Deus Misereatur

When I wrote " Our Heads on Straight " in 2020 and " Beyond Outrage " in 2023, I was deeply concerned with the way all aspects of news and social media were shaping us to be manic, anxious, and angry. Since then I have found a wide spectrum of folks, even people who are not Christians, like Jonathan Haidt , concerned as well. So I was interested when I stumbled across "Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age," a 208-page paperback written by Samuel D. James, associate acquisitions editor at Crossway and one-time communications specialist for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. The author's aim in the book is to show that social media and the internet technologies are not neutral tools but "an epistemological environment - a spiritual and intellectual habitat - that creates in it's members particular ways of thinking, feeling, and believing" (9). The author does an expert job hitting his target! James ma...

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everything Is Vulnerable, and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman My rating: 5 of 5 stars Paranoia will quickly set in, and if it doesn't it probably ought to! That's the immediate effect of reading "Future Crimes: Inside the Digital Underground and the Battle for Our Connected World". This 608 page paperback reprint, and light expansion, of the 2015 hardback, was penned by Marc Goodman. Goodman is the founder of Future Crimes Institute and holds the chair of Policy, Law, Ethics at Singularity University, and has been a Law Enforcement Officer, Futurist with the FBI, and Senior Adviser to Interpol. As readability goes, the book is very accessible. My 19 year old son gulped it down in a week. As for content, it is overwhelming and inundating with details and designs. "Future Crimes" is a dossier compiling gigabytes of factual exemplifications showing the interconnections of our cyber-world's "Internet of...