The Benedict Option and the Media Ecology of Rod Dreher

Any Benedict Option that fails to deal honestly and forcefully with our relationship to technology and popular culture will fail. —Rod Dreher When Benedict of Nursia left Rome he traveled forty miles south of the city and entered a forest to pray. From there he began to build monasteries: fortresses to preserve Christian culture against […]

Donald Trump: Hot Persona for a Cool Medium

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, perhaps one of the most respected scholars on political rhetoric in the electronic age, must be scratching her head right now. Back in the 1980s she explained the popularity of Ronald Reagan by saying he had mastered the “cool” medium of television with his winsome persona. So how does one explain Trump’s […]

Just Another Day in America: On Location with the Latest Spectacle in the Global Village

On December 3, 2015, Matt Lauer opened the Today Show in California, when only several hours earlier he had been sitting comfortably in his New York studio. While we were all sleeping NBC flew him and a camera crew across the country so we could watch events of the latest mass killings unfold on location. […]

Andrew Byers’ “TheoMedia: The Media of God in a Digital Age”: A Review

Andrew Byers, TheoMedia: The Media of God in a Digital Age, Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2013, 252 pages, $25.20. Andrew Byers serves as the Chaplain at St. Mary’s College, Durham University, England. As a Theological Consultant for Codec Institute at St. John’s College, Durham University, he has explored many of the issues addressed in TheoMedia: The […]

Girl with a Gadget

Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s A Young Girl Reading (1776) resides in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and is perhaps one of the most familiar paintings of a girl reading coming to us from the eighteenth century. When it was painted America was in revolt and France was on the verge of doing so. Despite […]

Jane, Stop This Crazy Thing! The End of Progress and the Beginning of a Third Way

At times I feel like George Jetson rotating round and round on my treadmill outside the Skypad apartments. I want to scream, “Jane, stop this crazy thing!” I have this gut feeling that something is very, very wrong with the world. I am not just referring to the problem of evil or what theologians call original […]

The Secular C.S. Lewis: Neil Postman’s Unlikely Influence on Evangelicals

He was basically a secular Jew, and I am basically a conservative Christian, but he taught me more than almost any Christian I can think of (C. S. Lewis?). —Dr. T. David Gordon Dr. Gordon’s comment, which appeared in an online post among other recollections of Neil Postman (Rosen, 2003), demonstrates how well the media […]