Wayword by Mr. and Mrs. Garrett Soucy

. . .the process of perception is that of incarnation. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium and the Light ‘Wayword’ (available on CDBaby) is a second collection of songs by Mr. & Mrs. Garrett Soucy, a collection of songs with many allusions to both Christian faith and McLuhan’s ideas about media and culture.  I note the artists’ […]

Eschatology and the Technological Future Review

Michael S. Burdett is a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford’s Wycliffe Hall and holds degrees in engineering, physics, and theology. My imagination tells me he can answer basically any kind of question you have. For example, the last few editions of Wired magazine’s probably left you with a few lingering concerns over genetic engineering, the future of […]

The Cultivated Life

Who can deny that the popular lyrics “Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right” aptly describe our political culture? Likewise, who is bold enough to deny that the “circus life” is an apt metaphor for large portions our life?

How Cell Phones, Computers, Gaming and Social Media Are Changing Our Brains

I once got into testy e-mail exchange with a media ecologist over my use of the word addiction in regard to media behavior. He adamantly preferred the word habit for behavior, whether acceptable or problematic, leaving addiction to recovery problems of physiological substance abuse, alcohol, heroin, etc. I had deliberately left out the defining limit […]

Antagonism on YouTube: Metaphor in Online Discourse

There are a few corners of the digital world that I leave unvisited in order to preserve my sanity, namely the dark net, my ex’s Facebook page, and YouTube comments.  Stephen Pihlaja braves the last of these domains in his monograph Antagonism on YouTube: metaphor in online discourse (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).  In six chapters spanning […]

Incarnate: The Body of Christ in an Age of Disengagement

What does the body have to do with ministry? What does the incarnation have to do with the Christian life? The answer is simple: everything.

Captive to Christ, Open to the World: On Doing Christian Ethics in Public

Brian Brock, Captive to Christ, Open to the World: On Doing Christian Ethics in Public, edited by Kenneth Oakes, Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014, 143 pages, $15.20 Captive to Christ, Open to the World isn’t your typical work of theology. A collection of edited interviews with Brian Brock (Reader in Moral and Practical Theology at […]

When the Made Remakes the Maker: Theology and Technoculture

Waters, Brent (2014). Christian Moral Theology in the Emerging Technoculture: From Posthuman Back to Human. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate (260 pages). This piece originally appeared on Marginalia on February 17, 2015. Brent Waters’s Christian Moral Theology in the Emerging Technoculture: From Posthuman to Technoculture extends inquiries pursued over the last fifteen years into the question of what it […]

More Than Talk: A Covenantal Approach to Everyday Communication, a Review

Strom, Bill (2013). More Than Talk: A Covenantal Approach to Everyday Communication (4th ed). Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall Hunt (389 pages). In Proverbs 25:11 (CEB) the author writes, “Words spoken at the right time are like gold apples in a silver setting.” I believe the book More Than Talk: A Covenantal Approach to Everyday Communication by […]

Jana Marguerite Bennett’s “Aquinas on the Web?”: A Review

Jana Marguerite Bennett, Aquinas on the Web? Doing Theology in an Internet Age, New York: T&T Clark, 2012, 200 pages, $37.20. Like Jesus’ critics who wondered, “Can anything good come out of Galilee?” I often wonder, “Can anything good come out of Ohio?”  But a recent book, Aquinas on the Web? Doing Theology in an […]

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