Rethinking tech

How do our beloved tools affect us?

We often feel the Bible’s call to care for the vulnerable most strongly in our immediate families. Who doesn’t want to protect their child or partner from danger?

Often we make protective rules. If we live with someone who has struggled with addiction, that may mean keeping a house free of alcohol or using a router-based filter against pornography.

With children it can mean requiring they reach a minimum age before allowing them to create their own social media accounts, access violent movies and video games, or buy a mobile phone.

Strangely, we don’t often apply our caring concern around these dangerous influences to ourselves. We assume we’re too mature to be taken in, too developed in our willpower, too wise in our discernment.

This issue’s articles on technology encourage us to pause and reflect – and maybe consider how our uncritical use of tech might be doing us more harm than good.

Is our tech “undermining our development of responsibility for each other?” asks Craig Gay. Or is it making superficial, careless interactions increasingly the norm?

Are our devices “enhancing our actual experience of ordinary reality . . . enabling us to dwell richly in those places where we are most at home?” Or are we giving in to escapism, choosing vicarious experiences at times when God might be inviting us into the here and now?

Gay warns that our society’s “results-oriented worldview and methods” have been “profoundly dehumanizing . . . since a good deal of the volatility and unpredictability . . . derive from human personality.”

How do these concerns apply to how you use your vehicle, mobile phone or other everyday forms of technology? We’d welcome your thoughts by email or Facebook – or maybe after you reflect on these articles you will feel compelled instead to call, videochat or arrange an in-person meeting.

You can also read meaningful articles this issue about the anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, grandparenting, Christmas and more.

We’re grateful for the technology that enables our tiny team to interact with dozens of contributors across our vast country to put together each issue of Faith Today. We pray that God will continue to guide and equip us to use it well in the service of His Church.

Have a blessed Advent season and (inspired by David Guretzki’s column) we’ll say a merry Incarnation Day. /FT

How do these concerns apply to how you use your vehicle, mobile phone or other everyday forms of technology?