Quick Summaries (November 2022)

Quick Summaries are pithy paragraph-long reviews

of releases that cross our desk.

These are reviews for when you don't have all day

to decide whether a resource is worth
your time, money, storage space, or trouble.

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Song, Felicia Wu. Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age.  Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2021. 232 Pages. Paper. $24.00. https://www.ivpress.com/restless-devices

Our review is below in the bold paragraph. Consider first this publicity blurb from IVP.

We're being formed by our devices. Today's digital technologies are designed to captivate our attention and encroach on our boundaries, shaping how we relate to time and space, to ourselves and others, even to God. Our natural longing for relationship makes us vulnerable to the "industrializing" effects of social media. While we enjoy the benefits of digital tech, many of us feel troubled with its power and exhausted by its demands for permanent connectivity. Yet even as we grow disenchanted, attempting to resist the digital "powers that be" might seem like a losing battle.

Sociologist Felicia Wu Song has spent years considering the personal and collective dynamics of digital ecosystems. She combines psychological, neurological, and sociological insights with theological reflection to explore two major questions:

What kind of people are we becoming with personal technologies in hand?

And who do we really want to be?

Song unpacks the soft tyranny of the digital age, including the values embedded in our apps and the economic systems that drive our habits. She then explores pathways of meaningful resistance that can be found in Christian tradition—especially counter-narratives about human worth, embodiment, relationality, and time—and offers practical experiments for individual and communal change.

In our current digital ecologies, small behavioral shifts are not enough to give us freedom. We need a sober and motivating vision of our prospects to help us imagine what kind of life we hope to live—and how we can get there.

About the Author

Felicia Wu Song (PhD, University of Virginia) is a cultural sociologist of media and digital technologies, currently serving as professor of sociology at Westmont College in Santa Barbara. Her publications include Virtual Communities: Bowling Alone, Online Together and articles in such scholarly journals as Gender & Society and Information, Communication & Society.

Watch her lecture "Digital Life as Secular Liturgy" from the Center for Pastor Theologians.

Watch her interview with Aaron Shamp on how digital media devices influence us and our communities.

(Publisher's Website)

/+ Restless Devices left me with a positive impression of a largely helpful resource that could have been a pithy paragraph that could have gotten the same point across: put down your devices, connect with people in real life, limit your time on social media, and actually go to Church instead of viewing from home. The author's book-long treatment may be exactly the medicine some readers need in order to get the main point: We're being formed by our devices. Shouldn't Christians be formed by the Word instead? Turn to 20ff, 111ff, 140ff, 205ff for her best arguments and recommendations. Her Christian tradition is different from my conservative confessional Lutheran one, so anticipate her communicating her experience, theology, practice, and tradition. This book is worth a look if you run across a copy, but not one you'll need to keep forever. If you do read it and also appreciate it, pass it on to someone as an encouragement to leave the death scrolling habits of staring at our devices, devices making us restless.

Note:

Unsolicited titles will be considered for review
based on the time our volunteer reviewers have available,
how interested we believe our readers would be
in the unsolicited resource,
and how closely related the item is
to preaching, Christian worship, and Church music.

We exercise this policy today on the following titles:

Kruschel, Steve. Foreword by Michael Berg. Graciously Keep Me This Night. Irvine: 1517 Publishing: 2022. 176 Pages. Paper. $18.95. https://shop.1517.org/products/graciously-keep-me-this-night-devotions-from-scriptures-darkest-hours

Camacho, Haroldo S. Foreword by Donavon Riley. All Charges Dropped! (Volume 1) Devotional Narratives from Earthly Courtrooms to the Throne of Grace. Irvine: 1517 Publishing: 2022. 225 Pages. Paper. $19.95. https://shop.1517.org/products/all-charges-dropped-devotional-narratives-from-earthly-courtrooms-to-the-throne-of-grace-volume-1

Jones, Kyle G. and Kathryn Morales. Foreword by Chad Bird. The Sinner/Saint Devotional: Advent & Christmas: Devotions for Advent and Christmas, Focused on Jesus' Work for You. Irvine: 1517 Publishing: 2022. 126 Pages. Paper. $16.95. https://shop.1517.org/products/the-sinner-saint-devotional-advent-and-christmas