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''A question of language''

The question of religious vis-a-vis technological language cannot be avoided at this point. Let's start simply enough. Language is very much affected by the culture it is shaped in. I am still thinking of the analog adult and the digital youth. Adults are likely to talk about 'turning over a new leaf', 'beginning a new chapter' as metaphors for conversion. There is no need to explain where those metaphors come from! The metaphors will change – 'Get a second life' would not be an inappropriate metaphor for conversion, maybe? And 'flip-flop' is already an established idiom for something which is not at all conversion – somebody who appears to be able to hold two opposing positions at the same time! It comes from an electronic circuit capable of assuming either of two stable states.

We need to be a little careful here not to create in our minds an artificial opposition between two discourses, as if technology and faith could have nothing to do with one another. In logic that is called 'begging the question', where the proposition to be proved is already assumed at the beginning! That said, we would admit that the technical is immediately attractive, while the religious, based as it is so often on the grass-like growth of the kingdom of God, requires a little depth and patience to be observed. We may also need to be careful not to think that it is a matter to two discourses cohabiting. As one commentator on a draft of this text told me, it is more a case of strong contamination - itself a strong word but he meant it positively - between the two since religion should never be separated from life and vice versa.

The challenge is to formulate a discourse that assists a Christian formation of good, true and faithful lives in the light of the rising ascendancy of techno-science as the formative cultural factor. Do I mean a counter discourse? Not really, because I do not intend to set up any presumed opposition between the two but rather am I seeking ways to hold them together. So I mean that telling the story with our Christian vocabulary and grammar may enable other quests for the good and true, and this is especially so for the young people whom we educate. Ronald Cole-Turner is not a theologian but a bio-ethicist. Bio-ethicists tend to be on the front line these days when it comes to thinking about the relationship between technology and faith, so he puts the question rather starkly:

-> Can theology—that communal process by which the Church’s faith seeks to understand—can theology aim at understanding technology? Can we put the words God and technology together in any kind of meaningful sentence? Can theology guess what God is doing in today’s technology? Or by our silence do we leave it utterly godless? Can we have a theology of technology that comprehends, gives meaning to, dares to influence the direction and set limits to this explosion of new powers? (Ronald Cole-Turner, 'Science, Technology and Mission' in The Local Church in a Global era: Reflections for a New Century, eds. Max L. Stackhouse, Tim Dearborn, and Scott Paeth, Grand Rapids, Win B. Eerdmans, 2000, pp 100-112)

I am not sure that theology can guess what God is doing in today's technology; in fact I am not sure that this is theology's task! Telling the story with a certain vocabulary and grammar is theology's task, and listening to others tell their stories is also part of the task. Trying to guess what God is doing anywhere and at anytime is not a good pastime for anyone, theologians included. But faith seeking understanding is – as study and as a pastime. In fact, it might be a good pastime to introduce today's young technologists to. Let me explain.

Young minds are certainly fascinated by the technological. I am not a programmer, and am probably well beyond the age where I could take programming too seriously, but I am not beyond being fascinated by some aspects of programming, once I have begun to understand it. I know from long experience that I am fascinated by language, so programming seen from that perspective is an extension of that fascination. So at the very least I can look at some lines of code and let myself be interrogated by them, sometimes in ways that have nothing to do with what the code is all about. The kids probably come at that in a less roundabout way, but at least I can feel comfortable talking to them about it, and learning from them. But can one do a little more than learn from them?

The electronic environment is an environment. Don Bosco paid great attention to the environment or the setting that young people were in, creating such environments for them where at all possible. We can certainly give some thought to making the electronic environment a spiritual one. One thing is really quite clear – the normal net environment is not only dismissive of religion and theology (try looking up both terms in Raymond's New Hacker's Dictionary) but at times decidedly inimical to it. I think one of Cole-Turner's questions above is pertinent here: “..by our silence do we leave it utterly godless?”. It's less a matter of organising a frontal attack on godlessness in cyberspace than marshalling efforts to speak up in positive ways about God, faith, spirituality in that environment.

We have already noted, with the Game of Life, that what looks to be randomly chaotic is rarely if ever so. Technology does not believe in chaos, and always looks for some sort of algorithm to explain what is happening. It is a good entry point to explain that faith, too, does not believe in chaos. Faith too likes its rhythms, its patterns manifested in life and even its spiritual techniques. After all, rosary beads are a technology and praying the rosary is a faith rhythm, pattern and technique. We can be imaginative in adopting and encouraging this sort of thing in the digital environment. Let me give just two examples at a practical level. If you were to visit Don Bosco's Oratory in Turin, Northern Italy, you will still find, 120 years later, reminders of a helpful religious kind placed around many of the walls. (An 'oratory' was originally just a place of prayer, but Bosco turned it into his 'home, parish, school, and playground' – and the last named was often the introduction to the others!). Reminders of this kind can easily be replicated in a dozen ways on a computer screen, with little 'note' widgets or similar.

Then there is the question of certain rhythms of faith. A good example, now somewhat lost in many more secularised settings, is The Angelus, a reflection on the mystery of the Incarnation, announced, in the words of the prayer itself, by the Angel Gabriel ('The Angel of the Lord declared to Mary....') but in long Catholic tradition by the ringing of bells at 6 in the morning, midday and six in the evening. One could, of course, set up a digital alarm to sound at those times! But instead I use something quite different. It is a tiny 'add on' (still experimental) for the Firefox browser, and happens to be a Tibetan chime, called a 'consciousness bell'. It sounds randomly. That's fine – it serves the intention of the user, and my intention is to use that chime to remind me to pause for a moment of prayer and reflection. In fact it does a little more than this. It's not that the monks invented clocks, but it is certainly known that they developed the idea of marking the hours (they used a one hand clock only) for prayer and work by the clock. Eventually the machine 'escaped' monastery life and became the regulator of all things secular and capitalist like regulated production and regular working hours.... and so on and so forth. I like the little Tibetan bell. It reminds me of that kind of history on the one hand, of non-clock cultures on the other – including heaven!

Technology – the missing link

(:nl:)