Welcome to the desert of the real.

The moving forward in Hess’s book brought back flashes of an E-Crit Lab I took my last semester at UDM on Spatiality / Virtuality. I more impressed with Hess’s view of technology as a tool than I thought I would be. Barney Warf’s essay Compromising Positions in Cities in the Telecommunications Age (a favorite of Marcel) argues for integrating physical and mental aspects of humanity in regard to technology. While Warf (not Worf) makes sense on one level, I feel he takes it a bit too far when arguing that “bodies and cyberspace are shot through with each other.” (pg 59) Hess argues that although technology is instrumental, it is not necessarily impersonal. I hope you agree, because I have invested a part of my personality to the blog you’re reading.

Arguing for media & technology as instruments to be used and mastered in theological education certainly makes more sense than anything else I have heard. They must be engaged, because our culture is immersed in them, and accessed through them. They must be used, because they are the language that people are familiar with.

Hess is correct when she argues against theological learning being inherently relational and embodied, but we must be careful in our understanding of this. Theological learning is not inherently relational, but spiritual formation is, and if we dare divorce the two, we have abandoned our purpose for the former, and an important means to the latter. We must remain in community if we would remain balanced in our Christian lives. That community may be supplemented in any variety of ways, including technology and media, but neither of those offer community in and of themselves.