Digital Liturgies Quotes

“Christian carefulness does not come out of a place of timidity or confusion. Rather, it stems from a deep awareness of the powerful intellectual effects of the fall and the reality-distorting power of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Judging by outward appearances tends to be useful in confirming what we already believed to be true, but it is not how God looks at the world”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“Just as TV has certain rules that make it tend toward the frivolous and entertaining, the web has certain rules that make it tend toward the diffuse and distracting. But it also has a rule that pushes us away from slow and careful reflection and toward a kind of zombie-like pursuit of the next neurological reward:”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“Christian thinking pursues embodied community. Before physical people, with human faces we can read, human voices in which we can hear emotion, saying human words that bind us emotionally to a particular place and a particular moment, we are reminded of what the Bible really means by honoring one another, serving one another, preferring one another, loving one another, admonishing one another, confessing your sins to one another, and praying for one another. Pixels are not created in God’s image. People are. It is a holy thing to be with another human being. It is, in fact, our eternal destiny.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“To actively resist the dehumanization of much digital technology, we have to do something simple yet often difficult: we must gather.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“Offline, if you open the door to someone else’s house, enter her living room, and start yelling at her, you may be arrested, and few people would feel sorry for you. But on the internet, starting arguments with total strangers, for no apparent reason, is normal.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“The web, by “collapsing” categories of human thought into one flat medium, pushes away from deep, personal reflection and toward the neural rewards of the notification and the Like button.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“Anger is a powerful epistemological fog.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be: if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“Concerns about “misinformation,” outrage culture, and polarization are frequently unaccompanied by any presentation of what real wisdom looks like or an alternative way to think that is more true, more humane, and more just.11”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“The internet is an epistemological habitat that makes genuine wisdom difficult and unappealing.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“they really don’t want others to agree with them. Their status as enlightened ones must be preserved.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“Jargon is what happens when the desire to be seen as a certain kind of person outweighs the desire to know what’s real.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“Minds that were fixated on how TV staged the world started to create a world that felt more like TV.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“by immersing themselves in television, modern people were relearning how to think about themselves, each other, and the world, and the result was a form of thought overwhelmed by shallowness and titillation.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“Postman’s chief concern about television was not that it took people away from reading, but that it “re-staged” the world in a trivial way.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“The reading of a sequence of printed pages was valuable not just for the knowledge readers acquired from the author’s words but for the way those words set off intellectual vibrations within their own minds.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“It’s as if the digital world helps transform us into something different entirely. To put it simply, it’s as if we’ve all started thinking like the computer algorithms that dominate our day, and in so doing, we’ve really forgotten how to think.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“As one technology critic put it, “If it feels like people arguing online are living in two different worlds, it’s because they are.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“My experiences matter because Christ is sovereign over my life and is working all things together for my good, but my experiences do not define me. I”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“But the flipside of this is that because I am God’s creature, I matter. My story is not absurd or meaningless. There is a transcendent purpose over my life and even my body. Since I cannot create my own meaning, I do not have to. I’m”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“Though we may retreat into the safety of self-creation to get out from under some sense of being oppressed, the self-creation actually turns into a form of self-oppression. Without givenness, we have to create the self that we are, and it needs to be a good one if we are to feel validated. How do we know if it is a good one?”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“the web is uniquely designed to cultivate expressive individualism in us.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“Arguments belong to the world of expertise; stories belong to the world of democratization.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“And in the online world, your story is your truth.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“circle to a unique dilemma of the internet age. The radical democratization of everything has not only given billions of ordinary people a very real kind of power and voice; it has flattened the distinctions between one voice and another.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“political commentator Tom Nichols described “the death of expertise,” a condition of the internet era in which the free availability of information and the ease with which individuals can express their viewpoint result in an intellectual free-for-all.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“When we say that the web has democratized information and experiences, we mean that it has made things that otherwise would be available to the few available to the many.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“If we look hard at the epistemological habitat of the internet through the eyes of wisdom, we will see that the privileging of personal experience as ultimate truth is not just something we find online; it’s the very logic of the social internet itself.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“the tendency of evangelicals over the past few years has been to zero in on the content of digital media, to encourage one another to use discernment, filters, accountability, and time limits. These things can be valuable, but a focus on content to the exclusion of form creates an illusion of purity.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“part of faithfulness to God as embodied humans means living wisely, and this wisdom consists primarily of seeing the world the way God sees it and responding accordingly.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age