wired-tired-may-june-2013

vol.22 | no.3 | May-June 2013 | $6.50

Wired & tired

May-June 2013

Heidel b er g Co n fe r e n c e o n Refo r m ed T h e olo g y

»OUR ONLY COMFORT«

The Heidelberg Catechism at 450 Years July 18–21,2013

SPEAKERS

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Dr. Joel R. Beeke is president and professor of Systematic Theology and Homiletics at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary.

Dr. Victor E. d’Assonville teaches Systematic and Historical Theology at Reformatorisch-Theologisches Seminar in Hannover, Germany.

Dr. Michael S. Horton is the J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California.

Dr. Jon D. Payne is church planting pastor of Christ Church Presbyterian (PCA) in Charleston, South Carolina, and visiting lecturer at Reformed Theological Seminary.

Dr. Lyle D. Bierma is the Jean and Kenneth Baker Professor of Systematic Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary.

Dr. Jason Van Vliet is Professor of Dogmatology at Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary (Hamilton, Ontario).

Admission & Registration Thursday – Saturday: $170 (reduced: $100) | Thursday – Sunday: $200 (reduced: $115) (Room and Board excluded. For hotel information, please consult the website.)

Registration: on website | via e-mail to signup@heidelbergconference.info Host: Selbständige Evangelisch-Reformierte Kirche Heidelberg | www.serk-heidelberg.de & Reformation2Germany | http://www.reformation2germany.org Location: Molkenkur Hotel Heidelberg | www.molkenkur.de Website: http://www.heidelbergconference.info

features VOL.22 | NO.3 | MAY-JUNE 2013

23

Why We Prefer the Practical

BY SHANE ROSENTHAL

36 The Book That Isn’t Really There: Digital Texts and Declining Discipleship

Deep-Sea Diving in a Jet Ski Age

BY MICHAEL S. HORTON

BY JOHN J. B OMBARO

30 COVER ILLUSTRATION BY JESSE LENZ

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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Radio, Anytime.

DID YOU KNOW THAT WHITE HORSE INN RADIO ARCHIVES ARE AVAILABLE ONLINE? RECENT TOPICS INCLUDE: The Arrest, Trial, and Crucifixion of Jesus, Resurrection, and Questions of Faith Listen for free at your convenience. Comment, ask questions, and share the link with others.

TO L I STEN TO DAY, VISIT W H ITEH O R SE I NN.ORG/JOHN.

departments 04 05 11 16

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

46 54

BOOK REVIEWS

BY RYAN GLOMSRUD

INTERVIEW ›› Distracted Q&A WITH MAGGIE JACKS ON

FROM THE HALLWAY ›› Alien Authenticity

BY ETHAN RICHARDS ON

THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD ››

Judges: A Story of Wayward Sheep

BY ZACH KEELE

NEIL POSTMAN

GEEK SQUAD ›› Experiential Realms

and Psalm 27

BY JAMES H. GILMORE

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BACK PAGE ››Mortimer J. Adler’s

“How to Read a Blog Post”

BY SHANE ROSENTHAL AND BROOKE VENTURA

Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Executive Editor Ryan Glomsrud Managing Editor Patricia Anders Marketing Director Michele Tedrick Design Director José Reyes for Metaleap Creative, metaleapcreative.com Department Editors Ryan Glomsrud (Letter from the Editor & Reviews), Michael S. Horton Designers Tiffany Forrester Copy Editor Elizabeth Isaac Proofreader Ann Smith Modern Reformation © 2013 All rights reserved. ISSN-1076-7169 1725 Bear Valley Parkway Escondido, CA 92027 (800) 8907 5 5 6 i n fo @ m o d e r n re fo r m a t i o n .o rg w w w. m o d e r n re fo r m a t i o n .o rg S u b s c r i p t i o n I n fo r m a t i o n U S 1 Y R $ 3 2 2 YR $58 Digital Only 1 YR $25 US Student 1 YR $26 Canada 1 YR $39 2 YR $70 Europe 1 YR $58 2 YR $104 Other 1 YR $65 2 YR $118

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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LETTER from the EDITOR

RYAN GLOMSRUD executive editor

There is a saying that Renaissance humanism laid the egg that the Reformation hatched. In plain sense, this means that when the sixteenthcentury humanists turned back to original sources—reflecting carefully on the meaning of words in context, paying attention to details, and demonstrating both agility and humility of mind—they became a major catalyst for the reform of the church. The fact is that Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and the rest stood on the shoulders of humanist educational reforms: they themselves turned back to the Bible in its original languages; they cleared up generations of fuzzy, confused thinking about the gospel; and they promoted the instruction of the laity by writing new catechisms and confessions. In hindsight, one wonders if in the ordinary way of things there could have been a Reformation without a preceding Renaissance movement.

This leads to a nagging series of related questions that have arisen in light of an important national conversation about technology and intellectual life: Can there be a modern Reformation of our churches without a contemporary version of Renaissance humanism upon which to build? Do we have an egg of cultural learning and ability to

think critically that might hatch a reform movement for the church in our day? What will it mean for the church and Christian discipleship if we are on the verge of a new “Dark Age”?

The authors in this issue take up these questions and more. We begin with an interview with author Maggie Jackson about her book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Our ability to pay attention is our “most important human faculty,” she argues, and we are risking a Dark Age when we allow that ability to be undermined by certain uses of technology.

White Horse Inn radio producer Shane Rosenthal laments the loss of deep-thinking Christian reflection, and Lutheran minister John Bombaro explores the difference between holding a real book versus merely skimming an electronic text.

Michael Horton then reflects on what it means to be a deep-sea Christian diver in a Jet Ski age of intellectual superficiality.

In a special reviews section, we consider Neil Postman’s classic book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, from two different perspectives, one critical and one more appreciative. We also offer another installment of “The Greatest Story Ever Told” by Presbyterian minister Zach Keele, as well as an intriguing article by Ethan Richardson, writer for Mockingbird’s blog, about analogies of law and gospel on Facebook.

This issue of Modern Reformation is more a first word than a last. A recurring theme throughout is that we have to think carefully, not only about how we use technology but about how technologies are changing us. We are created to be a people shaped by deep reflection upon the Word of God. It’s time to recover (in the Renaissance sense) the habits of mind that will enable us to grow in grace and receive from God his good gifts through the Word and by his Spirit.

WHAT WILL IT MEAN FOR THE CHURCH AND CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP IF WE ARE ON THE VERGE OF A NEW “DARK AGE”?

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INTERVIEW

DISTRACTED

Q & A with MAGGIE JACKS ON

INTERVIEW

D I ST R ACT E D

M

Q & A with MAGGIE JACKS ON

aggie Jackson is an award-winning author and former columnist for The Boston Globe. She wrote Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Prometheus Books, 2009) and What’s Happening to Home: Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age (Sorin Books, 2002).

In your latest book you prophesy the coming of a new Dark Age. You write, “The premise of this book is simple. The way we live is eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention: the building blocks of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress.” What do you mean by “the way we live”? What are we doing that’s eroding our attention and creating this age of distraction?

a.

The first thing that comes to mind is that we have our eyes glued to the gadgetry.

We live now in an atmosphere of almost constant media exposure, basically looking away from what’s going on around us. Kids now spend nearly ten hours exposed to media each day, and the average person switches tasks every three minutes. There’s an inattention to what’s going on around us, and there’s also the fragmentation of our attention: the distraction caused by hopscotching through our day.

Sound-bites, data points, and skipping around are corrosive to the deep, thoughtful, focused attention we need at times.

In our age, many people flit around on the surface like jet-skiers, and we don’t seem to have many deep-sea divers.

Regarding the different “departments” of our lives—politics, economics, religion—there is concern these days that people aren’t thinking about the future, that people aren’t thinking very deeply about what this means for us ten, twenty, or thirty years from now. Is that part of the immaturity this distraction has helped to produce in our lives?

a. In order to make data evolve from infor-

a. It’s interesting you use the word “imma-

mation into knowledge and wisdom, we need processes that sometimes involve stillness,

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quiet, and the ability to tenaciously wrestle with a problem. The types of distractions I’ve described in my book run counter to that.

There are different types of attention. As human beings, we are born to pay attention to what’s new in our environment. This enables us to survive and allows us to move forward and be flexible. At the same time, human beings always need to be aware of their goals, of what they’ll be doing in five years. So if we’re always reacting to what’s new in our environment—every beep, ping, Yahoo headline—we’re undercutting the highest order human abilities, which are planning, evaluation, and assessment. That’s called executive attention. It’s not just the fragmentation or lack of tenacity or hyperactivity; it’s also our reactivity.

turity,” because I describe the smartphone as a kind of teddy bear as well as a cognitive

prosthetic. I think there is an insecurity related to this constant need to be needed—the constant need now to tweet, which used to be blogging. I thought originally that this massive interest in blogging was all about the fact that we’re not really listening to one another, so we have to pour it out to whoever might be listening. So I think immaturity is an interesting concept. Distraction does drag us down developmentally.

The shortsightedness of all of us who are really only looking to the end of our noses every single day is very, very disturbing.

Going back to the point of the Dark Age, I did a tremendous amount of research on what Dark Ages constituted in the past. What I found is that they are oftentimes periods of high technological achievement—from the discovery of the olive in ancient Greece to certain types of shipping in ancient China, to the medieval invention of the compass and the university system. These were great inventive times, but times, nevertheless, of great cultural loss and forgetting. There just wasn’t the ability to keep up with or manage information or to preserve a heritage. There was a huge time of “cultural forgetting,” as Jane Jacobs, the urban thinker, puts it. I don’t think we’re in a Dark Age right now, but we are on the cusp. We’re risking a Dark Age when we undermine our ability to pay attention, which is our most important human faculty.

How do you respond to people who say that the same fears arose about books when Gutenberg came along? It did create a loss of cultural memory, oral culture, and so forth, but look at the great benefit.

a.

There are always costs and benefits to any new technology; in fact, the doubts about the written word go all the way back to Plato. He lamented the fact that our memories would shrink once we moved away from an oral civilization. But you can also argue that memory is extended through books or even the Post-it note. There are always costs and benefits. The point here is not to say that we’ve seen criticism before, that people have criticized our gadgets before. The point is to wake up to the challenges

THE EXPERTS SAY...

There are three kinds of mental attention:

➨ Awareness: Attention to your surroundings, a sort of peripheral vision of the mind.

➨ Focus: Sustained attention to a single object or small cluster of objects, much like a spotlight in your mind.

➨ Executive: A deeper level of thinking, namely, “evaluating, planning, and assessing.”

facing us today.

We really need to be concerned with what’s going on in our lives, but solving the issue of distraction isn’t a cure-all. Recapturing our attention isn’t going to solve poverty or crime, but it’s a starting point, and we need to look with clarity at our technologies and not lose perspective because we’re so enamored with these toys— these shiny gizmos and gadgets that beep and put us in touch with celebrity news and other trivia. We’re so enamored with what we’ve invented that we lose perspective on what it’s doing to us.

So when we have developed discernment, then we can choose what we’ll allow ourselves to be distracted by. But you’re saying that there’s so much distraction, younger people aren’t necessarily developing the tools for this discernment.

a.

Exactly. When we need to focus, can we?

When we have the rare and wonderful opportunity to face one another and have a deep conversation, are we doing that? Can we put aside those gadgets when we need to? Scientists now agree that there are three types of attention: awareness, which is wakefulness to your surroundings; focus, which is a spotlight of your mind; and there is the executive attention that I mentioned, which MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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INTERVIEW

is evaluating, planning, and assessing. These number of close confidantes that Americans are arrows in our quiver that we need to know have has fallen in the last twenty years. The when and how to use and what environment is lonely American is not just a fallacy; it’s true. most conducive to using these attention skills.

So, yes, the irony is this great abundance and This is the kind of language and awareness of it’s all a matter of drawing boundaries, which attention we need, and we need to be thinking is what a person’s focus does. It’s a matter of about what kind of lives we’re leading. It’s not prioritization, which is what executive attenjust the technologies; it’s the hurry and bustle tion does: What am I doing at this moment, and that blurs what’s going on in our lives; it’s our am I really doing it well? And what do I want to inability to see distraction as defined by being be doing Thursday? Look up from the screen pulled to something secondary. There’s the and be in charge of your life. That’s partly what entertainment that’s hard attention does. to say no to. There’s also I have increasing faith that fragmentation, which is the this can be tackled. I see a backdismantling of the whole lash to the technology that moment of presence before involves people choosing not to an intellectual problem or be on Facebook or not to have a before a person. So there are cell phone. Certainly there are many different aspects to people who believe you need to attention, and again, we need be on it all the time, and that’s to be aware. That’s the most the way to go; but I think there WINIFRED GALLAG GALLAGHER important thing. are ripples of change with many who want that close family Rapt: Attention and time and closer relations with the Focused Life So you’re exposing ironies here: others. There is a tremendous (Penguin Books, 2010) imagining on one hand that we amount of consideration about have more knowledge than the need for critical thinking in ever before—that is, anybody our education system. We’ve who has Internet access—yet gone far beyond thinking, “Oh, we’re not thinking as deeply. it’s just a matter of turning it We have more “friends” than off,” to now thinking, “How do we’ve ever had via Facebook, we actually, in a smart way, yet fewer real deep lasting handle all of this, and yet still commitments. make use of it?”

I think we’re at a critical Yes, in many ways we’re crossroad. We’re not just dealWILLIAM POWERS living in abundance. We are ing with the telephone or the drowning in oceans of data, fax anymore. We’re dealing Hamlet’s BlackBerry: but are unable to turn that with a wholesale usurpation A Practical Philosointo knowledge. We have so of our lives by technology and phy for Building a much connectivity that the its impacts, so we have to get Good Life in the connections we’re making even smarter in how we’re dealDigital Age are thinner and more difing with it individually and (Harper, 2010) fused. Research study after collectively. research study backs up my One of the most interesting assertions right there. The studies I’ve seen on multitasking

a.

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shows that when you’re multitasking, yes, you are learning. However, we need to digest information in order to make it our own, to learn it well, interpret it, and therefore be able to transfer it to other situations. When you’re multitasking, you’re using parts of your brain related to automatic behavior. So that means kids cramming for a test are learning and can spit it out the next day, and maybe get an A. But they are not learning that information in a way that goes into their deeper memory. Therefore, they can’t transfer that information into new situations—they’ve lost it. It’s surface learning. That transference is at the heart of creating wisdom. So the cumulative effect of multitasking your way through your homework is astonishingly dangerous. The same goes with our own adult lifestyles.

You write that storing facts into our long-term memory requires “cognitive work that can take days and even months to accomplish,” and that this requires rote repetition. If we’re not going to really invest ourselves in anything that can’t be “netted out,” that can’t be skimmed, then we’re going to miss quite a bit that’s good, true, and beautiful in the world, aren’t we?

a.

Yes, exactly. We’ll also miss out on what’s immeasurable—the things that can’t be stored or measured through data. We’ll miss out on the sensory beauty of the landscape in front of us—the garden or your own child. We’ll miss out on even being in touch with our own thoughts, because when we pump so much information, music, and media into our brains at all times, when we’re living to a kind of sound track that we’re not creating, we’re not in touch with our inner lives and our inner thoughts. That’s really frightening. I went down to the University of Maryland, where students were assigned a digital detox for 24 hours—that is, they couldn’t access media. One word I came away with after talking with dozens of students was “fear.” They were terrified of being alone with themselves.

That was very chilling for me.

Do we need to recover what earlier generations called “growing up”? Basically, discipline in our lives where we realize that although some things may not seem exciting to us at the moment, there are lots of things that are valuable that can’t be digitized or downloaded.

“IT’S NOT JUST THE TECHNOLOGIES; IT’S THE HURRY AND BUSTLE THAT BLURS WHAT’S GOING ON IN OUR LIVES; IT’S OUR INABILITY TO SEE DISTRACTION AS DEFINED BY BEING PULLED TO SOMETHING SECONDARY.” MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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INTERVIEW

“SELF-CONTROL REALLY IS A MUSCLE. THE LATEST RESEARCH SHOWS THAT IT’S A FORM OF ENERGY THAT CAN BE DEPLETED. WHEN YOU’RE NOT PRACTICING THE CRAFT OF TENACITY OR PATIENCE, FOR EXAMPLE, YOU’RE NOT ABLE TO GET BELOW THE SURFACE OF THINGS.” a.

Yes, I think that’s very important. The style of thinking and living we have when we’re attached to media all the time leads to an undermining world of instant gratification, instant information, instant shopping, instant everything. Self-control really is a muscle.

The latest research shows that it’s a form of energy that can be depleted. When you’re not practicing the craft of tenacity or patience, for example, you’re not able to get below the surface of things. In past ages, there was rigidity about discipline that now makes us run the other way. We want a boundary-free world of instantaneous everything; we don’t want to sit and wait for anything. But this is a critical skill to keep. So often, we talk about sifting through the cost benefits. We keep, adapt, and adopt new things, and yet we throw away

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what doesn’t work. I don’t want to be seen as someone who wants to go back to the past; I exult in technological wonders, and I’m glad technology makes education and information accessible to others. However, we might just be creating a new form of ignorance, not based on lack of information, but based on lack of willingness or ability to access that information in a deeper way. So I think that discipline and self-control are intentional skills related to attention.

Toward the conclusion of your book, you write, “A renaissance of attention may be at hand: an antidote to our epidemic of distraction lies in a set of astonishing discoveries. Attention can be understood, strengthened and taught.” In the time since you wrote this statement, do you think the problem is getting worse, or are we on the road to some kind of recovery? In other words, are we heading to a new Dark Age or to a renaissance?

a.

I think the jury is still out. I’m heartened by some willingness to question how we’re living: a yearning and a hunger for depth, for face time, and for attention in life. That doesn’t mean we’ll be able to translate this into true action. I think we have a long way to go. There are still many people who believe that efficiency and a hurried, multitasking way of life are productive. In terms of a potential renaissance, we have to realize that attention, like many other things, is a value system.

When we look at the executive running past us, head down on the BlackBerry, barely listening to anyone around him, and we think that here is a successful person in life—that’s a value system we should question. When we think about the kid with the first hand up in the classroom, “Me, me, me, call on me!”— that’s the smart kid, not the kid who’s listening thoughtfully. When we assume that time spent thinking is mere idleness, then these are value systems we need to question.

F R O M t h e H A L LW AY

ALIEN AUTHENTICITY FA C E B O O K “ L I K E S ” AND THE RISE OF “A D U L T E S C E N T ” LO N E L I N E SS

by ETHAN RICHARDSON

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F R O M t h e H A L LW AY

n the first scene of the first season of HBO’s new sitcom Girls, Hannah (played by Lena Dunham) is out to dinner with her parents to be “let down easy” with regard to her postgraduate finances. After the last glass of wine is poured, her mother declares, “You graduated from college two years ago; we’ve been supporting you for two years, and that’s enough.” Stunned, Hannah rifles off a very funny list of reasons why she should continue to be supported and then finally, exasperated, relents: “I’m so close to the life that I want, the life that you want for me, and you want to just end that, right now?” Apparently jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.” It they do. Her mom responds seems that, in all categories, the 20-somethings are suffering a deep existential paralysis that is bluntly, “No—more—money.” prolonging adolescent angst.

In my opinion, the new show is an acute barometer of the state of affairs for many people my age.

It’s a controversial comedy, but no one is arguing with its diagnoses. And Girls isn’t alone; I’m sure you could name at least five recent films that depict a hapless 20-something in the plot, or books and editorials you’ve read about manchildren, or pop psychology blogs describing our “age of anxiety.” This cultural breadcrumb trail leads us to a phenomenon that is being called an extended phase of “emerging adulthood,” the “Odyssey stage,” or “adultescence.”

Data shows that more and more 20-somethings are bypassing the typical route into adulthood. In 1970, 70 percent of Americans had already married, had kids, and purchased a house before their thirtieth birthday; today, by the same birthday, less than 40 percent of Americans have done so. As the New York Times put it, “The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as [we] remain untethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes…avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America

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ASKING WHY While the economy has been a factor, and no one is denying the rise of performance pressure, it seems impossible to talk about “adultescents” without also talking about their technological lingua franca, Facebook, and the surge of other social media networks that have surfaced in its wake.

It is hard to communicate the scale and reach of Facebook’s connectivity. It was the first website to tally one trillion page views in a month, and Facebook users generate an average of 2.7 billion “likes” and comments every day, not to mention the 750 million photos uploaded each weekend.

More than that, nearly half of emerging adults the world over check their Facebook page minutes after waking up, and 28 percent of emerging adults, worldwide, check Facebook before even getting out of bed.1 The social media statistics are more stupefying than anything, but studies have also revealed a uniquely unsettling loneliness in our time. In May 2012, The Atlantic released “Is Facebook Making

Us Lonely?” and called attention to the decrease in personal confidants as well as the increase of those employed in “professional care.” As Stephen Marche writes: In the late ’40s, the United States was home to 2,500 clinical psychologists, 30,000 social workers, and fewer than 500 marriage and family therapists. As of 2010, the country had 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 400,000 nonclinical social workers, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 105,000 mental-health counselors, 220,000 substance-abuse counselors, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, and 30,000 life coaches. The majority of patients in therapy do not warrant a psychiatric diagnosis. This raft of psychic servants is helping us through what use to be called regular problems. We have outsourced the work of everyday caring.2

TWENTYSOMETHINGS

T

he 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there. One-third of people in their 20s move to a new resi-

dence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch.

Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation.”

While bleak, the numbers haven’t kept social media from quickly becoming the primary source of human communication for most emerging adults.

I wish I could say I wasn’t a participant; alas, I find myself guiltily among the ranks of likers, commenters, and feed-readers. I keep up with my nieces and nephew this way. I have an Instagram feed that allows me to share a well-spent Saturday. I think maybe three people follow me on Pinterest.

While it’s easy to wag a finger and cry vanity, correlation is not necessarily causation, and though social media might be an enabler to our propensity for self-isolation, it’s not more than that. This is to say, Facebook doesn’t create isolation so much as it stirs the pot. For people naturally inclined toward isolation, Facebook, with its omnipresent avenues for secret voyeurism and public pulpiteering, provides a startlingly powerful magnifying glass on the human heart. And what is this diagnosis for the emerging adult? Why are we, as Sherry Turkle’s book describes, “alone together”? Certainly it has something to do with the personal validation we’ve been bred to crave.

Self-esteem and personal “distinction talk” make up a large part of the adultescent’s development.

Many of us, from a very young age, exhibited a ballooning self-esteem. We were told that the career opportunities were endless, that if we reached or

FROM ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG, “WHAT IS IT ABOUT 20-SOMETHINGS?” NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, AUGUST 18, 2010.

dreamed, we’d find the perfect match for our unique potential. We sought this distinction and were affirmed in its pursuit to a ludicrous degree. As Sally Koslow says in Slouching Toward Adulthood: “The destiny of each child, parents have grown to believe, is to realize and maximize their own brand of distinction. Oprah may have started preaching to the viewer to ‘live your best life’ in the 1980s. Perhaps she got the inspiration from boomer parents who started being vainglorious about their children as soon as they had them.”3 The emphasis on distinction and destiny has created in today’s emerging adult an onerous belief in the importance of unmitigated choice in one’s destiny, as well as the equally onerous need for those choices to be validated at every turn. The product, then, is a tirelessly anxious and affection-hungry generation.

CURATOR OF YOUR SELF-IMAGE Of course, this distinction theme isn’t a new MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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F R O M t h e H A L LW AY

phenomenon. It has been a staple of the rugged individualism of the American way (think of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” or Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”). Today, though, with the help of technology, distinction for emerging adults has become a 24/7 mission, primarily in terms of maintaining a public image of success and happiness. More than just having impressive-sounding majors, interesting travels to Southeast Asia, or low-paying fellowships in the City, there are immediate, handheld venues for authentic expression. More than ever, the opportunity (and pressure) to selfcurate is at our fingertips.

And yet, in talking about it like an omnipresent weight, we forget that it’s also fun. It feels good to have an experience validated: like getting a compliment, last night’s dinner feels a little bit hipper in retrospect once you see the images your friend tagged on Instagram with the Earlybird filter. You share some thoughts on your “wall,” your friends “like” them, and it feels as if you’re sharing a new experience all over again. Though it may sound tongue-in-cheek, it feels rewarding to smooth the rough edges, as Marche describes: The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society…. Instead, we have the lovely smoothness of a seemingly social machine.4 While we enjoy the thrill of distinguishing our experiences, the anxiety it generates paralyzes the potential to call any kind of experience “authentic.” This tends to be the root of much of the anxiety of 20-somethings today: the gap between

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the curated experience and the real thing. The Facebook user must succumb to the never-ending job of selecting, out of an arresting number of choices, the right choice that makes one “authentic.” Because all forms of social media operate on a continual and instantaneous feedback loop, the human need for validation is perpetually checked and rechecked, throughout the day, every day.

Essayist Walker Percy touched on this need for validation by telling a story about a couple’s search for the “authentic” vacation experience. Going down to Mexico, they wanted to find an experience that is “it,” that no one else had ever seen, that would serve as a purely distilled capturing of “authentic human experience.” When they found an ancient tribe that seemed untouched by modern civilization, they believed they had found “it,” but curiously they also felt a simultaneous dread that their friend, an anthropologist, might tell them that “it” was, in fact, not genuine. They need their friend, the Expert (a figure who surely represents the law), to certify their experience as “authentic”: “The present experience is always measured by a prototype, the ‘it’ of their dreams. ‘Now I am really living’ means that now I am filling the role of sightseer and the sight is living up to the prototype of sights.…Hence their anxiety during the encounter. For at any minute something could go wrong.”5 This, for Percy, is the “loss of the creature”; we have shipped off the validation of our authenticity to anyone we believe could be an authority.

This is true of social media—we judge our tweets by their re-tweets, their comments, their likes— and because it is frenetic, the tides of validation are rapidly ebbing and flowing. This floundering validation before the law of authenticity actually kills one’s genuine encounter with an experience.

This becomes true of loving relationships, too, and especially helps explain the “commitment fear” that plagues this generation. We cohabitate, move around, sleep around, marry late, if at all; motivated more by our need for validation than by our experience of love, it is no surprise that, as David Brooks says, “everything gives way to a less permanent version of itself.”6 A CULTURAL ANALOGY FOR IMPUTATION Allowing only sound-bite-sized room for connections and relationships, social media commodifies love into a temporary, mirror-gazing affair. Jonathan Franzen says as much in a piece he wrote for the New York Times. He talks about the Facebook “like” tab and its neatness in comparison to the muddy complexity of love: The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.7 What I think Franzen is getting at here has a lot to do with what’s known in Christian terms as “imputation” and its relationship with identity. Imputation is this old legal term that means someone is being given or ascribed characteristics they don’t actually have. It is the way God justifies man in Christ—we are given an alien righteousness, in light of Christ’s suffering on the cross and obedient life.

The characteristic we long for—that we long to see validated—is the righteousness we know in better terms as “authenticity.” In the world of “likes,” with our Facebook profile, a Twitter feed, and a résumé, we are often attempting to create a closed-circuit imputation system. Our hope is that, by way of the profile we curate publically, we can impute to ourselves the self we long to be. Social

“BECAUSE ALL FORMS OF SOCIAL MEDIA OPERATE ON A CONTINUAL AND INSTANTANEOUS FEEDBACK LOOP, THE HUMAN NEED FOR VALIDATION IS PERPETUALLY CHECKED AND RECHECKED, THROUGHOUT THE DAY, EVERY DAY.” media, in this sense, serves as a platform for our own self-mediated authenticity, and ultimately for our own self-justification.

The problem with this, though, is that it will never be enough. As Franzen indicates, we will at some point be forced to visit our own depravity.

Besides, no “likes” will ever be enough, either. We will always fear that the self being “liked” on our Facebook page is that curated imagining of Me, and not the mysterious, complex, authentic Me. The gospel addresses and counters the need for validation in this way. For the adultescent who cannot earn the authenticity he or she seeks, for the profile he or she made (and will continue to update) to validate this authenticity, God in Jesus brings the only imputation that doesn’t need reloading.

Ethan Richardson lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he writes for Mockingbird Ministries, New York. He is author of This American Gospel. You can find him on Facebook.

1 Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” The Atlantic, May 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/ is-facebook-making-us-lonely/308930/.

2 Marche.

3 Sally Koslow, Slouching Toward Adulthood: Observations from the Not-SoEmpty Nest (New York: Viking, 2012), 36.

4 Marche.

5 Walker Percy, “The Loss of the Creature,” in The Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 52–53.

6 David Brooks, “The Odyssey Year,” New York Times, October 9, 2007, http:// www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/opinion/09brooks.html?_r=0.

7 Jonathan Franzen, “Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts,” New York Times, May 28, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/opinion/ 29franzen.html?pagewanted=all.

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THE

G R E AT E S T STORY EVER TOLD

PART III

16

JUDGES

A Story of Wayward Sheep

E

by ZACH KEELE

ven though few of us have ever worked with sheep, the line “sheep without a shepherd” resonates for all of us. A scene flashes before our mind’s eye of kids on a playground with no adults: it’s Lord of the Flies. So it was this imagined scene that frosted Moses’ mind when God told him he could not enter the Promised Land with Israel. Atop Mt. Abarim, the Promised Land panorama gracing Moses’ eyes, the Lord informs Moses that he would not lead the people into the honeyed hills of Canaan, but that he would die in the desert as had Aaron. Moses does not protest his fate, but he does implore the Lord, “May the congregation of the Lord not be as sheep that have no shepherd” (Num. 27:17). Moses knew that without a leader, without a shepherd, Israel would quickly be starring in their own Lord of the Flies reality show.

The Lord grants Moses’ prayer by appointing Joshua to lead the people out and to bring them in. Under Joshua’s brave and upright leadership, Israel takes possession of the Promised Land. It is hardly idyllic, but Joshua presides over one of the better periods of Israel’s history. But what happened after Joshua?

Moses certified his successor, but did Joshua? This is the issue that presents itself with the closing of the book of Joshua and the opening of Judges. But

the suspense is not exactly drawn out as Judges tells us, “The people served the Lord all the days of Joshua” (2:7). Joshua did not appoint a successor. So, after Joshua and the elders of his generation died, what happened? The people did what was evil in the sight of the Lord; they served the Baals (Judg. 2:11).

With the shepherd dead, the sheep became lost.

And so begins what is commonly called the Judges’ cycle: Israel rebels; they are oppressed and cry MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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T H E G R E AT E S T S T O R Y E V E R T O L D

out; a judge arises and delivers; and there is peace for a time. The vacuum of leadership and the absence of kingship are what give birth to this cycle.

The arising of the judge is what brings relief from oppression. But questions float on the horizon like clouds: What sort of leader does Israel need?

What is this leader to do? Who is the true enemy that plagues Israel?

Well, the conquests of the judges stand tall.

Equipped with the Spirit, Othniel bulldozes Cushan-Rishathaim. Ehud’s left-handed dagger impales Moab. When no man will step up, Deborah marshals a landslide victory with the hammer of Jael. Gideon’s three hundred trumpets scatter the hordes of Midian. The Ammonites are leveled before Jephthah’s overhead wave. And with Superman arms, Samson plays with the Philistines like a cat toys with a mouse. What marvelous victories of the Lord!

And yet, amid the victory parades, a foul odor arises. The oppressors of Israel were the Lord’s rod to discipline his idol-addicted people, merely the presenting symptom for the real cancer within—sin. How then did the judges fare in assaulting this foe? Ehud casually strolls by idols on the way to feed Eglon his blade (3:19). Gideon wimps out from taking on the duty of a king; yet he happily receives the plunder of a king, from which he fashions an ephod for Israel to whore after (8:27).

Gideon tears down the altar of Baal only to raise up an idol of his own making. And Gideon’s heir, Abimelech, ends up being the very oppressor from whom Israel needed deliverance.

Jephthah’s staggering ignorance of the law leads him to sacrifice his own daughter and to slaughter 42,000 of his Ephraimite brethren.

Running after Philistine women, Samson kills Philistines not because they were God’s enemies, but simply out of personal revenge. Having scorned his Nazirite status, Samson uses his strength to serve the desires of his flesh; sex is his kryptonite.

Moses had made clear that the slopes of Sinai could only be ascended with righteousness and not with the sword. But the hands of these judges knew only the hilt of a sword. Then comes the

18

“MOSES HAD MADE CLEAR THAT THE SLOPES OF SINAI COULD ONLY BE ASCENDED WITH RIGHTEOUSNESS AND NOT WITH THE SWORD. ” final episode of the book. The Levite, who treats his concubine like a sex-slave, seeks hospitality in Gibeah of Benjamin, thinking it safer than the foreign Jebus. But what does he find in this village of Israel? Welcome to Sodom. The village sleazebags besiege the house, demanding to have their way with the Levite. The Levite tosses his concubine out to them like fresh meat to a pack of wolves. After the all-night gang rape (and Scripture indicates that it was every bit as horrible as this), the poor concubine dies with her hands on the threshold, reaching out for deliverance, for justice.

The only justice given, however, is more savagery. The Levite dissects and priority mails his concubine to the eleven tribes, who then assemble and decimate their brother Benjamin. Once they awake to the evil they committed, the only remedy they can drum up is to steal women for the few surviving Benjamite men. Israel answers the sin of Sodom with genocide and kidnapping.

Lord of the Flies gets an Emmy in Israel: “There was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” The true enemy of Israel is not without but within. It is sin, and the victory is righteousness.

The judges triumphed militarily, but they failed miserably to lead in righteousness and obedience to God. Without a royal shepherd, Israel was like sheep dashing off into every ravine of sin.

Standing before the holy inclines of Sinai, Israel

P A R T III

THE JUDGES OF ISRAEL OTHNIEL

JAIR

ELON

The first judge and Caleb’s

A Gileadite in the land of Gilead,

A Zebulunite, he judged Israel for

son-in-law, he drove out the

he had thirty cities and thirty

ten years.

Arameans and took Debir.

sons who rode donkeys.

EHUD

ABIMELECH

Son of Hillel the Pirathonite, he

A left-handed judge of Benjamin,

Son of Gideon, he killed the sev-

judged Israel for eight years, had

he killed the King Eglon of Moab.

enty sons of Gideon, became the

forty sons and thirty grandsons

ruler of Shechem, but fought it

riding on seventy donkeys, and

and died.

was buried in Ephraim.

JEPHTHAH

SAMSON

A Gileadite rejected by his broth-

A Nazirite and Danite, he fought

ers, he fought the Ammonites.

the Philistines and loved Delilah.

ABDON

SHAMGAR He killed six hundred Philistines with an ox goad.

DEBORAH

On Nazirite vows see Numbers 6:

A prophetess in Ephraim, she de-

IBZAN

they were to be separated to the

A judge of Israel from Bethlehem

Lord, drinking no wine or strong

BARAK

for seven years, he had thirty

drink (vinegar made from strong

Son of Abinoam of Naphtali, he

sons and thirty daughters.

drink), using no razor, and avoid-

feated Jabin in Hazor in Canaan.

helped rout General Sisera of

ing a dead body (even family).

Jabin on Mt. Tabor.

SAMSON AND DELILAH

GIDEON Son on of Joash in Manasseh, he fought against Midian and the Amalekites.

TOLA Son of Issachar, ssachar, he judged at Shamir in Ephraim.

needed a king to lead them in righteousness, one to obey for them and with them. They required a king to slay the true enemy within—their own sin. The book of Judges reveals that Israel needed Jesus Christ as their king—the Righteous One who defeated our sin on the cross. The judges impress deeply upon our souls that we too need a righteous shepherd. The palms of the concubine on the threshold symbolize our bondage to sin: “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” Thanks be to God through SAMSON AND DELILAH, OIL ON CANVAS,

BY ANTHONY VAN DYCK, 1620 (PAINTING).

Jesus Christ our Lord! The Father has not left us without a shepherd, but he has given us his own Son, the Living One who died but is alive forever more— Jesus Christ. He shepherds us by his own righteousness and love, from sin and death to the honeyed hill of the heavenly Mount Zion.

Zach Keele is pastor of Escondido Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Escondido, California.

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

19

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features 23

WHY WE PREFER THE PRACTICAL

30

THE BOOK THAT ISN’T REALLY THERE

36

DEEP-SEA DIVING IN A JET SKI AGE

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

21

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

by RYAN GLOMSRUD

In 2008, Nicholas Carr began a national conversation about technology and contemporary life. His Atlantic article was provocatively titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and it quickly became the talk of the town. In 2012, he expanded his treatment in a landmark book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (W. W. Norton & Company, 2012).

Today, a twofold discussion continues about the issues raised in Carr’s work. First, there is an ongoing conversation among neuroscientists and others about the scientific implications of technology: How does our use of technology impact our brains, mental development, and intellectual abilities? Second, there is an ever-expanding conversation about the prudential side of technology and life: How should we then live in light of the tsunami of technological innovations over the past fifteen years?

More recently, the impact of technology on our social lives has been a leading discussion topic, due in large part to the research of Sherry Turkle. In 2011, the MIT professor explored the social implications of our online lives in her important book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic Books, 2011). This was quickly followed by another provocatively titled Atlantic article by Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” (May 2012). Every month books are released on one or more of these topics, and we want you to join in the conversation. The following feature articles tease out the consequences for the Christian life. We have some book recommendations throughout the issue and hope you’ll take, read, and discuss with your “friends”—real and virtual.

22

why we prefer

the practical

by SHANE ROSENTHAL

ILLUSTRATION BY TIFFANY FORRESTER

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

23

i

n the beginning of The Screwtape Letters, atheist. As the man is meditating on the according to the elder demon, “beginning counterarguments to his patient, but the

the whole struggle on to the Enemy’s own ground.”

This involves drawing his patient’s attention away focus on “the stream of immediate sense experience.” idea that it is time for lunch. “Once he was in the

24

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

—NEIL P OSTMAN

C. S. Lewis describes the near conversion of a solid ideas of a particular book, a train of thought is, to go the wrong way.” Screwtape could have suggested trouble with that approach, he says, “is that it moves Instead, he uses what he calls “practical propaganda.” from “attending to universal issues” and helping him Following this strategy, Screwtape implants the street,” the demon boasts, “the battle was won.”1

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SO HOW EXACTLY DID “THE STREET” end up being a powerful argument for atheism? Screwtape explains that “whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he [is] shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of ‘real life’” is powerful enough to convince him that “this sort of thing just couldn’t be true.”2 Lewis’s point is clear enough. Too often, human beings arrive at conclusions not on the basis of clear thinking, but by being distracted from it.

According to Alexis de Tocqueville, Americans see things a little differently. In 1840, the world-traveling French thinker sought to understand why it was that “Americans are more concerned with the applications than with the theory of science.”3 He was thinking here of fields of knowledge in general, rather than the natural sciences in particular, and the answer he gives to this question has to do with the structure of our democratic society. “Equality,” he writes, “stimulates each man to want to judge everything for himself and gives him...a contempt for tradition and formalities.” This distaste for tradition in turn encourages people of a democratic spirit to mistrust systems (in general), as well as the word of the master (in particular).

The result of this is that “traditions have little hold over them, and they never spend much time studying the subtleties of any school and will not accept big words as sterling coin.”4 This is why Tocqueville concludes that though “the purely practical side of science is cultivated admirably...hardly anyone in the United States devotes himself to the essentially theoretical and abstract side of human knowledge.”5 Of course, this wasn’t always bad. Americans became known throughout the world as pioneers of invention and applied science, especially throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But this obsession with the practical, as Tocqueville describes in 1840, would just a few decades later be developed into an entirely new philosophical outlook

26

by thinkers such as William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey. In other words, by the mid- to late nineteenth century, this practical outlook formalized into an entirely new school of philosophy we know today as “pragmatism.”

Think of the relevance of this observation for contemporary Christianity. Do today’s Christians lose sight of the basic principles of their faith once they begin to confine themselves almost exclusively with practical concerns? To put it another way, did we begin to apply the gospel poorly once we stopped focusing on the content of the gospel that was to be applied?6 The long and the short of it is that there are numerous real world consequences of this general tendency to focus on the practical and to steer away from the theoretical. But as significant as these consequences are, especially as we encounter them in the life and ministry of today’s churches, there may be something else going on that is even more worthy of our attention.

THE PROBLEM OF RESTLESSNESS Tocqueville observes that the higher branches of knowledge “require meditation above everything else.” Unfortunately, he argues, the very structure of our way of life is against us at this point, for “nothing is less conducive to meditation than the setup of democratic society.” He unpacks this idea by arguing that in democratic societies “in contrast to aristocratic societies,” workaday demands have reduced the leisure class.7 In other words, deep sustained attention is required for the higher sciences, such as philosophy or theology. But who among us has time in today’s world for this kind of rigorous thinking? The very idea of meditating upon some abstract idea, without regard for its practical use, requires a kind of stillness rarely found outside of the groups of people who have their basic needs met in life. In our workaday world, however,

“THE VERY PACE OF OUR MODERN DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY... HAS MADE RESTLESSNESS ONE OF THE DOMINANT FEATURES OF REALITY.” Everyone is on the move, some in quest of power, others of gain. In the midst of this universal tumult, this incessant conflict of jarring interests, this endless chase for wealth, where is one to find the calm for the profound researches of the intellect? How can the mind dwell on any single subject when all around is on the move and when one is himself swept and buffeted along by the whirling current which carries all before it?8 Think for a moment about the real world implications of all this. Think, for example, about the kinds of comments people make when you recommend a classic author such as Aristotle or Alexis de Tocqueville. The response I often receive is, “Where do you find the time?” Of course, all of us make time for what is important to us; but what’s interesting is the fact that all of us truly are busy with life, work, kids, and chores. In other words, the very pace of

our modern democratic society—even before we address issues relating to media and technology, the very fabric of life in today’s world with all of its busywork—has made restlessness one of the dominant features of reality. This is why many of us crave action-packed dramas, even when our own work is finished; it’s why we feel like we might crawl out of our skin when nothing’s happening; and it’s why we always need to have on the radio, television, or Internet—always listening, watching, surfing, scanning.

This restless desire continually pushes us toward a multiplicity of activities; again and again, we are led to focus on bodily action rather than stillness and quiet reflection. We value what is practical and useful, rather than what is true. We think always of this world and its needs, rather than the next. This is the reason that “having our best life now” rings true to Americans. In fact, Tocqueville himself observed that “preachers in America are continually coming down to earth. Indeed they find it difficult MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

27

to take their eyes off it.” These preachers, he says, “are forever pointing out how religious beliefs favor freedom and public order, and it is often difficult to be sure when listening to them whether the main object of religion is to procure eternal felicity in the next world or prosperity in this.”9 Of course, this isn’t to say that we should never be concerned with the cares of this world, or that democracy itself is an evil we should always fight against. Rather, we simply need to be aware of the direction in which we are being pulled. The problem is that we are constantly encouraged to focus on things earthly, to the exclusion of things heavenly; as proud Americans, we’re raised to think about virtues of democracy, but rarely its vices.

But these vices are real. Again from Tocqueville: “In democratic countries when almost everyone is engaged in active life, the darting speed of a quick, superficial mind is at a premium, while slow, deep thought is excessively undervalued.”10 What’s amazing is that these words were written over a century before the creation of the “blogosphere.” Of course, it is a real problem when thoughtful men and women describe the effects that Internet surfing and blog skimming have on their ability to wrestle with books of even modest complexity.

S O WHAT ARE WE TO DO ?

First, we need to recognize that the problem is real.

Not only are we constantly being shoved into the shallow waters, but we like it there. So we need to identify this as a particular form of worldliness that we should battle against the rest of our lives. Yet, if the word of Christ is to dwell in us richly (Col. 3:16), then we need to do whatever it takes to begin cultivating an appreciation for the deep things of God (1 Cor. 2:10). To do this, we need to recover the lost art of Christian reflection.

If you are interested in the quest for truth, in all its varied forms, then you need to carve out both space and time for serious reading and reflection.

Commit yourself to it, just as you would devote yourself to learning a foreign language, with all of its difficulties, yet hopeful of the rewards to come. And like learning a new language, this can be done either in a group setting or through self-study, or both at the same time. The fact that something is hard to grasp does not mean it’s not worth our time—that’s

28

“IN DEMOCRATIC COUNTRIES WHEN ALMOST EVERYONE IS ENGAGED IN ACTIVE LIFE, THE DARTING SPEED OF A QUICK, SUPERFICIAL MIND IS AT A PREMIUM, WHILE SLOW, DEEP THOUGHT IS EXCESSIVELY UNDERVALUED.” just one of those worldly assumptions that keeps us in the shallow waters.

So whether you end up attending an in-depth Bible study or decide to work through a classic text such as Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, it’s important to work at it little by little, always remembering to keep your mind engaged. Mortimer Adler is especially helpful at this point. Listening to a lecture or reading a book, he argues, “is primarily an activity of the mind, not of the ear or the eye.

When the mind is not actively involved in the process, it should be called hearing, not listening; seeing, not reading….The most prevalent mistake that people make about both listening and reading is to regard them as passively receiving rather than as actively participating. They do not make this mistake about writing and speaking.”11 We know how much work goes into preparing a speech or writing an essay; it is just as important to direct that sort of mental energy to the task of interpreting what we read and hear. Just as writing and speaking are skills that can be acquired and improved over time, so too is the case with good listening and reading skills.

It’s important to be a demanding reader or listener, to ask questions of the writer or speaker as you give your attention to the meaning of the words.12 In fact, in her book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention

and the Coming Dark Age, Maggie Jackson observes that “The Oxford English Dictionary defines attention as ‘the act, fact or state of attending or giving heed; earnest direction of the mind.’” She argues that “the word is rooted in the Latin words ad and tendere, meaning to ‘stretch toward,’ implying effort and intention.”13 How many of us put this kind of effort into listening to a sermon or Bible study? How often do we just sit there without putting the slightest bit of effort into following along? As a result, how often have we simply wasted our time because we let our attention wander aimlessly rather than attending to the words? How often have we let our eyes scan the pages of a book while our minds drifted off to some other concern? And what about our children? How many of us teach them to listen carefully to the words of the minister, to stay focused on his message, and to think about its meaning? How often do we discuss the sermon with our children afterwards? The good news is that the harder we work at attending to the words of others, the easier it gets over time; the more we instill these habits in the

RECOMMENDED READING For thinking through your own conscious use of technology, we recommend:

The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time

lives of our children, the easier it will be for them to profit from what they hear and read.

CONCLUSION There is more to life than the hustle and bustle of the street or our growing list of activities. Though these things do demand our attention, we need to remember to stop and reflect upon even more important things. In fact, “few of the more significant aspects of life,” writes T. David Gordon, “involve much motion: love, humility, faith, repentance, prayer, friendship, worship, affection, fear, hope, self-control.” All of these are essentially “non-kinetic,” Gordon argues, and they take place “between the ears, as we make sense of life [and] our place in it.”14 Whether liberal or conservative, many churches are trying to make Christianity relevant to people tackling their way through life with its countless distractions. In this context, “relevance” is generally defined as making things practical, being “down to earth,” and meeting people where they’re at. But what if we began to see all this as demonic, this never-ending talk of the “here and now” that distracts us from the actual “there and then” of redemptive history, or from questions of eternal rather than merely temporal significance? This is not the question Screwtape and his companions would encourage you to spend time thinking about. In fact, you’re hungry; you should probably go get something to eat.

Shane Rosenthal is executive producer of the White Horse Inn national radio broadcast.

by David L. Ulin

(Sasquatch Books, 2010)

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

(Oxford University Press, 2011)

1 C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 2–3.

2 Lewis, 3.

3 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Perennial Library, 1988), 459.

4 Tocqueville, 459.

5 Tocqueville, 460.

6 J. Gresham Machen, What Is Faith? (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1996), 23.

7 Tocqueville, 460.

8 Tocqueville, 460.

9 Tocqueville, 530.

10 Tocqueville, 461.

11 Mortimer Adler, How to Speak, How to Listen (New York: Touchstone, 1983), 85–86.

12 Adler, 95.

13 Maggie Jackson, Distracted (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008), 24.

14 T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can’t Preach (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2009), 53.

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29

THE

BOOK

THAT ISN’T REALLY THERE DIGITAL TEXTS

AND

DECLINING DISCIPLESHIP

by JOHN J. BOMBARO

30

S

tatus symbols have changed. Where once a warmly paneled room with wainscoting, high leatherback chairs, and a library replete with vast numbers of books may have been the central feature of a dream home’s architectural plans, now it is sterile geometric spaces sparsely punctuated with technological fixtures: wallmounted flat screen, multipurpose remote, and an iPad situated on a simple table, and there it is. There’s the library. It’s digital. It’s so now. It’s also somehow lifeless.

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By lifeless, I mean there’s no “there” there—no sense of a collection of books as material, physical objects, no “being” to their existence. Ontology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the logic, nature, and relations of being. But do digital texts really “exist” in the same sense as physical books?

Whether it is a Libronix or Kindle or an iBooks digital cache, none of these is out here in reality where we as physical humans live and move and have our being.

Nevertheless, digital texts are rapidly becoming the preferred mode for textual resources, beginning with millions of Bible app downloads to devotional materials and scholarly publications. We want it at our fingertips, but it has to be as light as 1s and 0s adrift in cyberspace or, synonymously, no place. Our inability to place digital texts in spatiotemporality means they have a fundamentally different physical status from printed material with paper, binding, and cover. Digital texts are ephemeral; they are ontologically diminished. This loss has implications and may be symptomatic of a changing worldview, even within the church, even for Christian discipleship.

Before I go on, let it be known that I have a Libronix library glutted with texts. Daily I use an iPad and conduct work from my Galaxy S III. I’m no Luddite. At the same time, my understanding of the incarnation and the Reformation perspective on the Bible leaves me with a pragmatic approach to the aforementioned devices. The fact of the coming of Christ in the flesh and the fact that the Holy

Spirit works through material objects like the Word and Sacraments leave me in a posture of respect to the physicality of the Scriptures. My Bible is not a book among other books, an app among other apps.

I have no mastery over it. Call it old-fashioned if you like, but it can hardly be denied that there’s something fitting about outward deference to and reverence for the material pages of Scripture that are related in some way to the fact of Christ’s incarnation. What I am getting at is the loss of relationship to the biblical text as such and, by extension, its author and object when the “there-ness” and hold-in-your-hand nature of the book is surrendered.

THE DISAPPEARING B OOK The displacement of printed books for techno-texts is a phenomenon observed in three places: private homes, u n i ve r s i t y c l a s s r o o m s, and church sanctuaries. In parishioner homes, especially those people under 40, bookshelves are a rare commodity. When I do find a shelf, it’s usually lined with DVDs or CDs; but even these seem antiquated with “on-demand” and iTunes options. The family Bible remains at Grandma’s house.

To be sure, parishioners have Bibles on their phones or computers, but not on their coffee tables. Consequently, more times than not, there is no Bible present, no Bible presence. Out of sight, out of mind. The same can be said for other literature, be it classical, theological, or whimsical.

Likewise within classrooms, students read less—much less—notwithstanding the “omni-

“‘I DOWNLOADED THAT BOOK’ CANNOT MEAN THE SAME THING AS ‘I OWN A COPY OF THAT BOOK,’ MUCH LESS THAT I HAVE MARKED IT UP WITH MARGINAL NOTES AND MADE IT MY OWN.”

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WHAT IS A LUDDITE? Luddite: Member of the organized bands of 19thcentury English handicraftsmen who rioted for the destruction of the textile machinery that was displacing them. The movement began in the vicinity of Nottingham toward the end of 1811… but the movement was soon ended by vigorous repression and reviving prosperity. The term Luddite is now used broadly to signify individuals or groups opposed to technological change.

“LUDDITE,” ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA, ACCESSED FEBRUARY 20, 2013, HTTP://WWW.BRITANNICA.COM/EBCHECKED/TOPIC/350725/LUDDITE. THIS DEFINITION WAS QUOTED FROM THE ONLINE VERSION (AVAILABLE VIA SUBSCRIPTION) AS ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA OFFICIALLY WENT OUT OF PRINT IN 2012.

availability” of information. Twenty-five years ago as an undergraduate, I was expected to read upwards of a dozen books per course. Universities poured the foundation for the building of personal libraries. Now, I am hard-pressed to get students to read four books written at the ninth-grade level.

Students are shocked when I tell them they are expected to read the whole book. That’s not how reading is done these days, they tell me. It’s unnecessary, and for those who have been trained to read and research on the Internet, a synopsis suffices and perusing is the practice. In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr has explored “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” and Mark Bauerlein laments in The Dumbest Generation “How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.”

Both conclude that a truncated approach to texts, with no peripheral vision of what the next page holds or orientation to the linear progression of the entire text, trains the mind’s learning plasticity to think in pragmatic, detached, fragmented ways. In contrast, a printed book provides (spatially speaking) linear progression to the total story. In other words, digital texts militate against a big-picture perspective and comprehension of the whole story of the Bible.

Printed material has an eBay existence among

university students: endlessly recycled for reuse through repurchase at the campus bookstore. Students generally do not want a library nor do they feel the need to build one. A personal library, one student told me, is environmentally irresponsible. To him, all those books signaled not a mine of knowledge but a waste of trees. Printed matter, he said, was ecologically unfriendly. Owning a Kindle Fire was not merely a consumer choice for him; it was an ethical decision. This same student, however, confessed with the majority of his classmates that though he possessed the required reading for his courses on a Kindle, he did not and would not comprehensively read them. That’s not how digital texts are consumed. My parishioners admitted the same thing about Bible reading and devotional materials.

There are reasons for this.

THE REAS ONS WHY First, unlike reading printed matter, which requires the discipline of body, mind, and environment, digital texts have undisciplined built-in competitors: e-mail, texting, Internet, and scores of titillating apps. There are alerts, jingles, tones, and vibrations signaling the reader to multitask, thereby exploding the farce of “quiet time” or “devotion.”

Second, the mere possession of digital tomes, like the instant availability of a Google search engine, conditions complacency and laziness in learning.

Reading practices formed by Internet scanning do not lend themselves to deep consideration, let alone memorization of information in context. One may have the text, and therefore the story or information available (after all, it’s just a click or tap away), but this potentiality is not reality. “I downloaded that book” cannot mean the same thing as “I own a copy of that book,” much less that I have marked it up with marginal notes and made it my own.

Third, texts suffer from atomization. Search engines within these devices make it easy to locate particular words, phrases, or verses when researching, but that does not equal familiarity with the text. For example, it is one thing to do a word search on “justification.” It is another thing to understand justification within the context of the overarching storyline of the Bible. Careful biblical interpretation considers individual verses MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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INCARNATION

T

he incarnation is the biblical doctrine

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE CHURCH

that God became man. It describes the historical appearance of the second per-

son of the Holy Trinity, God the Son or divine Logos (“Word”); he “became flesh” by being conceived of the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary. The reality of the “Word becoming flesh” (John 1:14) is the all-encompassing doctrine of Christianity, firmly ensconced in real human history. Without it, there is no Christianity. Much of the New Testament witness is given to substantiating the fact that “the Word of life” was made “manifest” (1 John 1:2) and subsequently was seen, heard, and even touched by credible witnesses. Because of the centrality of the incarnation, Martin Luther began most of his theological reflections with the Incarnate Word on the cross, and present-day theologian David Scaer insists that in some sense, therefore, “all theology is Christology.”

in relation to the whole story of the Bible; but electronic Bible readers tend to let particular search results govern the understanding of the whole.

Increasingly, I am finding that Christians cannot locate chapters or even books in a printed Bible because their only familiarity with the text is via the app search tool.

Fourth, printed copies can be shared—replete with margin notes, underlining, and highlighting—in a gift-giving, self-giving way that digital texts cannot.

Fifth, and along similar lines, real books have a variety of distinguishing features, including size, shape, texture, color, thickness, and even smell.

Even without a photographic memory, there is some recall as to the location of information on a page or in the beginning, middle, or end of a book. This is a “sameness” factor that is surrendered with the modifiable font, size, and presentation of electronic books. In other words, the physical book brings with it a sense of encounter. Digital texts do not, or at least not really.

When we accommodate our Bible reading practices to the age of digital texts and the Internet, we

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may only be contributing to the biblical illiteracy, doctrinal ignorance, and sacramental neglect of the contemporary church.

When the gospel met the Greek world, there was a clash. God the good Creator of the material world has always spoken and acted through creaturely means. Then the eternal Word became flesh. Early on, the apostolic church struggled to defend the humanity of Christ against the heresy of Docetism: namely, that he only appeared to be fully human. To the extent that we are drawn to a God who is only known in the inner realm of spirit and not through his external means, we won’t find the dematerialization of Scripture disconcerting.

The disappearing Bible may be the result of the dominant understanding of Christian “community” in our day, where Christian worship is increasingly ephemeral, where there are no hymnals, no printed liturgies, no pew Bibles, no permanent pulpits; but only transitory PowerPoint slides, overhead projections, and portable podiums. In Scripture, this age is passing away; in our culture, even material objects like books are passing away. So much in contemporary church life is fleeting and impermanent; the texts and songs of the church are there one moment and gone the next, disappearing into cyberspace. It is no wonder contemporary Christianity is so “docetic”—that is, material-denying. From a Reformation perspective, the rule of worship and catechesis begets the rule of belief and discipleship.

We don’t worship a disembodied Christ, nor should we imagine our earthly or resurrection existence to be a disembodied one. When there’s no “there” in real space and time—not even the Bible—then it’s no wonder that ephemeral worship and catechesis yield such fruitlessness in discipleship.

Our Lutheran parish has fought against this phenomenon by purchasing hard copies and using them during the public service, Bible study, and catechesis. We process with an illuminated Gospel Book. The lectern Bible is massive and emanates a massive presence. We are consciously reinforcing the point that relationships are formed with the material text we encounter in the forum of salvation and, consequently, relationships are formed and reformed with the Author—the Father, Son,

KNOWING THE BIBLE From 2007 to 2011, I conducted a survey at the University of San Diego (USD). The USD results indicated that the digital availability of the Bible and other Christian texts for discipleship or reference was only reflective of reading practices exposed

by Nicholas Carr and lamented by Mark Bauerlein.

Of the more than five hundred baptized students surveyed, a full 88% were in possession of a Bible app on their smartphones or computers. Unfortunately, however, the widespread possession of an electronic Bible does not translate into biblical literacy. Here are some statistics:

➨ Only 19% could rightly order Abraham, the prophets, Christ’s death, and Pentecost.

➨ Only 12% could sequence Moses in Egypt, Isaac’s birth, Saul’s death, and Judah’s exile.

➨ More than two-thirds could not identify Matthew as an apostle.

➨ Staggeringly, 96% could not find Paul’s travels in Acts.

➨ Only 10% knew that the Christmas story was in Matthew or that the Passover story was in Exodus.

Student disclosures indicated that the operative factor in their biblical illiteracy was not just ideological but also sociological. They preferred not to own a hard copy of the Bible for two reasons: (1) their use of the Bible was for proof-texting and word searches, and (2) a digital version was clandestine.

Inadvertently, students admitted there was real significance to the physical fact of a hard copy Bible. Its mere presence “spoke” to their friends—only it said things they did not want their peers to hear. It seems safe to conclude, then, that

and Holy Spirit. When theology takes the incarnation seriously, it steers disciples to the Bible and to sacraments that have real “existence” in the here and now. Incarnational theology steers discipleship through texts and sacraments that “be” in the here and now. The Word is incarnate; the Word was also inscripturated; and physical sacraments are given as signs and seals—the self-giving of God in Christ Jesus who is also given to us through concrete instruments of grace.

C. S. Lewis once ruminated on the death of a friend, commenting on how a part of himself had died with this friend. Lewis explained that he had shared with this friend conversation, laughter, and company, such that his own personality and sense of well-being had been enlarged. In other words, this relationship rendered Lewis more substantial, more expanded as an individual. Consequently, when the friend died, Lewis felt that he himself was diminished.

A relationship with a book—the vehicle that brings us into a relationship with the author—can be much like that. After spending months in the Beineke Library at Yale University—handling, smelling, and reading hundreds of Jonathan Edwards’s books, notebooks, and sermon manuscripts—there came a point in which I thought of Edwards almost as a family friend (although, Edwards, along with other theologians I’ve read, such as Luther and Augustine, always takes a backseat to other more esteemed friends named Matthew, Luke, and Paul).

When we see and hold the physical text of Scripture, it speaks to us and occupies the reality in which we live as a living testimony, an abiding witness. It has an enduring quality. A conversation and an encounter continue through the ontological presence of books. Their very presence is sometimes iconic, sometimes instigating, always familiar, occasionally troubling. That is just the way the Lord intended the Bible to be—iconic, instigating, familiar, and troubling—just like the incarnation itself.

electronic Bible reading is hardly taking place on smartphones and iPads any more than with real Bibles.

John J. Bombaro (PhD, King’s College London) is senior priest at Grace Lutheran Church, San Diego, and teaches at the University of San Diego. He is the author of Jonathan Edwards’s Vision of Reality (Pickwick, 2012).

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DEEP-SEA DIVING JET SKI AGE IN A

by MICHAEL S. HORTON

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PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY JESSE LENZ

P

SYCHIATRIST KEITH ABLOW JOINS THE CHORUS OF COLLEAGUES, AS WELL AS SOCIOLOGISTS AND HISTORIANS, IN A RECENT ONLINE ARTICLE. The gist:

“We are raising a generation of deluded narcissists.” He refers to new surveys collected by Dr. Jean Twenge, a psychology professor.

Today’s college students “are more likely than ever to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, even though their test scores and time spent studying are decreasing.” In short, she calls it “a narcissism epidemic” and many of her colleagues, like Ablow, agree.

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These data are not unexpected. I have been writing a great deal over the past few years about the toxic psychological impact of media and technology on children, adolescents and young adults, particularly as it regards turning them into faux celebrities—the equivalent of lead actors in their own fictionalized life stories.

On Facebook, young people can fool themselves into thinking they have hundreds or thousands of “friends.” They can delete unflattering comments. They can block anyone who disagrees with them or pokes holes in their inflated self-esteem. They can choose to show the world only flattering, sexy or funny photographs of themselves (dozens of albums full, by the way), “speak” in pithy short posts and publicly connect to movie stars and professional athletes and musicians they “like.”…These are the psychological drugs of the 21st century and they are getting our sons and daughters very sick, indeed.1 Tragically, narcissism typically turns to self-loathing. “False pride can never be sustained.” Young people are looking for more highs to define and distinguish themselves. “They’re doing anything to distract themselves from the fact that they feel empty

inside and unworthy.” However, the bubble will deburst. Ablow says, “Watch for an epidemic of de homicidalipression and suicidality, not to mention homicidali ty, as the real self-loathing and hatred of others that lies beneath all this narcissism rises to the surface.” grandI had the privilege of growing up with aged grand parents in our home. Born in the 1880s in Texas and Oklahoma (when it wasn’t Oklahoma but “Indian Territory”), they were full of stories I badgered them to tell over and over again. I felt like I was part of something larger than myself: a family story that was itself part of a larger story you can crawl inside by having it told to you, over and over again. And the storytelling just happened, during those lulls in the daily rhythm, because we were actually there—in each other’s presence—with time to spare.

One day, I can’t recall exactly when, our children discovered our iPad and nothing’s been the same. It’s like a moth to a flame. My wife and I allow them to use it only in limited blocks of time for playing games, but if we’re distracted it could go on for hours. You’ll never be able to eradicate the natural childhood wonder at stories of the old West, but there are fewer opportunities to tell them. It’s not just the kids. I find myself navigating more than thinking and meditating; and even while I’m reading and writing, I’ll be checking my e-mail or texting like a crazy person.

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SCATTERBRAINS ERBRAINS TO BE EVERYWHERE IS T O B E NOWHERE

“I don’t read books,” says Joe O’Shea, hea, a former president of the student body at Florida State S University niversity and a 2008 recipient of a Rhodes hodes Scholarship. “I go to Google, and I can absorb relrel evant information quickly.” O’ O’Shea, ’Shea, hea, a philosophy major, doesn’t see any reason to plow through chapters of text when it takes but a minute or two to cherry-pick the pertinent passages usus ing Google Book ook Search. “Sitting itting down and gogo ing through a book from cover to cover doesn’t make much sense,” he says. “It’s “ t’s not a good use of my time, as I can get all the information I need faster through the Web.” Ass soon as you learn to be “a skilled hunter” online, he argues, books bebe come superfluous.

It’s t’s called “Generation Net”—no et”—no longer reading a page from left to right, from top to bottom, but skimming. “In “ a recent Phi Beta eta Kappa meeting, Duke University niversity propro fessor Katherine Hayles confessed, ‘I‘ can’t get my stustu dents to read whole books anymore.’ Hayles teaches nglish; the students she’s talking about are students English; of literature.”

What this means is that we increasingly think in “short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts” rather than “our old linear thought process.” For the last five centuries, books have shaped our minds. “It “ t may soon be yesterday’s mind.” Yet Y Carr arr experiences “informa “information overload.” “Take your time,, the books whispered

There’s nothing wrong with browsing and scan-

e’re not going anywhere anywhere.” to me in their dusty voices. We’re

ning, or even power-browsing and power-scanpower-scan ning. We’ve always skimmed newspapers and

Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiolo-

books and magazines in order to get the gist of a

gists, educators, and Web designers point to the

piece of writing and decide whether it warrants

same conclusion: when we go online, we enter

a more thorough reading….What is different, and

an environment that promotes cursory reading,

troubling, is that skimming is becoming our dom-

hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial

inant mode of reading.

learning….The Net seizes our attention only to scatter it.

The Roman philosopher Seneca may have put it best two thousand years ago: “To be everywhere

What we aren’t doing when we’re surfing the Net is as important as what we do when we’re on it. “We become mindless consumers of data.”

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is to be nowhere.”

THE PREVIOUS QUOTATIONS WERE EXCERPTED FROM THE SHALLOWS BY NICHOLAS CARR, PAGES 9, 10, 12, 118, 120, 125, 138, AND 141.

Most of us have to stretch our historical imagi imagination to understand a world that was normal not that long ago. With our automobile-driven culture of climate-controlled suburbia, anonymous indi individualism deposits us in our garage without having isolato bother with others. Add to that now the isola tion of having the world at your fingertips in front of a screen—TV, Internet, and phone—and it’s easy to see why we’ve become quite different people in barely a generation. In a recent story on NPR, an passenolder woman was talking about how train passen gers used to bring baskets of food on the trip from Madrid to Paris, exchanging cheese, meats, and fruit among themselves. Now, she said, there are no baskets; everyone sits alone, glued to his or her gadgets. (technology-hatDon’t worry: this isn’t a Luddite (technology-hat civiliing) screed. Medieval mining transformed civili zation in good and bad ways, giving us many of the modernisocial habits that came to full flower in moderni ty. The invention of maps changed our relation to space just as clocks changed the way we live in time.

As Jesuit priest and media scholar John Culkin points out, “We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.”2 It can’t be all bad, but then it can’t be all good, either. That’s where wisdom comes in. WisWis dom discerns not just between good and bad, but bebe tween better and best.

ORALITY TO WRITIN G It’s one thing to lose that socializing force of grandgrand parents weaving us into the tapestry of a larger stosto ry. Even more critical are the ways in which the narcissistic bent of our hearts is actually nurtured in the church by exchanging the patient wisdom of a common gospel, confession, catechesis, prayer, praise, and discipline for the instant gratification of self-esteem and self-expression. A group formed exclusively by private Bible reading will be fundamentally different from the body of Christ that the Spirit is building by his publicly proclaimed Word and Sacraments. Communal identities are mediated by stories proclaimed and sung in church. In our churches today, singing is less a social act of “making the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Col. 3:16) than an individual expression of one’s own feelings.

Worshiping alone, together. Meanwhile genuine

public worship—specifically, the preached Word— creates a community that contrasts sharply with the private spirituality that more easily fits with the Internet age.

It is no surprise that in Scripture the Word of God is something that is first and foremost spoken.

The world itself came into being and is sustained by speech. “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host” (Ps. 33:6). The God of the Bible is not Plato’s impersonal “One” silently emanating divinity, but the Father speaking in his Son and by his Spirit.

Jesus himself said, “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63). The apostles taught that “faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of Christ” (Rom. 10:17) and that we are born again through the preaching of the gospel (Rom. 1:16; Eph. 1:13–14; 1 Thess. 1:5; 1 Pet. 1:23; James 1:18).

Scholars have often observed that the New Testament “happened” to emerge right at the transition from an oral to a writing culture. So we get the best of both worlds: a preached Word that creates faith, and a written Word that is normative for what is preached. Yet the biblical writers were clearly convinced that the preached Word is especially God’s ordained means of grace.

Augustine defined the essence of sin as being “turned in on ourselves.” By addressing us in command and promise, God makes us his kind of extroverts: looking up in faith to God and out to our brothers and sisters—as well as our non-Christian neighbors—in love. The Reformers also emphasized the point that faith is created and sustained by the gospel promise we hear rather than by the things we can see. “For Calvin as for Luther,” John Leith observes, “the ears alone are the organ of the Christian,” and Luther said that “the church is a mouth-house, not a pen-house”—this from the first figure to transform history through the relatively new invention of the printing press! The Second Helvetic Confession declares, “The preached Word is the Word of God.” The Westminster Larger Catechism explains that God blesses the reading, “but especially the preaching of the Word as a means of grace…driving them out of themselves and drawing them unto Christ.” This public and community-generating Word is not only found in the sermon, but also runs through the whole liturgy.

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Especially in the Psalms, God gives us our lines in the script for common praise, lament, confession, and thanksgiving.

There are crucial theological convictions that ground our practices. If we forget them, assuming that the media are indifferent and change from culture to culture, then even the best doctrinal statement becomes little more than a piece of paper we file away.

On balance, surely writing has turned out to be a net gain. Yet it has also tended to make us as Christians more forgetful of basic things, such as that “faith comes by hearing the word of Christ” (Rom. 10:17). Just as the early Christians and the Reformers were able to take advantage of the written word without surrendering the preached Word, we need to avoid the radical tendency of our day either to lionize or demonize new technologies. In other words, we need wisdom.

READING TO SKIMMING Yet wisdom—that fruit of patient meditation on what really matters—is precisely what is becoming more difficult in the Internet Age. In this issue, we mention on several occasions the considerable discussion provoked by Nicholas Carr in his book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

While enthusiasts and critics debate the content, Carr points out that both are missing the deeper issue, namely, the ways in which our tools themselves—in this case the Internet—actually change us. It’s not just how we use tools but how they use us that matters.

Carr spent his life reading and writing. “Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel like I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle….

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” We’re becoming “chronic scatterbrains.”3 It is not just that our habits are changing, Carr argues—it’s our brains, our very selves. He appeals to recent studies showing how our brains are rewiring themselves in the Internet Age. This is nothing new, of course. Social historians have explored the ways in which our tools have changed us, individually and

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socially, in myriad ways. Yet, unlike these gradual transformations in the past, the Internet revolution has been a tsunami. Technical know-how has marginalized other ways of knowing, like art and, above all, wisdom.

If the library replaced the campfire as the archive of communal wisdom, the library itself is under threat today. Carr observes, “The library’s layout provides, as well, a powerful symbol of our new media landscape: at the center stands the screen of the Internet connected computer; the printed word has been pushed to the margins.” He points to the way our interpersonal communication has changed, evident for example in the differences between a personal letter and an e-mail message. It’s not just a question of different technologies, but the different people we become and communities that emerge as a result. In the past, quiet and contemplation were essential habits of reading; now, we are mostly comfortable surrounded by noise and distraction—the sounds of other technologies.

RECOVERING WISDOM One of the interesting distinctions drawn by Carr is between technological “determinists” and “instrumentalists.” Determinists act as if we are pawns of

MULTITASKING MULTIMEDIA

I

t’s often assumed that the time we devote to the Net comes out of the time we would otherwise spend watching TV. But statistics sug-

gest otherwise. Most studies of media activity indicate that as Net use has gone up, television viewing has either held steady or increased….A 2006 study by Jupiter Research revealed ‘a huge overlap’ between TV viewing and Web surfing….

Frequently, they use two or even all three devices [TV, computer, and phone] simultaneously.”

THE PREVIOUS QUOTATION WAS EXCERPTED FROM THE SHALLOWS

BY NICHOLAS CARR, PAGES 86–87.

SCROLLING VS. READING

A

page of online text viewed through a computer screen may seem similar to a page of printed text. But scrolling or

clicking through a Web document involves physical actions and sensory stimuli very different from those involved in holding and turning the pages of a book or a magazine. Research has shown that the cognitive act of reading draws not just on our sense of sight but also on our sense of touch. It’s tactile as well as visual. ‘All reading,’

writes Anne Mangen, a Norwegian literary studies professor, is ‘multi-sensory.’ There’s ‘a crucial link’ between ‘the sensory-motor experience of the materiality’ of a written work and ‘the cognitive processing of the text content.’ The shift from paper to screen doesn’t just change the way we navigate a piece of writing. It also influences the degree of attention we devote to it and the depth of our immersion in it. Hyperlinks also alter our experience of media. Links are in one sense a variation on the textual allusions, citations, and footnotes that have long been common elements of documents. But their effect on us as we read is not at all the same. Links don’t just point us to related or supplemental works; they propel us toward them. They encourage us to dip in and out of a series of texts rather than devote sustained attention to any one of them. Hyperlinks are designed to grab our attention. Their value as navigational tools is inextricable from the distraction they cause.”

“We don’t see the forest when we search the Web. We don’t even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves.” It’s psychic fragmentation. “We joke about it all the time,” but we forget that “we are

technology, while instrumentalists think we’re just using it without being changed by it. The truth, he thinks, is somewhere in the middle. Precisely because of that, we need to think about how we’re being changed and consider more deliberate practices that can make up for what we’ve lost or are losing.

Only with wisdom were Christians in other ages able to integrate various forms of technology. And only with a similar wisdom, informed by the same convictions about reality and how we encounter it, will we be prepared to adapt to the Internet Age without being swallowed whole.

In Christian discipleship, wisdom is in the driver’s seat, not calculative reasoning or visual consumerism. And wisdom is formed over the long haul as each generation of competent disciples passes its faith and practices down to the next. We are not autonomous individuals, surfing the Internet to choose among various identities that the market offers us. The preaching of the gospel calls us outside of ourselves, to look up in faith to God in Christ and out to our neighbors in love. It socializes us as a specific kind of community. Through its regular recital, the story changes us. Instead of just being spectators in front of it, we find ourselves living in it as part of the cast in the covenant of grace.

The Word became flesh. He delivers himself to us here and now through ordinary human speech, water, bread, and wine. In uniting us to himself he unites us to one another. These others are not people we “friend” on Facebook or “join” in “chat rooms” based on how much they’re like us. They are real flesh-and-blood human beings. We didn’t choose them based on shared consumer profiles; God chose them for us as our brothers and sisters, and we’ll be living with them for eternity, so we had better get used to them now! Sure, we change the church, but the church changes us. To grow more and more into one body with Christ as our head, we must exist in real places, where we are drawn from our private rooms into the theater of grace.

plunged into an ‘ecosystem of interruption technologies,’ as the blogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow terms it.”

THE PREVIOUS QUOTATIONS WERE EXCERPTED FROM THE SHALLOWS

BY NICHOLAS CARR, PAGES 90-91.

Michael S. Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation.

1 Keith Ablow, “We are raising a generation of deluded narcissists,” FoxNews. com, January 8, 2013.

2 John Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshal McLuhan,” Saturday Review, March 18, 1967.

3 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010).

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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book reviews “The videos (YouTube or otherwise) my students view on their digital devices are as ‘amusing’ as television itself, and Postman’s insights regarding the one realm are highly applicable to the other. ” –T. D AV I D G O R D O N

48 “Postman’s prose is itself rather entertaining, but his argument that television is the technological culprit ruining culture cannot be considered an accurate portrayal of the present-day scene.”

–JAMES H. GILMORE

51 46

REVISITING A CLASSIC

REVISITING A CLASSIC BOOK EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

Almost thirty years ago, culture critic and media ecologist Neil Postman (1931–2003) wrote a book that became an instant classic: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Penguin, 1985; rev.

2005). The book began with a proNEIL POSTMAN vocative and admittedly cryptic thesis: George Orwell was wrong; Aldous Huxley was right. ¶ Postman meant to bring to mind two contrasting possibilities for the future based on famous dystopian novels, Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.

Although both novels imagine a terrible future, they do so for very different reasons: ➨

➨

Orwell feared a totalitarian future in which Big Brother takes away our freedom.

Huxley satirized a future in which free citizens are overwhelmed by trite and insignificant choices.

As Postman summarizes, What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to

passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture. (vii) Politics aside, it would appear that Huxley was right. We have no wardens or gatekeepers of truth in America today, no Ministry of Propaganda withholding information. But we do have a population “distracted by trivia,” awash in a sea of information we can no longer meaningfully digest. We are, in Postman’s words, “amusing ourselves to death.”

T h e fo l l ow i n g b o o k rev i ew s re c o n s i d e r Postman’s classic book from different perspectives in the hopes of renewing a discussion about the relevance of these issues for the contemporary Christian life.

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AMUSING OURSELVES... IS STILL RELEVANT review by T. DAVID GORDON

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or a book written about media in 1985, Postman’s book is surprisingly relevant. When my students read it, I expect them to say something about how irrelevant it is to them, but they never say this; instead, they speak enthusiastically about how insightful and helpful it is. This is probably because laptops, iPads, and smartphones are really little more than portable televisions. The videos (YouTube or otherwise) my students view on their digital devices are as “amusing” as television itself, and Postman’s insights regarding the one realm are highly applicable to the other. If anything, their portability (and therefore ubiquity) exacerbates the cultural problem Postman addressed in 1985.

Second, Postman’s critics have almost never engaged what he ac-tually said. All the critics I have encountered tend to object to one of two things: what they think he intends to say (but never actually says), or what some people might do with what he says (e.g., never watch television). Many think Postman was a media determinist, though he was not. If he were a determinist and believed that the dehumanizing aspects of television were inescapable, he would not have bothered to have written books and essays alerting his readership to our current cultural tendencies, advising us how to escape those tendencies. To be sure, he said that the triumph of television over print “dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse” (8), but individuals could and can choose to conduct themselves differently from the culture at large. As Postman said, “I do not mean to imply that prior to the written word analytic thought was not possible. I am referring here not to the potentialities of the individual mind

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but to the predispositions of a cultural mind-set” (51). If Postman was a determinist, then surely Malcolm Gladwell is. In The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Little, Brown, 2002), Gladwell, even more than Postman, has argued that cultures reach “tipping points,” where they move in different directions than they did before and exert pressures on individuals to conform to these directions.

Similarly, Postman never said that no one should watch any television of any sort in any amount (what people fear his readership will conclude). Here’s what Postman said: “The problem is not that television subpresents us with entertaining sub matject matter but that all subject mat ter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether” (87). If television merely presented matus with entertaining subject mat ter for an hour or so daily, Postman would have had no problem with it. But when it becomes the primary means of knowing, and when it televises matter (e.g., public policy, education, religion) that ought to be discussed in another (print) forum, he indeed had problems.

POSTMAN’S TWO THESES Postman’s first thesis that pervades his book is this: Every medium inevitably shapes, to a greater or lesser degree, the “message” it conveys. Some media (e.g., painting and sculpture) are nondynamic; others (drama and music) are dynamic.

Some media are visual (painting, film, and television), and others are auditory (audiobooks and radio). Every medium has certain formal properties, and these properties shape its peculiar potential. We employ stone for grave-markers

“THE PROBLEM IS NOT THAT TELEVISION PRESENTS US WITH ENTERTAINING SUBJECT MATTER BUT THAT ALL SUBJECT MATTER IS PRESENTED AS ENTERTAINING, WHICH IS ANOTHER ISSUE ALTOGETHER.” because of its peculiar potential to last a long time, which is a result of its medium. A balloon would not do the same. Similarly, Postman denied that smoke signals were an adequate medium for conducting philosophical discourse (7). He justly says, It is naïve to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value. Much prose translates fairly well from one language to another, but we know that poetry does not; we may get a rough idea of the sense of a translated poem but usually everything else is lost, especially that which makes it an object of beauty. The translation makes it into something it was not. (117) Postman’s second (and equally pervasive) thesis is this: Every medium inevitably shapes, to a greater or lesser degree, those who employ it. In Teaching as a Subversive Activity (Delta, 1971), coauthored with Charles Weingartner, Postman writes: Being illiterate in the processes of any medium leaves one at the mercy of those who control it.

The new media—these new languages—then are among the most important “subjects” to be studied in the interests of survival. But they must be studied in a new way if they are to be understood; they must be studied as mediators of perception. (166) Most media ecologists put it this way: To evaluate

any tool, we ask two questions, not one. First, what does the tool do for us; and second, what does the tool do to us? A shovel, for instance, does something for us; it puts holes in the ground. It also does something to us; it callouses our hands. This observation about callouses is not a value judgment; handball players like to have calloused hands, because they can hit the ball harder than they can with soft hands. Whether one desires to have calloused hands or not is up to the individual to decide; but as a simple matter of fact, using any material thing affects material humans in certain ways, by altering either the physiology or neurology of those who use it.1 Further, media influence the sociology of knowledge or how a community comes to know what it knows (and thereby a culture’s values). Every culture creates what some call “plausibility structures,”2 and different media shape these structures differently. As Postman writes: My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content—in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.…I believe that the epistemology created by television not only is inferior to a print-based epistemology but is dangerous and absurdist. (27) Postman’s twin theses that media shape their messages and that media shape their users are bedrock principles of the discipline of Media Ecology.

POSTMAN’S THESES AND TELEVISION Applied to commercial television, Postman calls attention to its particular form: there are commercial interruptions every five minutes (which militates against sustained discourse or argumentation), and commercial interests demand that the programming be comparatively easily comprehended (which militates against refined or specialized vocabulary).3 Postman also follows French philosopher Jacques Ellul in saying that, compared to MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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print or radio, television is largely image based, appealing to (and cultivating) the emotions at the expense of rationality: “The photograph itself makes no arguable propositions, makes no extended and unambiguous commentary. It offers no assertions to refute, so it is not refutable.…

Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence” (73, 158).

Perhaps of greatest interest to Modern Reformation readers are Postman’s thoughts about televised religion. Postman was not, of course, the first to talk about the incompatibility of the two. Malcolm Muggeridge brought the public’s attention to the matter in the series of lectures he gave in 1976 in London.4 Postman, however, brought to the discussion his basic media-ecological orientation, as well as his sardonic wit, giving the pertinent chapter the impertinent title, “Shuffle Off to Bethlehem.” Though himself a secular Jew, Postman demonstrated greater understanding of the Christian faith than many who profess to embrace it: On television, religion, like everything else, is presented, quite simply and without apology, as an entertainment. Everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as second banana.…

I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.

(117, 121) If space permitted, I would augment Postman’s negative comments about religion and television with some positive arguments about religion and proclamation. “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe” (1 Cor. 1:21, NRSV). God decided not only what

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message to employ for salvation (the word of the cross, 1 Cor. 1:18); he chose also the medium by which to save. Proclamation was much less common in Paul’s culture than at least four other media: poetry, dialogue, rhetoric, and drama (by far the most popular medium with the Greeks and the Romans). Further, proclamation was often regarded, with a degree of contempt, as a rather perfunctory task assumed by a lower-level functionary: “At a first glance it seems as though the herald has completely lost the status which he had in the royal period.…Obviously, a herald was not highly regarded. He was simply an official.”5 Yet, for reasons I cannot address here, God chose this unpopular and not very highly regarded medium as the ordinary vehicle of salvation.

Postman did not appear to be aware of this, but he had enough knowledge of both religion and commercial television to rightly perceive that the two were incompatible.

Those who have not yet read Amusing Ourselves to Death should treat themselves to it; and those of us who haven’t read it recently should read it again. It is surprisingly germane to our tweeting, texting, distracted YouTubing, Facebooking, Net-surfing culture.

T. David Gordon is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania.

1 Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: Harper, 2007).

2 Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1969).

3 Postman’s critics often overlook his express statement that it is commercial television as a medium that he is writing about, not television as a technology, that might have been employed differently than it has been commercially: “We must understand that we are not talking about television as a technology but television as a medium. There are many places in the world where television, though the same technology as in America, is an entirely different medium from that which we know. I refer to places where the majority of people do not have television sets, and those who do have only one; where only one station is available; where television does not operate around the clock; where most programs have as their purpose the direct furtherance of government ideology and policy; where commercials are unknown, where ‘talking heads’ are the principal image; where television is mostly used as if it were radio” (85).

4 Later published as Christ and the Media (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977).

5 G. Friedrich, “κῆρυξ,” Theological Dictionary of the New Testament III (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 685.

AMUSING OURSELVES... IS DATED review by JAMES H. GILMORE

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early three decades after its publication, you still hear people refer to Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Especially among theological conservatives, the book is cited as the definitive critique of today’s media- and entertainment-saturated culture. Mind you, not much of the book’s content actually gets referenced, just the book’s title. The all-too-clever catchphrase has become the metaphor of choice for those wishing to describe what ails our society.

I’ve heard the phrase “amusing ourselves to death” so often in conservative Christian circles that I now instinctively roll my eyes whenever I hear it. What’s my gripe? It begins with recognizing a certain irony: Postman builds his argument upon Northrop Frye’s theory of resonance. According to this theory, “a particular statement in a particular context acquires a universal significance.”

Postman points out that metaphor lies as the generative force beneath this resonance, with “the power of a phrase…to unify and invest with meaning a variety of attitudes or experiences.” Today, Postman’s announcement that “we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death” resonates.

In fact, it imposes itself on the attitudes and behaviors of all too many well-meaning Christians and dominates the very way they have come to relate to culture. The universally significant sentiment has become: I am not a man of unclean amusements, but I dwell among a people of unclean amusements.

“Amusing ourselves to death” is a resonating metaphor through which we’ve come to see our culture, not ourselves, as depraved.

Thus parents often show more concern about not exposing their innocent children to certain evil aspects of culture than having them fully acknowledge their sinful nature. Pastors point to the culture “out there” as our problem more than they identify our condition in Adam. (I’ve listened to some sermons, mentally substituting the word sin for every mention of culture, and only by doing so obtained a fairly cogent proclamation

“‘AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH’ IS A RESONATING METAPHOR THROUGH WHICH WE’VE COME TO SEE OUR CULTURE, NOT OURSELVES, AS DEPRAVED.” of the gospel.) Instead of seeking to richly understand culture in order to better speak truth into it, Christians mount efforts to change culture–focusing on outward purity, or retreating in despair–rather than focusing on inward piety. I’m afraid it is this dim view of culture, and the puritanical and/or pietistic responses to it, that fuels the Moralistic Therapeutic Deism that Modern Reformation so often laments as the dominant spiritual condition of our age. Such a view of culture denies the very words of Jesus: “There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him” (Mark 7:15 ESV).

PROS For those who go beyond the title-cum-metaphor and actually read Amusing Ourselves to Death, there is much to like. Postman defends the written word against the moving image of the screen. He does not shy away from citing biblical texts or using religious examples, and he devotes an entire chapter MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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to exposing the distorted context from which all TV preaching flows. Here Postman keenly points out that “spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate.” Several of his observations strike a chord: Postman sees Las Vegas as “a metaphor of our national character and aspirations”; I position Vegas as “the epicenter of the Experience Economy.” And Postman rejects the notion of the plasticity of the human mind, something overemphasized in my view by contemporary technology critics such as Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (W. W. Norton, 2011).

CONS Postman’s prose is itself rather entertaining, but his argument that television is the technological culprit ruining culture cannot be considered an accurate portrayal of the present-day scene.

Postman claims “we would all be better off if television got worse, not better.” Surely, TV has gotten much worse in the last thirty years since Postman penned these words—and we are better for it. The dominant TV-show format of today, socalled reality TV, provides a much truer glimpse into the human heart and much richer fodder for analyzing our behavior than Dynasty or Dallas, the top two shows in the year Postman wrote, although Dallas has been revived just recently for a new generation.

To illustrate this point, allow me to recap the brilliant cultural exegesis done by Andrea Seigel in the December 2, 2012, issue of The New York Times Magazine, in an article lengthily entitled: “Say Yes to the Intrafamilial Psychological Entanglements: The most successful reality TV shows are never about what they claim to be about. Once you realize this, you can learn some very valuable life lessons.” Seigel’s analysis of three reality TV programs comes down to this: Survivor is really about “how hard it is to force yourself to be someone different” and

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“THE DOMINANT TVSHOW FORMAT OF TODAY, SO-CALLED REALITY TV, PROVIDES A MUCH TRUER GLIMPSE INTO THE HUMAN HEART AND MUCH RICHER FODDER FOR ANALYZING OUR BEHAVIOR.” “being unable to escape who you really are when you are dropped into uncomfortable conditions.”

Conversely, The Bachelor is about “forgetting who you really are when everyone around you gets lost in the same overpowering fiction.” Finally, Say Yes to the Dress concerns “the trouble with family” and the “psychological entanglement [that] can keep loved ones from being able to separate their desires from your own.” Any of this would prove more useful in starting a meaningful conversation with your neighbor, or as fodder for kick-starting a sermon, than admonitions to avoid the evils of television.

Postman would have found a better villain in movies. Unlike television programs, movies are today watched over and over again (“reruns” are a dead TV paradigm). Movies provide the common language from which most people draw analogies and frame their daily experience. Interestingly, television is increasingly watched like movies— via complete seasons on DVD, sequential episodes recorded on DVRs, or accessing the likes of Hulu. In this regard, Neal Gabler’s Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality

(Vintage, 2000) paints a richer, truer picture of our times. Gabler’s contention: People live their lives today as if producing their own life-movie.

More significantly, while Postman addressed the computer—naively calling it an “overrated technology”—he did not anticipate the rise of the networked computer (via the Internet and “the Cloud”). Here I wish more folks would revisit George Gilder’s Life after Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life (W. W. Norton, 1985) in lieu of Postman. Gilder accurately anticipated the end of an era; Postman missed the demarcation.

But that’s of little consequence, as television only served as the dramatic foil for Postman’s real target as public enemy #1: entertainment. He lamented that “all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment.” However, it is not entertainment that would threaten to amuse us to death.

If anything, it’s a diet of escapist fare that consumes so much time today, displacing finer entertainments. We’re mobile-phoning and texting one another over trivial matters, instead of talking to the

RECOMMENDED READING You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto J JARON LANIER Vintage, 2011

Elsewhere, USA: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety DALTON CONLEY Vintage, 2010

person next to us in line, or even just people-watching. We’re busy blogging, Facebooking, Pinteresting, and YouTubing ourselves to a better life now (“Do this and you shall live!”). Oh, to be once again just passively entertained! (Just this morning, before sitting down to write this paragraph, my wife and I enjoyed watching chickadees partake from our new feeder against the background of freshly fallen snow. It was wonderfully entertaining, and we made no e-posts about it.)

Postman, echoing Marshall McLuhan, at least had this right: “The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.”

Postman can be recast in more favorable light by recognizing that it is not television per se, but the ubiquitous screen that now permeates the surface of our culture. Go to a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant and try counting the countless screens.

Observe people waiting for flights in airports. I’ve seen some travelers three screens deep with laptop, tablet, and smartphone, all on their laps. And I’ve been to church sanctuaries in which a projection screen has been installed right in front of the old mounted cross.

Ours is a world in which our tools for conversation are being displaced by tools of presentation.

Our once-private thoughts and preparations for public life are increasingly conducted in the open with little or no editing, filtering, or self-censoring.

Constant tending to our “social media” is actually antisocial when performed in the physical presence of others. We’re drowning in e-mail from the office, updates from friends, and pings from the family. Instead of complaining and just adding to all this non-entertaining noise, those rightfully concerned about the state of affairs can begin by modeling better behavior. Let’s offer in the marketplace alternative ways of being engaged in the world with one another. Let’s offer a better way.

James H. Gilmore is coauthor of The Experience Economy: Updated Edition (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011) and Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want (Harvard Business School Press, 2007). He teaches a course on the Experience Economy at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and a course in cultural hermeneutics at Westminster Seminary California.

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GEEK S QUAD

EXPERIENTIAL REALMS AND PSALM 27

B

by JAMES H. GILMORE

usinesses must go beyond mere entertainment to truly engage participants in memorable and meaningful ways. To achieve this, they need to richly draw from the following four experiential realms: ➨ Educational (to learn via active absorption) ➨ Escapist (to transport from one sense of reality to another via active immersion) ➨ Esthetic (to hang out and “just be” via passive immersion) ➨ Entertainment (to enjoy via passive absorption)

In The Experience Economy: Updated Edition (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), I extend these realms to define six dimensions in which value can and should be created: ➨ Edutainment (holding attention) ➨ Eduscapist (changing context) ➨ Edusthetic (fostering appreciation)

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➨ Escathetic (altering state) ➨ Entersthetic (having presence) ➨ Escatainment (creating catharsis) More Christians should be encouraged to enter the marketplace to start businesses that more richly engage customers–yes, customers–with edifying commercial experiences, for business enterprise is the dominant culture-forming institution of our times.

In citing the Scripture below, I do not look to directly apply biblical passages to the economic sphere, but only to validate the “4E” model. Consider the way in which the above realms are present in Psalm 27:4 (ESV).

One thing have I asked of the L ORD , that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the L ORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the L ORD and to inquire in his temple.

To seek is escapist, to dwell is esthetic, to gaze is entertainment, and to inquire is educational. In both the earthly and heavenly kingdoms, such is the farthest place from amusing ourselves to death.

FOUR EXPERIENTIAL REALMS ABSORB

E N T E RTA I N M E N T

E D U C AT I O N A L

PA S S I V E

AC T I V E

E ST H E T I C

E S C A P I ST

IMMERSE

Source: The Experience Economy: Updated Edition

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B A C K PA G E

M O RT I M E R J. A D L E R R’ S K B O ST X X “ H OW TO R E A D A B O O K”

by SHANE ROSENTHAL OSENTHAL and BROOKE VENTURA

R U L E 1: C L A S S I F Y

Is the purpose of the article/post to entertain, inform, edify, instruct? Most pieces will fit into one of these categories, so pick one and skim it through that lens.

R U L E 2 : S K I M TO S C A N

A good skimmer is a master in the art of scanning. He is one who has learned to pick out the important words in an article as his eyes move rapidly down the page (e.g., “terror,” “bombing,” “hotel,” Cairo,” “investigation”).

R U L E 3: T I M E I S O F T H E E S S E N C E

This is the skimmer’s chief consideration. The important question is not, “Have I acquired a thorough and careful understanding of the material at hand?” Instead, it is, “Can I get a clever tweet out of this?” A good skimmer can generally get through the gist of a CNN article or blog post by sampling the first few paragraphs.

R U L E 4: S C RO L L , D O N ’ T C L I C K

If the skimmer is compelled to click on another page to continue scanning the article, he is not a skimmer; he’s a reader. This sort of person will be found printing out the entire article, underlining (sometimes with a ruler) various sections, and writing notes in the margins. This is to be avoided at all costs, since it requires both time and attention, neither of which he can afford to give.

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