our views of text itself, including the central text of Christian communities.
30. Vincent Miller, “When Mediating Structures Change: The Magisterium, the Media, and the Culture Wars,” in When the Magisterium Intervenes: The Magisterium and Theologians in Today’s Church, ed. Richard Gaillardetz (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012), 157.
31. Miller, “When Mediating Structures Change.”
32. Ibid., 159.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 162.
35. Ibid.
36. Vincent Miller, “Media Constructions of Space, the Disciplining of Religious Traditions, and the Hidden Threat of the Post-Secular,” in At the Limits of the Secular: Reflections on Faith and Public Life, ed. William A. Barbieri, Jr. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 178–179.
37. Miller, “When Mediating Structures Intervene,” 164.
38. Ibid., 165.
39. Bennett, Aquinas on the Web? 47.
40. Ibid., 103.
41. Col. 1:16–17.
42. Bennett, Aquinas on the Web? 105.
43. As George Randels writes, “This technology may require the church to reinterpret itself and its sources, re-emphasize or de-emphasize parts of its tradition, or adopt new points of view, even as the church also influences the use of computer technology.”
44. Pippa Norris, Digital Divide? Civic Engagement, Information Poverty and the Internet in the Democratic Societies (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 4.
45. Norris, Digital Divide? 5. Theologians have begun to deal with the first two kinds of divide, but have been largely silent on the third.
46. Bennett, Aquinas on the Web? 18.
47. Ibid.
48. Craig Detweiler, iGods: How Technology Shapes Our Spiritual and Social Lives (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2013), 15.
49. Detweiler, iGods.
50. Ibid., 115.
51. Ibid.
52. Phillip M. Thompson, Returning to Reality: Thomas Merton’s Wisdom for a Technological World (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2012), xx.
53. Thompson, Returning to Reality, 36.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., 39.
56. Ibid., 46.
57. Access in this way also applies to the various unsavory aspects of the internet, such as pornography or erotic literature.
58. Bennett, Aquinas on the Web? 105.
59. Detweiler, iGods, 89.
60. Ibid., 92.
61. Thompson, Returning to Reality, 48.
62. Ibid., 50.
63. Detweiler, iGods, 219. But Detweiler parts ways with Thompson in offering as his final reflection the image of the city as a crucial aspect of the eschatological vision.
64. Andrew Root, “A Screen-Based World: Finding the Real in the Hyper-Real,” Word & World 32, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 241.
65. I will assume, for the purposes of reviewing this literature, that online interaction is “disembodied.” Later, I argue that the category is complicated, if not ultimately unhelpful.
66. “Our Digital Future,” Editorial, America (February 17, 2014), accessed online, http://americamagazine.org/issue/our-digital-future.
67. One of the most well-known authors on transhumanism is Ray Kurzweil, who proposed singularity as humankind’s telos in The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin Books, 2005).
68. Root, “A Screen-Based World,” 242.
69. Graham Ward, “Between Virtue and Virtuality,” Theology Today 59, no. 1 (2002): 58. I find the use of “face-to-face” to be more specific and more helpful than “disembodied,” though it too has problems.
70. Ibid., 59.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid., 61.
73. Ibid., 62.
74. Ibid., 64.
75. Ibid., 65. Here Ward is drawing on Sean Cubitt’s Digital Aesthetics (London: Sage Publications, 1998).
76. Ibid.
77. Bennett, Aquinas on the Web? 79.
78. Ibid., 49.
Ecclesial Perspectives on Media and Communications
The Magisterium of the Catholic Church is no stranger to the questions posed in the preceding chapter. The church has long had an interest with the modes and effects of human communication, as well as with the consequences of technology. In general, magisterial documents have taken a cautiously optimistic approach toward the progress of communications and media. According to Gaudium et Spes, part of “reading the signs of the times and interpreting them in the light of the gospel” is being honest about the obvious shortcomings and problems of modern life. The document balances its enthusiasm with statements like the following:
[T]he modern world shows itself at once powerful and weak, capable of the noblest deeds or the foulest; before it lies the path to freedom or to slavery, to progress or retreat, to brotherhood or hatred. Moreover, man is becoming aware that it is his responsibility to guide aright the forces which he has unleashed and which can enslave him or minister to him. That is why he is putting questions to himself.1
The guiding vision for the church’s official commentary on media and communications, then, is a realistic vision of both its possibilities and its pitfalls. What follows is a review of ecclesial perspectives on three interrelated questions: technology, media, and communications. The least amount of attention is given to technology in explicit terms in the ecclesial documents. The church has been more explicit about addressing the questions of media and communications, questions they have tended to consider together under the category of “social communications” following the Second Vatican Council.
The question of “where to begin” on these topics is especially difficult. In 1766, Pope Clement XIII promulgated the encyclical Christianae Reipublicae in which he dealt primarily with the dangers of anti-Christian publications. He wrote that the Holy See is required to see that “the unaccustomed and offensive licentiousness of books which has emerged from hiding to cause ruin and desolation does not become more destructive as
