[A shorter version of this article was published at The Gospel Coalition.] We are about to live through some unsought social experiments. Among them may be the following: “What happens when a radically individualistic culture collides head-on with a scenario requiring unprecedented obedience to authority and self-sacrifice for something bigger than our own personal flourishing?” …
For more resources on smartphone addiction and coping with the digital age, see: Odysseus and the Age of Distraction Digital Prayers I hate Henry Following Christ in a Digital Age The Occupation It was a bloodless coup, a quiet revolution. There were no guns or bombs; no terrified shouting in the …
The Greek hero Odysseus never owned a smartphone (or so the annals of myth record). The Trojan Horse ploy was not live tweeted, the escape from the Cyclops never streamed to Facebook Live, the bloodbath in Ithaca spawned no Instagram posts. Yet armed with a phablet, the Greek hero could have been the influencer to end all …
Some events are so unexpected, so momentous, they seem to distort the fabric of time. Expected patterns of cause and effect are so violated, it seems time must compress or dilate to accommodate them. On 15th April 2019, as Notre Dame burned, a near millennium of ancient trees, the ages’ gathered dust, and millions of …
[This is #4 in a series of posts exploring information: what is it, where does it come from, and what does it teach us about ourselves and the reality in which we live. – #1 can be found here] When encoding information using symbols, it doesn’t fundamentally matter what physical carriers are used to display …
[This is #3 in a series of posts exploring information: what is it, where does it come from, and what does it teach us about ourselves and the reality in which we live. – #1 can be found here] As we have seen, not all information is equal in character. Particularly, it seems that the …
[This is #2 in a series of posts exploring information: what is it, where does it come from, and what does it teach us about ourselves and the reality in which we live. – #1 can be found here] When Bach sat to write his great works, he encoded sequences of tones in time, he …
[This is #1 in a series of posts exploring information: what is it, where does it come from, and what does it teach us about ourselves and the reality in which we live.] You may want to listen to the above while you read this post! The year is 1720. Johann Sebastien Bach sits in …
[This post explores whether social media spaces are just tools for human communication, or whether there is are more spiritual elements driving our behaviour online.] Social media spaces are geared towards performative behaviours. In them, we become actors; we post to target an audience response. We may pretend social media is a communication tool, but it …
[Note – this is a shortened version of a longer essay on the same theme, which is available here] Is Christianity a myth? No! shout most Christians. Yes! shout most atheists. Yes! shout most atheists. And yes said C.S Lewis, one of the most prominent Christian thinkers of the 20th Century. To most, the realisation …
