Pastor Foltz is Pastor Emeritus of Saint James Lutheran Church in Gettysburg, PA and author of the the Frontline Study content.
A friend suggested Dan Brown’s latest novel, Origin, deals with science challenging religion much as our book does. When I took a look, it was obvious Edmund Kirsch, one of the main protagonists, is based on the futurist Ray Kurzweil whom we use as the epitome of technological expectation. Kirsch predicts the beginning of a new […]
Last week I described faith as trusting the God found in the common story proclaimed by the Christian community. I boiled down that Gospel to God’s promise to be active in history, rescuing the creation from self-destruction and especially, humanity from the suffering it inflicts on itself. My Monday evening discussion group accused me of […]
One way to read the Enlightenment Project is to see it placing decision making in the hands of individual persons rather than established authorities. Integral to this is investing power in knowledge tested against reality and experience instead of laws imposed by aristocracy and clergy. The scientific method, technological innovation, and democratic government now associated […]
One of the major challenges confronting the Church is how we should be proclaiming the Gospel in this new electronic age. Last week, I suggested the first big step to resolving this question is gathering believers in person-to-person conversations. To that end, I have gathered 5 symposiums that have met regularly for at least two […]
Scholars usually speak of 3 momentous stages of language: the spoken, written, and electronic word. Each has distinctive characteristics that most of us readily recognize. Each has consequences for religion as well as culture. In the age of the spoken word, persons communicated exclusively person to person. Because most of this was face to face, […]
Even the ancients understood the essential role language plays for humanity. Genesis 1 acknowledges a rather sophisticated grasp of this when it portrays God using speech to create all things. It appears to build on the realization that speaking is always an act of creation and defines this action as naming and creating order out […]
The online comments have represented the two primary responses I have been getting to the first chapters in the book. The first, voiced by Lupe, Paul, and Don, rather powerfully express how people have used God’s Word to oppress and massacre. The second, posted by Derek, readily agrees we are seeing the loss of caring […]
I always shudder when theologians predict we shall all be worshipping in online churches before long. I imagine they are trying to show that they are on the cutting edge of history. However, I doubt if they have given much thought to the limitations of electronic communities. When my son and I studied online churches […]
Last week, I described our life in a technological society that integrates tools and techniques in sophisticated all-pervasive systems. Although these systems have brought us tremendous benefits, they have also created an environment that pretty much demands compliance with their features. When making decisions in the past we had to consider the effect on other […]
One of the theses of our book is that modern science-based technology has created a society that offers a new kind of challenge to Christian thought and practice. In the past, we thought of technology primarily as using tools to overcome human limitations. Over the years, we added technique, an orderly, step- by- step way […]
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