Jesus did not preach an escape from earth to an immaterial Heaven. Rather, he preached the coming of God’s kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven,” a redemption of God’s good creation. We hope in the completion of God’s grand rescue project, which is taking shape as we speak and which will reach fulfillment [...]
What sort of thing is the internet? It’s not exactly a physical thing, but it was made by human hands. It is a real thing, but not something I can touch. It is something man-made but difficult to nail down because it is unlike just about everything else. Asking ‘what sort of a thing’ something [...]
External shackles we will always have with us. Internal ones are the more worrisome, for they are the ones we forge ourselves. My all-too-modern soul requires a great deal of fasting from news, memes, and viral videos lest I develop eyes that do not see, ears that do not hear, and a mind that merely bobs [...]
Whether it be in the context of public schools, private schools, home-centered education, co-ops, or learning pods, revisiting Neil Postman’s vision will help foster humane education in our Zoom World. It was nearly sixty years ago when famed media theorist Marshall McLuhan penned The Gutenburg Galaxy as “a series of historical observations” regarding the cultural [...]
The social-media giants won't stop censoring conservative speech anytime soon. Why would they? The reality is that conservatives must fight back against big tech immediately. Here are several ways to do it. Will you see this essay on Facebook or Twitter? Maybe, maybe not. The two major social media networks have been censoring political speech [...]
Today, Theodore Roosevelt prompts us to ask the same question he raised over a century ago in his speech “The Man with the Muck-Rake”: How do we devote our attention to society’s problems without allowing them to devour us? Our survival in the Information Age hinges upon on our ability to address this problem. In [...]
It only took a moment. The smartphone was somewhere in the grass, forgotten. Our hands and jeans were covered in smears of purple and green sidewalk chalk. My two-year-old daughter and I were busy drawing roads and buildings on a square of pavement—here a library, there a post office, with our house around the corner. [...]
Millions of children today are raised, by default, to be slaves to group-think, addicted to endorphins released from a digital device, burdened with neural pathways so obliterated that nary a logical thought might pass from brain to lips... In The Princess and the Goblin, George MacDonald casts both an unlikely hero and an unlikely weapon [...]
An Internet-free Sunday honors the Sabbath and allows us to leave our daily rat-race for at least one day, to ponder and prepare for the week ahead. It is a perfect occasion to visit and converse with others. Last year, I made a New Year’s resolution that I would make my Sundays Internet-free. It was [...]
When Facebook came on the scene, I immediately saw this new online forum as a platform from which to express my opinion about current events like I did as a newspaper editorialist. It was all just so easy and convenient. Except for one thing. For about a decade before joining Facebook, I wrote weekly opinion [...]
A democratic society requires an informed base of voters making political judgments on the basis of commonly accepted information. When reliable authorities no longer hold sway, unscrupulous authoritarians can step in to fill the void… “We have a risk of getting to a place where we don’t have shared public facts. A republic will not [...]
It might be too early to say, but the present recoil from fake news might prove that we are not quite ready to abandon the values we once thought so completely debunked. Truth might still stand a chance… Over the last few months, a number of publications have been running articles about what may be [...]
The important thing is to control technology since it becomes abusive when it starts controlling us. Thus, if email overload is causing concern, it is time to implement some version of detox. There is life beyond the Internet…. On January 1, 2017, I made a New Year’s resolution to make my Sundays Internet free. This [...]
Given the choice, people would rather watch flat-out conflict and crosstalk rather than a more plodding format of elevated discourse and sober deliberation… The documentary film Best of Enemies (2015) is not just a compelling chronicle and contextualization of the famous 1968 television debates between William F. Buckley, Jr., and Gore Vidal. As the sequence [...]