The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

by Andy Crouch

Because we need not just to understand our place in the world and the faithful way to proceed—we also need the conviction and character to act. And that is what courage is about. The older word for this is virtue, a word that has dwindled, in our common language, into something like “niceness” or, worse, a kind of goody-goody avoidance of bad behavior. But we can’t afford to give up the word’s older and deeper meaning, which is the habits of character that allow us to act courageously in the face of difficulty. Life is difficult. In fact, if you do life properly—with wisdom—life gets more difficult as you go. (Eventually, it gets difficult for everyone, especially for the ones who try to avoid difficulty.) And even though it’s incredibly hard simply to know what we should do, it’s even harder to actually act on what we know we should do. Because almost all the time, the most faithful, the most loving, and the wisest thing to do is scary, hard, and painful—even, in some ways, dangerous.