If we are going to "discern the spirits" in association with iPhones and Web 2.0 generally we need to start with the good stuff. iPhones and Facebook are awesome!
Again, as I said in Part 1, these aren't going to be Luddite posts. I love my iPhone, and while I'm not on Facebook or Twitter I am, obviously, a huge fan of blogging--a signature of Web 2.0.
Here's my little Web 2.0 testimonial. In 2006 I was feeling kind of lonely. I had a lot of good friends, but I was struggling, socially, to find outlets for all the stuff that was rumbling around in my head. And to find someone who thrilled to the ideas I was kicking around and would join in. I think people are generally unprepared for the sheer volume of stuff I think about. If you ask me, in a passing social encounter, what I've been thinking about you are asking for a two hour conversation. If you are a regular reader of this blog I expect you know what I'm talking about. But given that I have a modicum of social skills, I don't inflict two hour discussions on people. So while my friends were interested in what I was thinking about I had too much to say, too much to communicate. I needed another outlet.
Plus, there were times when I would share thoughts with my friends and would be dismissed as odd or unserious. I keenly remember sending an email to many of my friends on campus, around 2005, telling them that universalism was going to be an important conversation for this next generation of students. One of my friends, who worked in the College of Biblical Studies, dismissed this as borderline crackpot.
Given how things have developed since 2005, I feel pretty much vindicated on that score. Before and definitely since Rob Bell's Love Wins, universalism has become a very hot topic. But in 2005 I couldn't get a whole lot of traction among my ACU colleagues about this topic. Not that I expected to. ACU is a pretty conservative place, theologically speaking. As are the Churches of Christ. So I was used to being in the minority. Still, it was lonely. Theologically and intellectually lonely.
But then I started this blog. And here I could pour out every crazy idea I had. I could write and write and write. Even about universalism. And the most amazing thing happened. People came here and talked to me. Suddenly, I had all of you. And I didn't feel so lonely anymore.
My day developed two tracks, intellectually speaking. My ACU track, where I talked very little about the stuff on my blog, was pretty boring. I mean, who wants to hear me go on for two hours about the theology of serpents in the snake handling churches of Appalachia? Or about how Type 1 and Type 2 errors make for a really cool metaphor for soteriology? Or how monsters are transgressive hybrids? Or how the Eucharist might be like a "strange loop"? Or about the theological implications of Calvinball? Or how Game Theory can be used to talk about the Sermon on the Mount? Or about the figure of Judas in art history? Or about reverse perspective in Greek Orthodox icons? Or about the problems of free will in Openness Theology?
See the problem if you're my friend? Where was I going to dump this stuff on campus? How does any of this stuff come up in a normal conversation, particularly if you have a modicum of social skills?
So I'd hardly ever talk about this stuff on campus. That was my ACU life, Track One. But I now had a second intellectual outlet, Track Two. The conversation here. On Tack One I was a normal person having normal conversations. But throughout the day I was also living on a second track, participating with you in the conversation I'd started here. It was awesome. I didn't have to burden friends with some odd idea I was kicking around ("Hey, do you want to hear the difference between weak and strong volitionalism and their relationship to moral luck?). But I could kick these ideas around on Web 2.0. That world was so big there were always a few people who, for any given post, would say "Cool. I like this. Have you thought about..."
In short, I've never been happier, intellectually speaking, than since I started this blog. So thank you and thank you Web 2.0.
And while we are talking about all this, let me say that I think Web 2.0 is the reason why universalism recently hit its tipping point. There were always people who believed in universal reconciliation, in every denomination. Catholic. Baptist. Pentecostal. Evangelical. Church of Christ. We were in every church. But we were always in the minority. Quiet and closeted. Feeling alone and strange.
But then Web 2.0 hit. And guess what? We found each other. Suddenly we realized we were not alone. Web 2.0 allowed us to "come out" and feel confident we weren't crazy.
Web 2.0 was the tipping point for universalism. It allowed the minorities within each church to connect with each other and start up a more public conversation.
To conclude, my story is just one of millions, if not billions. You are the grandmother who uses Facebook or texting to keep up with your grandkids in another state. You're the missionary overseas who uses the Internet to stay in touch with home. You're the lonely person who found companionship via the Web. Or the best friends who celebrate everyday together on Facebook, even if you live hundreds of miles apart. The stories go on and on.
Connection is a wonderful thing.
In short, any assessment of the spirituality of Web 2.0 and social mobile computing has to start with its enormous good. To miss that is to miss why we are so drawn to it all and how our lives can become impoverished, in real human ways, without it.
(Picture above is the world map drawn by Paul Butler using Facebook connections.)
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Richard Beck
Welcome to the blog of Richard Beck, author and professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University (beckr@acu.edu).
The Theology of Faƫrie
The Little Way of St. ThĆ©rĆØse of Lisieux
The William Stringfellow Project (Ongoing)
Autobiographical Posts
- On Discoveries in Used Bookstores
- Two Brothers and Texas Rangers
- Visiting and Evolving in Monkey Town
- Roller Derby Girls
- A Life With Bibles
- Wearing a Crucifix
- Morning Prayer at San Buenaventura Mission
- The Halo of Overalls
- Less
- The Farmer's Market
- Subversion and Shame: I Like the Color Pink
- The Bureaucrat
- Uncle Richard, Vampire Hunter
- Palm Sunday with the Orthodox
- On Maps and Marital Spats
- Get on a Bike...and Go Slow
- Buying a Bible
- Memento Mori
- We Weren't as Good as the Muppets
- Uncle Richard and the Shark
- Growing Up Catholic
- Ghostbusting (Part 1)
- Ghostbusting (Part 2)
- My Eschatological Dog
- Tex Mex and Depression Era Cuisine
- Aliens at Roswell
On the Principalities and Powers
- Christ and the Powers
- Why I Talk about the Devil So Much
- The Preferential Option for the Poor
- The Political Theology of Les MisƩrables
- Good Enough
- On Anarchism and A**holes
- Christian Anarchism
- A Restless Patriotism
- Wink on Exorcism
- Images of God Against Empire
- A Boredom Revolution
- The Medal of St. Benedict
- Exorcisms are about Economics
- "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?"
- "A Home for Demons...and the Merchants Weep"
- Tales of the Demonic
- The Ethic of Death: The Policies and Procedures Manual
- "All That Are Here Are Humans"
- Ears of Stone
- The War Prayer
- Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Experimental Theology
- Eucharistic Identity
- Tzimtzum, Cruciformity and Theodicy
- Holiness Among Depraved Christians: Paul's New Form of Moral Flourishing
- Empathic Open Theism
- The Victim Needs No Conversion
- The Hormonal God
- Covenantal Substitutionary Atonement
- The Satanic Church
- Mousetrap
- Easter Shouldn't Be Good News
- The Gospel According to Lady Gaga
- Your God is Too Big
From the Prison Bible Study
- The Philosopher
- God's Unconditional Love
- There is a Balm in Gilead
- In Prison With Ann Voskamp
- To Make the Love of God Credible
- Piss Christ in Prison
- Advent: A Prison Story
- Faithful in Little Things
- The Prayer of Jabez
- The Prayer of Willy Brown
- Those Old Time Gospel Songs
- I'll Fly Away
- Singing and Resistence
- Where the Gospel Matters
- Monday Night Bible Study (A Poem)
- Living in Babylon: Reading Revelation in Prison
- Reading the Beatitudes in Prision
- John 13: A Story from the Prision Study
- The Word
Series/Essays Based on my Research
The Theology of Calvin and Hobbes
The Theology of Peanuts
The Snake Handling Churches of Appalachia
Eccentric Christianity
- Part 1: A Peculiar People
- Part 2: The Eccentric God, Transcendence and the Prophetic Imagination
- Part 3: Welcoming God in the Stranger
- Part 4: Enchantment, the Porous Self and the Spirit
- Part 5: Doubt, Gratitude and an Eccentric Faith
- Part 6: The Eccentric Economy of Love
- Part 7: The Eccentric Kingdom
The Fuller Integration Lectures
Blogging about the Bible
- Unicorns in the Bible
- "Let My People Go!": On Worship, Work and Laziness
- The True Troubler
- Stumbling At Just One Point
- The Faith of Demons
- The Lord Saw That She Was Not Loved
- The Subversion of the Creator God
- Hell On Earth: The Church as the Baptism of Fire and the Holy Spirit
- The Things That Make for Peace
- The Lord of the Flies
- On Preterism, the Second Coming and Hell
- Commitment and Violence: A Reading of the Akedah
- Gain Versus Gift in Ecclesiastes
- Redemption and the Goel
- The Psalms as Liberation Theology
- Control Your Vessel
- Circumcised Ears
- Forgive Us Our Trespasses
- Doing Beautiful Things
- The Most Remarkable Sequence in the Bible
- Targeting the Dove Sellers
- Christus Victor in Galatians
- Devoted to Destruction: Reading Cherem Non-Violently
- The Triumph of the Cross
- The Threshing Floor of Araunah
- Hold Others Above Yourself
- Blessed are the Tricksters
- Adam's First Wife
- I Am a Worm
- Christus Victor in the Lord's Prayer
- Let Them Both Grow Together
- Repent
- Here I Am
- Becoming the Jubilee
- Sermon on the Mount: Study Guide
- Treat Them as a Pagan or Tax Collector
- Going Outside the Camp
- Welcoming Children
- The Song of Lamech and the Song of the Lamb
- The Nephilim
- Shaming Jesus
- Pseudepigrapha and the Christian Witness
- The Exclusion and Inclusion of Eunuchs
- The Second Moses
- The New Manna
- Salvation in the First Sermons of the Church
- "A Bloody Husband"
- Song of the Vineyard
Bonhoeffer's Letters from Prision
Civil Rights History and Race Relations
- The Gospel According to Ta-Nehisi Coates (Six Part Series)
- Bus Ride to Justice: Toward Racial Reconciliation in the Churches of Christ
- Black Heroism and White Sympathy: A Reflection on the Charleston Shooting
- Selma 50th Anniversary
- More Than Three Minutes
- The Passion of White America
- Remembering James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman
- Will Campbell
- Sitting in the Pews of Ebeneser Baptist Church
- MLK Bedtime Prayer
- Freedom Rider
- Mountiantop
- Freedom Summer
- Civil Rights Family Trip 1: Memphis
- Civil Rights Family Trip 2: Atlanta
- Civil Rights Family Trip 3: Birmingham
- Civil Rights Family Trip 4: Selma
- Civil Rights Family Trip 5: Montgomery
Hip Christianity
The Charism of the Charismatics
Would Jesus Break a Window?: The Hermeneutics of the Temple Action
Being Church
- Instead of a Coffee Shop How About a Laundromat?
- A Million Boring Little Things
- A Prayer for ISIS
- "The People At Our Church Die A Lot"
- The Angel of Freedom
- Washing Dishes at Freedom Fellowship
- Where David Plays the Tambourine
- On Interruptibility
- Mattering
- This Ritual of Hallowing
- Faith as Honoring
- The Beautiful
- The Sensory Boundary
- The Missional and Apostolic Nature of Holiness
- Open Commuion: Warning!
- The Impurity of Love
- A Community Called Forgiveness
- Love is the Allocation of Our Dying
- Freedom Fellowship
- Wednesday Night Church
- The Hands of Christ
- Barbara, Stanley and Andrea: Thoughts on Love, Training and Social Psychology
- Gerald's Gift
- Wiping the Blood Away
- This Morning Jesus Put On Dark Sunglasses
- The Only Way I Know How to Save the World
- Renunciation
- The Reason We Gather
- Anointing With Oil
- Incarnations of God's Mercy
Exploring Preterism
Scripture and Discernment
- Owning Your Protestantism: We Follow Our Conscience, Not the Bible
- Emotional Intelligence and Sola Scriptura
- Songbooks vs. the Psalms
- Biblical as Sociological Stress Test
- Cookie Cutting the Bible: A Case Study
- Pawn to King 4
- Allowing God to Rage
- Poetry of a Murderer
- On Christian Communion: Killing vs. Sexuality
- Heretics and Disagreement
- Atonement: A Primer
- "The Bible says..."
- The "Yes, but..." Church
- Human Experience and the Bible
- Discernment, Part 1
- Discernment, Part 2
- Rabbinic Hedges
- Fuzzy Logic
Interacting with Good Books
- Christian Political Witness
- The Road
- Powers and Submissions
- City of God
- Playing God
- Torture and Eucharist
- How Much is Enough?
- From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart
- The Catonsville Nine
- Daring Greatly
- On Job (GutiƩrrez)
- The Selfless Way of Christ
- World Upside Down
- Are Christians Hate-Filled Hypocrites?
- Christ and Horrors
- The King Jesus Gospel
- Insurrection
- The Bible Made Impossible
- The Deliverance of God
- To Change the World
- Sexuality and the Christian Body
- I Told Me So
- The Teaching of the Twelve
- Evolving in Monkey Town
- Saved from Sacrifice: A Series
- Darwin's Sacred Cause
- Outliers
- A Secular Age
- The God Who Risks
Moral Psychology
- The Dark Spell the Devil Casts: Refugees and Our Slavery to the Fear of Death
- Philia Over Phobia
- Elizabeth Smart and the Psychology of the Christian Purity Culture
- On Love and the Yuck Factor
- Ethnocentrism and Politics
- Flies, Attention and Morality
- The Banality of Evil
- The Ovens at Buchenwald
- Violence and Traffic Lights
- Defending Individualism
- Guilt and Atonement
- The Varieties of Love and Hate
- The Wicked
- Moral Foundations
- Primum non nocere
- The Moral Emotions
- The Moral Circle, Part 1
- The Moral Circle, Part 2
- Taboo Psychology
- The Morality of Mentality
- Moral Conviction
- Infrahumanization
- Holiness and Moral Grammars
The Purity Psychology of Progressive Christianity
The Theology of Everyday Life
- Self-Esteem Through Shaming
- Let Us Be the Heart Of the Church Rather Than the Amygdala
- Online Debates and Stages of Change
- The Devil on a Wiffle Ball Field
- Incarnational Theology and Mental Illness
- Social Media as Sacrament
- The Impossibility of Calvinistic Psychotherapy
- Hating Pixels
- Dress, Divinity and Dumbfounding
- The Kingdom of God Will Not Be Tweeted
- Tattoos
- The Ethics of :-)
- On Snobbery
- Jokes
- Hypocrisy
- Everything I learned about life I learned coaching tee-ball
- Gossip, Part 1: The Food of the Brain
- Gossip, Part 2: Evolutionary Stable Strategies
- Gossip, Part 3: The Pay it Forward World
- Human Nature
- Welcome
- On Humility
Jesus, You're Making Me Tired: Scarcity and Spiritual Formation
A Progressive Vision of the Benedict Option
George MacDonald
Jesus & the Jolly Roger: The Kingdom of God is Like a Pirate
Alone, Suburban & Sorted
The Theology of Monsters
The Theology of Ugly
Orthodox Iconography
Musings On Faith, Belief, and Doubt
- The Meanings Only Faith Can Reveal
- Pragmatism and Progressive Christianity
- Doubt and Cognitive Rumination
- A/theism and the Transcendent
- Kingdom A/theism
- The Ontological Argument
- Cheap Praise and Costly Praise
- god
- Wired to Suffer
- A New Apologetics
- Orthodox Alexithymia
- High and Low: The Psalms and Suffering
- The Buddhist Phase
- Skilled Christianity
- The Two Families of God
- The Bait and Switch of Contemporary Christianity
- Theodicy and No Country for Old Men
- Doubt: A Diagnosis
- Faith and Modernity
- Faith after "The Cognitive Turn"
- Salvation
- The Gifts of Doubt
- A Beautiful Life
- Is Santa Claus Real?
- The Feeling of Knowing
- Practicing Christianity
- In Praise of Doubt
- Skepticism and Conviction
- Pragmatic Belief
- N-Order Complaint and Need for Cognition
Holiday Musings
- Everything I Learned about Christmas I Learned from TV
- Advent: Learning to Wait
- A Christmas Carol as Resistance Literature: Part 1
- A Christmas Carol as Resistance Literature: Part 2
- It's Still Christmas
- Easter Shouldn't Be Good News
- The Deeper Magic: A Good Friday Meditation
- Palm Sunday with the Orthodox
- Growing Up Catholic: A Lenten Meditation
- The Liturgical Year for Dummies
- "Watching Their Flocks at Night": An Advent Meditation
- Pentecost and Babel
- Epiphany
- Ambivalence about Lent
- On Easter and Astronomy
- Sex Sandals and Advent
- Freud and Valentine's Day
- Existentialism and Halloween
- Halloween Redux: Talking with the Dead
The Offbeat
- Batman and the Joker
- The Theology of Ugly Dolls
- Jesus Would Be a Hufflepuff
- The Moral Example of Captain Jack Sparrow
- Weddings Real, Imagined and Yet to Come
- Michelangelo and Neuroanatomy
- Believing in Bigfoot
- The Kingdom of God as Improv and Flash Mob
- 2012 and the End of the World
- The Polar Express and the Uncanny Valley
- Why the Anti-Christ Is an Idiot
- On Harry Potter and Vampire Movies
Yer dang skippy. And thank you, Dr. Beck, for your voice in the conversation.
As a former third-culture-kid, child of missionaries to Peru, raised abroad, educated in Canada and now living in North Carolina, I sometimes tell people that I have a whole bunch of great friends and soul mates, but that they unfortunately live all over the globe.
The web has enabled me to keep contact with them - to be nourished and encouraged and loved by them. It has also allowed me to write for a willing, interested public. And as my readership has grown, this has forced me to be more rigorous, compassionate, and humble in my thinking. I, too, love the conversation we're all engaged in. And I love, as you have pointed out, that I can "come out" theologically and not feel so alone... or so heretical.
Again, thanks.
I think that feeling of connection is huge for the theological minorities in every church and place.
And here's the thing I keep discovering. I used to think my beliefs were highly idiosyncratic. It felt like a cobbled-together scrapbook of stuff. So I just assumed, as a teenager, that I had to be one of a kind. But I'm not. Like you noted in your recent comment, too many of us are walking very, even spookily, similar paths. What I thought was highly unique and individual is, I'm finding, just one example of a much larger and general pattern. Too many of us are making such highly similar theological moves that it's not a coincidence.
And isn't it sooooo tempting to think, "Eureka! An obvious sign that we're absolutely right, and God is on our side, and everyone else ought to just listen to us and things would be all right"?
At least, I find this to be a particularly dangerous temptation. Nonetheless, I do believe (at the risk of sounding like something I am not) that there is a spirit moving... a spirit that in a postmodern age has been able to dismantle a lot of really ugly power structures. A lot of babies are getting thrown out with the bathwater, but I think with enough silence and humility, it's worth it.
I can identify. Here's what helps me: I tend to agree with my friends: I am kind of a crackpot. And if you know that about yourself you tend to take yourself with a grain of salt.
I tell my students that I don't preach positive self-regard but ironic self-regard. A holy fool if you will. Well, an aspiring holy fool. I got the fool part down pretty well. Working on the holy part...
Interesting post. This week I attended an inaugaral International meeting for bloggers at the Vatican and some of these same issues were aired. I made a two part report on the day - if you want to have a look my blog is called Blue Eyed Ennis at
http://blueeyedennis-siempre.blogspot.com/
Blessings
Blogging (well) takes a lot of time, so as qb worked his way through Brueggemann's _Theology of the Old Testament_, he opted to post little bits of provocative distillate on Facebook. So qb would read two or three pages over a lunch salad at United, and post a condensed thought from those pages...suffice to say that Facebook's not the best place to get a conversation going, especially when the focal piont of the first post is already on the very outermost periphery (!) of evangelical orthodoxy.
Wondered if you'd seen/heard this Being show recently. It's on the same topic. http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2011/alive-enough/
Hi Emma,
No, I had not seen/heard this. Thanks!
I'm finding with this series that there is so much already out there on this topic that the links from everyone in the comments are better than my posts!
Question: Does the concept of universalism redefine our current existence as life in the "Matrix"?
how does it go rich god is a comedian with an audience that has forgotten
how to laugh,,,,????
thanks for all the insanity ...or sanity ....bro ....the older we get the more of a " compared to what " everything becomes, and i aint the the judge any more
,GOD give me mercy....thanks and blessing you.
This is off-topic(ish), but I just gave you and your book a shout-out on my latest blog post, which is partially inspired/informed by "Unclean." Thought you might want to know:
http://joshbarkey.blogspot.com/2011/05/why-decent-christian-talk-is-anathema.html
I don't ask is technology spiritual, i ask how can i use it?
The scope and quality of information about religion made available by the digital age, means we have come out of another "dark ages" giving rise to spirituality.
Hi Josh,
It's always humbling to get a shout out. Thanks.
But more to the point, your post was fascinating. The deconstructing of the NAPE subculture through a DC Talk song was brilliant.
It is a nice post. Web 2.0 was the tipping point for universalism.There were always people who believed in universal reconciliation, in every denomination.
Interesting thoughts. I had been wondering about and asking myself recently why universalism (and other expressions of Christian unity) have been getting so much traction at this point in history. Your thesis certainly seems to have a lot of explanatory power.
I heard a sermon recently that likened the emerging church movement to the charismatic renewal in the 60's and the seeker-sensitive movement in the 80's. Every twenty years or so these fresh movements challenge and renew the church. Some of the aspects of these movements get incorporated into the church and others fall by the wayside. But the important thing is that they challenged people to think and to re-evaluate their belief and praxis and hence grow in their faith. Even if universalism and other challenges from the emergent church do not bring universal change, they will have fulfilled a useful role in getting "orthodox" Christianity to sharpen its theology and adapt itself better to the current post-modern generations of followers and potential followers.
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