The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.
The most powerful choices we will make in our lives are not about specific decisions but about patterns of life: the nudges and disciplines that will shape all our other choices. This is especially tr...
Here is the heart of the paradox: Technology is a brilliant, praiseworthy expression of human creativity and cultivation of the world. But it is at best neutral in actually forming human beings who ca...
Technology is a brilliant, praiseworthy expression of human creativity and cultivation of the world. But it is at best neutral in actually forming human beings who can create and cultivate as we were ...
We have been created by God, to be loved by God, and to receive our identity from God. But in our everyday lives, as we go about our work, school, interacting with our family and friends, we don’t alw...
n The Wounded Healer , Henri Nouwen retells a tale from ancient India: Four royal brothers decided each to master a special ability. Time went by, and the brothers met to reveal what they had le...
I’ve served on staff at a few different churches throughout Silicon Valley for the last decade and a half, including a medium-sized church, a young church plant, and a multisite megachurch. At each, w...
As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, asso...
Let us pray. Almighty, powerful, creator God So often we think we know best. We confess to you our sin alongside the sin of all humanity. We have tried to master creation rather than care for it. We ...
A Time of Disruption Imagine your church somehow existed back in the 16 th century, at the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. You would be surrounded by major changes in society, in religious...
* This story is in all likelihood apocryphal, it nevertheless has illustrative power The ambition of young professionals should never be underestimated. One recent computer science graduate was ...
Computers give rise to many amusing salutations that could also offend. Humorous examples include the legendary Mr. Obe, a fine old West African name that didn’t happen to belong to the recipient (OBE...
Jesus’ first followers were at the forefront of a new kind of textual technology. From quite early on they used the codex, with sheets stuck together to comprise something like a modern book, rather t...
Digital connections . . . may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other.
Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addic...
Almighty God, during this tumultuous time, we see so clearly our frailty and powerlessness. Any illusions of strength and grandeur have been stripped away. We are utterly dependent upon you. Even with...
Our family is radical, but we are definitely not Amish—although we love to eat the fruit, vegetables, meat, and cheese produced by our Amish neighbors forty miles away in Lancaster County, Pennsylvani...
In the short term, online communication makes us feel more in charge of our time and self-presentation. If we text rather than talk, we can have each other in amounts we can control. And texting and e...
The digital age’s technological advancements boast three major contributions to the improvement of human experience, which in turn have become its undeniable values: We have access to what we want wh...
In June 2024, I (A. J.) had the opportunity to visit the Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem, Oregon, to meet with a group of inmates who had read one of my recent books. The experience was...
In the land whose founding metaphor was the mutuality of John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century vision of a “city set on a hill,” we live more and more in estranged, hostile, exclusive enclaves, linked o...
Romans 12:10, John 15:13, Proverbs 18:24, Ecclesiastes 4:9-12, Proverbs 27:17
There’s been a lot of talk about friendship because of Facebook and the internet. You can collect friends and “likes” and begin to feel pretty good about yourself, depending on how many you accumulate...
Have you ever heard of the forensic science theory known as Locard’s Exchange Principle? Named after the "Sherlock Holmes of France," the French criminologist Emile Locard, this theory sugge...
Ecclesiastes 7:10, Colossians 2:8, Matthew 9:17, 1 Thessalonians 5:21, Romans 12:2, Mark 7:8-9, Isaiah 43:19
It’s funny how sometimes members of the church can associate anything new with “heresy.” We often make the mistake of confusing technological innovations or scientific discoveries for changes to the g...
Find the room where your family spends the most time and ruthlessly eliminate the things that ask little of you and develop little in you. Move the TV to a less central location—and ideally a less com...
When I talk with parents of adolescents, the conversation often turns to smartphones, social media, and video games. The stories parents tell me tend to fall into a few common patterns. One is the “co...
Fifty years ago French sociologist/theologian Jacques Ellul warned that technology, in spite of its many lauded gifts, also presented great dangers. Its most important threat was its development into ...