Sharing the Word of Life: New Technology in the Church

From the Sounds of St. Francis, September, 2017

Then another book was opened, which is the book of life.”  Revelation 20:12

The Book of Revelation is perhaps the Bible’s most dramatic and mysterious section.  Revelation 20 recounts the climax of the story, the great Day of Judgement, when our Lord will return to speak the truth upon all humanity and make all things new.  It’s easy to miss the fact that the author is also noting a significant change in communications technology.  The Lamb, that is Christ, has a book, a book of life—a book, and not a scroll.

Books—codices is the technical name-were new-wave technology in the first century.  The first mention of a codex in literature is by the Roman poet Martial, who was born a few years after the death of Christ.  Before codices there had been tablets of wax and clay, as well as scrolls.  The codex was a handy technology.  Its covers protected the contents and it was easy to find one’s place.  The paper could be written on both sides, so it was more economical as well.

It took the codex a few centuries to surpass the scroll.  Religious officials were inevitably among the holdouts, with their preferences for the venerable, the beautiful, and the familiar.  In synagogues today, they still read the Torah from scrolls. 

But Christians were different. 

Ponder: "trusting his audience back"

"The scorebook will close on a cultural icon who earned trust in a way that is hardly seen anymore--not just through longevity, but through trusting his audience back.

[Vin Scully] did not question plays or players just to gin up a reaction.  He didn't utter undeserved accolades or excuses for the home team just because he was its employee.  He didn't engage in hype or hopped-up controversy.  He trusted that his audience would appreciate an intelligent, measured account of the game, laced with knowledgeable analysis and a never-saccharine icing of erudition...He belongs to a category that includes Johnny Carson, Carol Burnett, Barbara Walters and the pre-scandal Bill Cosby--avuncular, wise truth-tellers who entertain, accompany, and win our trust because they believe they can connect without hype, hysteria or superheated energy.  The key ingredient here is grace, an element that's so sorely missing from our politicians who--especially this year--try too hard or hide too much, relying on artifice and exaggeration because they refuse to believe that we might respond well to something genuine, honest, imperfect."

Marc Fisher, "Vin Scully Called it Right."  The Washington Post, 2 Sep. 2016, B1,4.

Ponder: "you are where your attention is"

“But of course, as I had discovered in my blogging years, the family that is eating together while simultaneously on their phones is not actually together. They are, in Turkle’s formulation, “alone together.” You are where your attention is. If you’re watching a football game with your son while also texting a friend, you’re not fully with your child — and he knows it. Truly being with another person means being experientially with them, picking up countless tiny signals from the eyes and voice and body language and context, and reacting, often unconsciously, to every nuance. These are our deepest social skills, which have been honed through the aeons. They are what make us distinctively human.

By rapidly substituting virtual reality for reality, we are diminishing the scope of this interaction even as we multiply the number of people with whom we interact. We remove or drastically filter all the information we might get by being with another person. We reduce them to some outlines — a Facebook “friend,” an Instagram photo, a text message — in a controlled and sequestered world that exists largely free of the sudden eruptions or encumbrances of actual human interaction. We become each other’s “contacts,” efficient shadows of ourselves.”

Andrew Sullivan, “I Used to Be a Human Being.”  New York Magazine.  20 Sep. 2016