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Brad East, on the church’s uncritical adoption of technology in worship:

Long before COVID-19 but exacerbated by lockdown, many churches have been competing in a kind of techno-liturgical arms race to draw seekers, especially young families and professionals, to the “Sunday morning experience” of high-tech public worship.

For many seasoned evangelicals among the millennial and Zoomer generations, the result—state-of-the-art, high-definition, professional video and audio and music, with smooth transitions and fancy lighting, all frictionless and ready-made for the internet—is simply becoming the norm. It’s what church, or worship, means.

At best, the gospel retains the power to cut through all the noise. At worst, believers receive neither the Lord’s Word nor his body and blood. Instead, they get a cut-rate TED Talk, spiritual but not religious, sandwiched between long sessions of a soft rock concert.

If you think East is being alarmist and blowing this whole thing out of proportion, then I don’t think I know how to help you.

James K. A. Smith:

We are bundles of potentiality, but the possibilities are not infinite. We are thrown into a time and place, thrown into a story that is our history, and these form the horizons of possibility for us…. That is not a limitation as much as a focusing, a gifted specificity. This corner of earth I’ve been given to till. These neighbors I am called to love. These talents I’m exhorted to fan into flame. This neighborhood in which to birth a future.

James K. A. Smith:

What I aspire to is a factor of what I’ve inherited. What I imagine as a possible future—even what I can hear as a “calling”—is a reflection of what my past has made imaginable. Our now is always bequeathed to us.

James K. A. Smith:

A buried past is not dormant. Ignoring the past is not a way to escape it. Indeed, the buried past probably takes more than it gives.

Robert Bolton:

When listening does not encourage disclosures of feeling, we tend to miss the speaker’s personal reaction to the events she is describing—her joy, sorrow, frustration, anger, grief, ambivalence, and so on. Since, as William James put it, “Individuality is found in feeling,” we miss the uniqueness of the other person when we have a low level awareness of the other person’s emotions.

Robert Bolton (I almost took out the exclamation point at the end, but—alas—I’m not Bolton’s editor so I figured I should include it):

One of the primary tasks of a listener is to stay out of the other’s way so the listener can discover how the speaker views his situation. Unfortunately, the average “listener” interrupts and diverts the speaker by asking many questions or making many statements. Researchers tell us that it is not at all uncommon for “listeners” to lead and direct a conversation through the frequent use of questions. It is also common for the “listener” to talk so much that he monopolizes the conversation!