Mitchell Landsberg, of the Los Angeles Times, reports on a recent Claremont School of Theology conference about how new technologies will affect the future of religion:
The premise of the conference had been laid out earlier in the evening by Philip Clayton, a professor at Claremont who talked about the role of Gutenberg’s printing press in the 15th century. By making the Bible more widely available, he said, it democratized religion and led directly to the Protestant Reformation.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Clayton said, “we are talking today about a transition equally as great.”
The article says less about the conference’s content than its form, and it sounds like there were some interesting characters present:
There are, of course, downsides to every revolution. When Jones asked the audience to shout or tweet any objections they might have to the use of social networks such as Facebook, someone yelled, “I don’t care what you had for breakfast!” And Roger Burns-Watson, who is starting a church outside Columbus, Ohio, said he wondered if there was any room for God in a 24/7 world of online interaction.
Can a still, small voice break through the digital clatter?
“God may not text you today,” Burns-Watson told the conference. “And are you going to be patient with a God who doesn’t move at a digital speed?”
Read more at the LA Times.