Canter Bridge

As it happens, just as I’m finishing Tony Reinke’s 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You, I am deep into two volumes on World War II history, a pair of explanations of Colombia’s unending cycles of political violence (I live in Colombia), and the occasionally disturbing adventure by the late Robert Pirsig so memorably titled Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Yet none of these volumes that dwell or touch upon topics as dark as world war, civil war, philosophical derangement, and mental illness keeps me up at night the way Reinke’s offering does.

Reinke could have written a jeremiad, could have shouted that our technology will kill us, that we and our mobiles are going to hell in a hand basket. He could have shouted ‘Run away!, Run away!’ from the rooftops. It would have made for easier reading.

Instead, the author of 12 Ways holds our feet firmly and just a little gently to the fire as he walks us through why life-giving deployment of our little hand-helds requires a kind of reflective and self-aware consideration of what we are about. Indeed, the use of our phones requires a kind of spiritual discipline that few (alas) will be prepared to exercise.

I wonder, uncomfortably, if I am among them, thus my erratic bouts of insomnia as I read 12 Ways once, then again.

Reinke has done us an immense service. He has dared to engage theologically with a habit as quotidian and omnipresent as checking our phones. He has seen what it can do to us, how dead it can slowly but relentlessly render us, how alone we can become among our thousands of ‘friends’.

He has named the dragons.

Yet Reinke is not a pessimist, somewhat to my surprise. He actually likes his technology, uses it virtually all the time, and thinks it can do us real good. 
But the risks are high and everywhere.

We need more theological reflection of this kind on everyday habits and matters and choices. We need to be kept awake by what our stuff can make of us.

Then, with Reinke, careful steps towards life-giving steps, community-enhancing steps, sane steps amid the mad stomping all around might just become possible.

Stay awake and read 12 Ways.