Christians and Digital Media: Benefits and Burdens by C. Ben Mitchell We were having an early dinner at one of our favorite mom-and-pop restaurants in a sleepy little Southern town just outside where we live. As Nancy and I were talking about our day, a lad about 10 or 12 years old came through the door with an older woman who appeared to be his grandmother. It was as close to a Norman Rockwell scene as one might imagine. Grandmother and grandson were out for a quiet meal together on a Friday evening. One could even imagine this being a weekly treat for them both, a regular liturgy of life in this tiny community. Bob, the owner of the restaurant, is also the cook. The owner’s wife waits tables, delivering daily specials, superb hamburgers, or house-made pizzas to mostly local customers who sit at formica-top tables while drinking sweet tea and watching the sparse traffic pass by on the other […]
Digital technology is here to stay. We’ve become quite comfortable with digital technologies and even dependent on many of them. Yet despite the number of technologies we use, there seems to be large scale naïveté about technology’s effects, especially the impact of digital technologies. Even otherwise helpful theologians and social analysts sometimes make the unsophisticated claim that technologies are morally neutral; that in and of themselves they are neither good nor bad, but it is the use of the technology that may be right or wrong. If it were that simple, answers to our questions would be much simpler. Unfortunately, the morality of technology is more complicated than we have imagined.