Does the Internet Have a Theology? A Review of Spadaro’s /Cybertheology/

Third, and this is a topic appropriate for the Tuesday after Trinity Sunday, Spadaro explores the logic of sharing on the internet. There is a much closer theological analogue here: The persons of the Trinity are best defined through their free gracious relations (paternity, filiation, spiration and procession), so much so, that there have been some advances in French theological phenomenology toward rethinking God as gift. Obviously, Sparadro is aware that not everything on the internet is free, nor are the free things entirely free. Even freeware frequently comes with options that can be only unlocked after making a payment. However, even here the internet might open up avenues to thinking about the subsequent costs of what was initially a freely given discipleship. Perhaps, and here I speculate, there are also avenues here for throwing some interesting kinks into studies in the theology of money.

Finally, Cybertheology closes with an exploration of the attempts to think through the implications of shared knowledge on the internet. It revolves around the question of what kind of a gift of this collective knowledge will become. Will it take a depersonalizing shape along the lines pioneered by Pierre Levy’s borrowings of Neoplatonic Islamic theology, or a more personalist direction following Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s speculations about the noosphere (a synonym for collective intelligence) and its orientation toward Christ, the concrete-universal goal of the cosmos?

These and other important implications of the new technologies are discussed in Cybertheology in much greater detail than a short review like this can pull off. If you are reading this post, then you already implicitly (and some of you explicitly) acknowledge the importance of such a theological project.

In short, you too should be thinking Christianity in the age of the internet and Cybertheology is an invaluable and even-handed starting point and guide for your explorations.

The answer to the title question?

Not yet, but we’re downloading the information and processing the data in whatever might be the philosophico-theological equivalent of spreadsheets.

Check back on these pages within the next couple of months. I am in the process of conducting an interview with Fr. Spadaro about his book. It might take a while given his busy schedule. This is yet another example of how theology ambivalently brings us together and keeps us apart.

In related news: Windows 8 was apparently so bad that the people at Microsoft felt such a need to put some distance between themselves and their product that they skipped ahead to Windows 10.

==================================================

Here’s McLuhan’s (a highly traditional Catholic, by the way) hilarious cameo in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall.

Speaking of the cost of discipleship and the internet:

Please remember to donate through the PayPal button on the upper right hand corner of this blog’s homepage. Blogging is not a lucrative enterprise despite all of its indubitable glamor and accolades.

Our family has a car to fix, rent to pay, and I’m still looking for something other than freelance work.