Digital Liturgies

Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

By Samuel James

Crossway, 2023. 208 pages. $23 (e-book $22, audio $13)

Samuel James argues that the social internet and the pocket supercomputer – which some people still refer to as a phone – are not only remaking the world, but actually making us into different kinds of people.

He writes that the online world “is an epistemological environment – a spiritual and intellectual habitat – that creates in its members particular ways of thinking, feeling and believing.” James makes his case in contrast to what we might call the default Christian approach of “technology as neutral,” an approach which focuses almost exclusively on the content while ignoring the deeply shaping nature of the medium itself.

As a millennial who tasted the last fleeting moments of analog life before the internet was inescapable, these observations strike me as true to experience. But why is this important for the Canadian Church? Because if James is correct and these technologies are not simply influencing us through questionable content, but reshaping our minds and hearts like a liturgy, then we must soberly reckon with that fact.

The slim volume manages to treat a surprising range of topics – wisdom, technology, media, embodiment, attention, pornography, the concept of the self, anxiety and more. After the opening chapters in which the author lays out his thesis, he devotes the second half to exploring five “liturgies”

which shape us as we spend time online – authenticity, outrage, shame, consumption and meaninglessness.

James, a bright new evangelical writer based in Kentucky, mixes some cure along with his trenchant diagnosis, including reflections on relevant Scriptures.