Andrew Sullivan confesses that he “used to be a human being.” In a provocative essay in New York magazine, Sullivan writes about the ways smartphone technology and its constant connectedness have disconnected us from our sense of our humanity and from one another.
I was most intrigued by Sullivan’s proposals for the church to be a haven in a digitally exhausted world.
“If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation,” Sullivan writes. “’Christian leaders seem to think that they need more distraction to counter the distraction. Their services have degenerated into emotional spasm, their spaces drowned with light and noise and locked shut throughout the day, when their darkness and silence might actually draw those whose minds and souls have grown web-weary.”