social media

So far as I can tell, nothing in our language or in our collective practice, digital or otherwise, holds space for such moments of spiritual pause, however secularized that spirituality might be.

How do I make sure that my contribution to the discussion of marriage equality properly accounts for my Christian faith? Instead of having the discussion in a vacuum, where words and ideas can be analyzed outside of experience, I make sure that my analysis runs directly through experience, and most importantly, through the experience of the suffering. Relative to this discussion, there is no more appropriate voice to include than that of the LGBT community, those whose experience has been objectified in “our” discussions of “their” rights.

With Twitter, there is just the right mix of calculable dissemination and mystery. You know who has retweeted or favorited your prayer, but what of the followers of the followers of the followers who follow you who did not retweet or favorite but may have read and been affected by your prayer?

Perhaps it wasn’t just the pope’s health that sent him into retirement, but his consternation at our increasingly networked lives.

The theory that access to the internet will be the undoing of organized religion has resurfaced. But do the data show anything like this?

Almost half of the world’s countries have laws or policies that penalize blasphemy, apostasy, contempt of religion, or religious “hate speech.”

At the end of the day, ministry without meaningful engagement is merely a form of advertising.

What happens in the Middle East isn’t always about us.

While the Catholic Church has certainly gone out of its way to encourage the use of social media to spread the gospel, it’s unlikely it intended the creepy surveillance that recently took place in a Minnesota parish.

So to see Manhattan itself go belly-up after the storm, to watch how carnal we become when met with loss of power, has been a sobering and a saddening experience. All of this has made me think more squarely about how inured we have become to screens as the mediator of our imaginative lives. Without electricity, we have no escape. Without Playstations and Xboxes, we have no other-worlds. Without fully charged mobile devices, we have no social media. Without our screens, we have lost our spaces of order, our promised places of reliable rules, our escape from reality. Whereas some New Yorkers contented themselves with flashlights and novels during Sandy’s aftermath, others felt compelled to trudge up to the gaudy power-lit mega-screens of Times Square, where at least you could see commercials and fight for seats at Starbucks.