Samuel James > Quotes

“The internet is an epistemological habitat that makes genuine wisdom difficult and unappealing.”
― 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

“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

“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

“If the web is the water we live in, expressive individualism is the chlorine that permeates it.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“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

“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

“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

“moral language of our technologies is so easy to miss precisely because the technologies change the way we see them. We don’t realize when we’re being pushed toward rhythms, patterns, and attitudes that undermine Christian formation because we usually only look for that in explicit worldviews, not in our devices. But they are there.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“We demand shorter and shorter books that will accommodate our diminished focus and present to us more like what we read online. We are becoming less tolerant of friends who voice opinions we dislike, so accustomed we are to being able to mute or delete that which discomforts us. We are becoming much more anxious, unable to accept stillness or silence that cuts against our daily intake of new noise. These real, offline effects emerge from our online habits because, in God’s providential design, our minds are also brains—physical objects with pathways and neurons and adaptability”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“It is not just that we take neutral tools and use them in sinful ways. It's that the tools themselves can bend our vision of reality.”
― 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

“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

“the web is quickly becoming more than just another epistemological or spiritual habitat that competes for our attention and presence. It is becoming the foundational medium, the superstructure of nearly every other experience.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“In other words, our intellectual technologies are constantly preaching to us, and over time, their sermons transform how we think and act.”
― 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

“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

“It’s not that my wandering attention span has nowhere else to go. It’s that digital environments beckon to me in a particularly powerful way.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“The title of Sullivan’s essay is profound; many of us seem to remember a time, at some point in our lives, when we just didn’t hear the noise the way we do now. We remember days and weeks and months without comparing our lives to strangers or wrestling with the insecurity of not measuring up. We remember a time when we could enjoy good things without having to photograph or broadcast them. We remember, somehow, what it felt like to lose ourselves in something outside us, to have our attention drawn to something that was really happening: the joy that comes from a genuine self-forgetfulness. And while those experiences still happen, they seem harder than ever to find, and all the while the anxiety and guilt and frustration of feeling like we’re somehow less human than we used to be drives us back to the screen, back to the feed where we can at least stop thinking for a minute.”
― 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

“Throughout secular culture, places of in-person gathering and embodied relationships are in decline. Jobs have gone remote. Streaming has crippled the cinema and concert industries. Classrooms are virtual, support groups are digital, and even dating is now centered around apps. In many communities, churches are some of the only physical centers of human gathering left. This is neither accidental nor arbitrary. Christianity does not reduce the self to the screen-mediated mind. We belong, as the catechism says, body and soul, to God. Our pursuit of the truth must take us nearer to other people and physical life, not away from it.”
― 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

“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

“One reason that Christians do not fear (or should not fear) discussing ideas or opinions they disagree with is that the gospel gives them a low view of themselves but a high view of God: his power, his victory, his sovereign rule over everything. The Christian striving in the area of politics and public life is not trying to create Utopia. His opponents are not mortal enemies that must be subjugated if the good guys are to win. Rather, he is a recipient of mercy who is heralding the coming of a kingdom that is decisive. Moreover, the assurance of a final judgment by a God who is both perfectly righteous and perfectly loving is a source of lasting peace and rest. The instrument of final justice is taken out of our hands and given to the one who turned it on his Son rather than on us. This is precisely the kind of emotional, social, and spiritual balm that a shame-addled digital culture desperately needs.”
― 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

“When people accept dreams as their reality, they feel like they have to go to sleep in order to wake up”
― Samuel James

“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

“words, the internet actually retrains us as readers. “When the Net absorbs a medium, it recreates that medium in its own image,” writes Carr.”
― Samuel James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age