In an aticle entitled Religious Self-Profiling ChristianityToday.com reports that “Christian” is still the most frequent religious label on Facebook, many people choose not to use it. I am quoted on the second page, and I wanted to give some additional commentary on what I said there.
When someone asks me what I do for a living, my answer depends on what I know about the person.
For most people I just say, “web programmer.” But if someone doesn’t seem terribly computer savvy I attempt to simplify saying, “I make websites.” On the other hand, if I know someone does computer work of some kind I get more specific and say I love to work with JavaScript on the front end, but I do a lot of backend programming in C# and some PHP, Ruby, other languages.
In other words, how I answer depends on the person asking and the context in which he or she asks.
Online vs. Offline Identity
When it comes to religious identification things get a little trickier, and many people have attempted to explain the move away from “Christian” to terms like “Christ follower.” That is an interesting discussion (recently I made hippypastornamegenerator.com to poke fun at our pomo resistance to traditional terms like “Christian” and “pastor”), but what I’m interested in here is how online profiles as a technology has influenced and shaped that larger issue of identity.
Let’s contrast how the technology of a website profile differs from a face-to-face interaction.

Last November, Christianity Today asked me to write a short piece that answered the question, “Which new technologies hold the most promise—and the most peril—for use in church ministries?”
Instead of discussing a particular technology (as Brad Abare and Mark Keller helpfully did), I said:
I believe that the technology that has the most promise in the church is not the latest thing that comes off the assembly line. Rather, it is the technology—any technology—that church leaders openly discuss with other leaders and with their congregations. Conversely, the technology that is most perilous for a church is the one that leaders immediately adopt without thinking through and addressing how it will subtly reshape our spiritual lives.
I went on to give the example of how a seemingly unimportant technology like online giving is worth thinking through spiritually:
For years my wife and I would spend the final minutes before leaving for church frantically searching for our checkbook. So when our church announced that we could set up automatic draft payments, we jumped at the chance to streamline our life and give more consistently.
After a little while, though, we noticed that our new plan was changing our giving in ways we hadn’t expected. Every week, when the person next to me passed the offering plate, I started to wish secretly that I had an “I give online” token so that he or she would know we were faithfully paying customers. A few months later, when our pastor gave a sermon on the joy of giving, I started wondering if we were missing out on the intimacy with God that can come through repetitive acts of devotion. Instead of worshiping through sacrifice, I seemed to be sacrificing the chance to worship for a little convenience.
A reader named Adam posted a few videos from Wheaton College of Professor Read Schuchardt’s chapel presentation in which he addresses several issues with our media and electronically saturated culture (see his notes for additional quotes from the lectures) . For some background, Dr. Schuchardt is a well known in the Media Ecology Society and is a keen observer of electronic culture, though he himself chooses not to have a TV at home for he and his five kids. Below are two short videos that some great one-liners and observations of media culture.
Highlights:
Highlights:
I found these via Adam’s blog The Second Eclectic, so please go check out his site. It’s full of great observations and comments on media culture.
In: Quotes

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/15097772@N08/3469571036/
Thanks to all you readers for making these posts popular! If you have a favorite posts that wasn’t here or something you’d love to see covered here, please let me know in the comments.
Happy New Year!
Technology, like “art,” is not a terribly easy word to define. It turns out that some philosophers have already done a decent job of parceling out categories, and I think they are helpful enough to list them out here. These definitions come from Stephen J. Kline’s 1985 article “What is Technology” found in the Bulletin of Science, Technology, & Society.
1. Technology as Hardware – this is the basic level that most of us mean when we use the word “technology.” As a piece of hardware (or an “artifact” for the anthropologist or “cultural good” for the sociologist), “technology” could be a clock, a shovel, a laptop, a belt, a thermometer, a can of root beer, a canteen, a tank, or a fake duck decoy. These are basically things do not occur “naturally” – which, for theists, are things God himself did not make. [As commenter Eric pointed out, this is a very broad definition which overlaps with things we would normally call art. I would also point out that this definition encompasses things that animals might make like bees' hives and beavers' dams.]
2. Technology as Manufacturing – taking a step back from the devices in our pockets and on our desks (and the desk itself) are the things that are used to make all these other things. Technology as manufacturing includes not just about the vat holding the molten steel for our next car or the robot putting together our next computer, but also the entire process (or “sociotechnical system,” as the philosophers say) from the people running the machines to the electrical grid powering the plant to the legislation passed that regulates the industry. This conception of technology was largely non-existent before the Industrial Revolution.
In: Books and Texts
I love books. I love them so much that I even created a site (www.bestcommentaries.com) to help people find good resources for Biblical studies. A cool part of that site is that affiliate links bring in some gift certificate money from www.wtsbooks.com. To celebrate God’s gift of his one and only Son to us all, I’d like to use some of that gift certificate money to say “Merry Christmas” and “Thanks for stopping by.” So if you’re in need of a book, here’s what to do:
I think I have enough to get 2-3 books, so comment and vote away. Oh and tell your friends.
Update: And the winners are:
I'm John Dyer a web developer working on sites like Best Commentaries, Bible Web App, Dallas Seminary. I'm also a seminary graduate and teacher at Irving Bible Church.
This blog is about the the role of technology in the redemptive movement from the Garden to the City. I believe technology is an amazing testament to the creativity embedded in the imago dei, but instead of assuming technology is always a neutral tool, I believe it - like culture in general - profoundly influences us.