Resident Theologian
About the Blog
Subtweets, backshadowing, and Saint Barnabas
A follow-up to the previous post on a style of punditry that denies contingency.
My latest: why Christians are conspiracy theorists, in CT
A link to my latest column in Christianity Today.
Boys and video games in different stages of life
Thinking about the place of video games in boys' lives: preteen, teens, twenties, and thirties.
More screens, more distractions; fewer screens, fewer distractions
A vision for the design of our shared spaces, especially public worship.
Writing without a platform
Reflections on the possibilities of writing today without creating and maintaining an online "platform" via social media.
It costs you nothing not to be on social media
One of my biannual public service announcements regarding social media.
A.I., TikTok, and saying “I would prefer not to”
Finding wisdom in Bartleby for a tech-addled age.
Screentopia
A rant about the concern trolls who think the rest of us are too alarmist about children, screens, social media, and smartphones.
All together now: social media is bad for reading
A brief screed about what we all know to be true: social media is bad for reading.
How do you spend your time in the office?
Counting hours and organizing time in the office as a professor.
Quit social porn
Samuel James is right: the social internet is a form of pornography. That means Christians, at least, should get off—now.
A decision tree for dealing with digital tech
Is the digital status quo good? If not, our actions (both personal and institutional) should show it.
Quitting the Big Five
Could you quit all the companies that make up Silicon Valley’s Big Five? How hard would it be to reduce your footprint down to only one of them?
Tech bubble
From what I read online, I appear to live in a tech bubble: everyone’s addicted to it while knowing it’s bad. Are there really people who aren’t addicted? Are there really others who are addicted, but think it’s good?
The take temptation
There is an ongoing series of essays being slowly published in successive issues of The New Atlantis I want to commend to you. They’re by Jon Askonas, a friend who teaches politics at Catholic University of America. The title for the series as a whole is “Reality: A Post-Mortem.” The essays are a bit hard to describe, but they make for essential reading.
Six months without podcasts
Last September I wrote a half-serious, half-tongue-in-cheek post called “Quit Podcasts.” There I followed my friend Matt Anderson’s recommendation to “Quit Netflix” with the even more unpopular suggestion to quit listening to podcasts. As I say in the post, the suggestion was two-thirds troll, one-third sincere. That is, I was doing some public teasing, poking the bear of everyone’s absolutely earnest obsession with listening to The Best Podcasts all day every day.
The meta mafia
Here’s something Mark Zuckerberg said during his indescribably weird announcement video hawking Facebook’s shift into the so-called metaverse: There are going to be new ways of interacting with devices that are much more natural. Instead of typing or tapping, you’re going to be able to gesture with your hands, say a few words, or even just make things happen by thinking about them. Your devices won’t be the focal point of your attention anymore. Instead of getting in the way, they’re going to give you a sense of presence in the new experiences that you’re having and the people who you’re with. And these are some of the basic concepts for the metaverse.
Twitter loci communes
One of these days Twitter will be no more. Or at least my Twitter account. Whether that future is distant or near, it will happen. I stopped actively tweeting or even retweeting anything beyond links to my published work a couple months into the pandemic. That was after resuming “normal” Twitter activity following a self-imposed months-long hiatus.
Charity
What if, when a person you are reading or listening to states a conviction or comes to a conclusion with which you disagree, your first thought were not that such a person must, by necessary consequence, be wicked, stupid, cruel, incurious, unserious, or otherwise worthy of public censure and ridicule?