Building Bridges...

Nothing fancy here, friends. Just tossing the stuff in my head out into the blogosphere to see what may develop...

As you may have guessed from my previous post, I'm reading much these days about young adults, God, Church and technology. This is the kind of stuff that intrigues me, irritates me, rolls around in my head, comes gushing out of my mouth as non-sequiturs, and returns to my own ears newly conceived to go through the whole process again. Current reads? Hamlet's BlackBerry and Handing on the Faith in an Age of Disbelief. A modern philosophy meets Pope Benedict XVI. Awesome.

A true confession: (Is there such thing as an untrue confession? Doesn't that defeat the purpose?) Between the web-based work I do for my job (which, by the way, I'm super excited about) and the web-related thinking I do for my homework, I just. want. it. to. STOP. Seriously. (The irony, of course, is not lost on me that I'm professing my desire to break from the techno-world in the techno-sphere.) I seriously just want to paint something. I need a creative outlet that does not involve a screen. Interestingly enough, that's what Hamlet's Blackberry is about -- finding the "gap" between interfaces so we can accomplish something that is not do-able in 140 characters or less: Depth. And that sounds blissful... but maybe that's just because I have more than 140 characters worth of stuff to say. and ask. and think about. Does technology help me figure out who I am? You know, when I do things like this and type-out-loud? Or does it distract me and keep me from the quiet, alone place where I can explore the deeper questions of what it means to be human? To another level, how do I identify God in this noise and light?

Another thing bouncing in my brain: knowledge of the faith. For my purposes, I'm most concerned with Catholics, but really, studies have shown that people in the United States just have a poor understanding of religious traditions in general. In the biz, we talk about knowledge of the faith as one of the six tasks of catechesis, and it's through the other five tasks that knowledge of the faith is contextualized. SO, if people don't have an experience of God, or community, or relationship, how can we expect that they will know and understand the faith?

Being engaged in social media is all about presence, relationship and community. Prayer is about relationship, communication, presence. The mystical Body of Christ is about community and presence and relationship. All related. How are they connected? What's the bridge? How can we use technology to form a culture that understands what it means to be human, rather than have a culture chasing after the latest and greatest in technology? What do we need to disconnect from technology long enough to be in the quiet, alone place, so we can contemplate -- in depth! -- what it means to be human, created in the image and likeness of God? How can we see and hear Christ in the blinking and beeping of a 4G world?

Any one?

The views expressed in this blog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.