Allan Appel photo
Professor Schmidt with Edward Dunar, head of Albertus's Eckhart Center.
Ever have a long email exchange end in a sudden stoppage? You send a heartfelt one and there is no answer. Nothing. Nada. An empty slot on the screen. Well, maybe that feeling of sudden absence after an enveloping “presence” of the Other might not be altogether unlike the way Adam and Eve felt when God cut off their account and expelled them from the Garden of Eden.
Thursday night an exploration of that push-pull of presence and absence was at the heart of a challenging lecture titled “Gold in the Furnace: Theology and the Digital Age.”
The scene was Albertus Magnus College’s Eckhart Center for Catholic and Dominican Life’s continuing series of talks on faith, life, and justice. The presenter was Katherine Schmidt, an associate professor of theology and religious studies at Molloy University.
That dynamic, a kind of pursuit of what’s absent, is also at the heart of many religions. That’s especially true in Catholicism with its sacramental imagination that sees so many material objects from rosaries and holy water or, in the Mass, the wafer and wine, for example, as both body and blood, but they’re of course also wine and wafer.
If the “virtual is seen as a continuum of presence and absence,” then Catholic theology should not be afraid of the virtual world of tech, from Facebook to artificial intelligence to augmented reality, but should embrace its possibilities, Schmidt said, but with cautions.
The “gospel according to Katherine,” Schmidt joked, involves not over-simplifying either theology or digital culture and avoiding simple responses to media like over-optimistic expectation or prophesies of doom-and-gloom.
So instead of thinking of media as tools to help or harm, and to get to the deeper matter of understanding God’s way, which is the business of theology, she suggested, “Let’s speak about media as spaces that people inhabit.”
That new space should not be feared, she said, with references to Genesis. That’s because as God creates and therefore humans, made in that image, are also creators, then, theologically speaking, “technology is humanity’s [continuing, after print media, radio, TV, and so forth] productive interaction with creation.”
There are however, unique theological problems with new media because unlike other sacramental or potentially sacramental spaces, “virtual space seems not to have a body, which is a challenge too in thinking about Jesus.”
To that end, however, she also pointed out that while the feeling of being online or in other virtual space is an airy, bodiless one, that isn’t the actual case as the new tech requires all kinds of metals, for example, including some precious ones that are even running out, in order to exist. “We shouldn’t lose sight of the physical reality, of metals, and it [virtual space] is therefore made out of creation.”
I asked if Schmidt had many colleagues studying this field and she said there are others, usually younger theologians, and she is also a founding member of the Global Network for Digital Theology, but that most of her colleagues in that group are Protestant.
“Because people perceive Catholicism as more rigid, slow moving, and traditional, they assume modern technology has nothing to do with the church’s activity,” she said, “but the church is always subject to the culture it’s in and contends with.”
While she wasn’t sure (as a non-theologically focused reporter pressed her) if the Pope had an iPhone, Schmidt said Pope Francis has been spotted using an iPad and that he has an active social media profile, mostly Instagram.
There has also been for a long time a serious department at the Vatican, the Dicastery for Communications.
“Most of the Pope’s social media is done by [high level] cabinet secretaries.”
Because Schmidt’s lecture was on plane of theology, she outlined but didn’t address (at least not yet) lots of lower hanging digital questions: Are people more sinful – racist, sexist, bullying — due to technology? Is so much screen time anthropologically affecting us humans and therefore how we go about thinking about God? Are Catholic kids’ liturgical and religious educations being short-changed by their spending too much time online?
And how far, for example, should church services online be conducted? At what of the many physical objects that a worshipper should contemplate or at what aspect of the church architecture should the camera be aimed? And how about this challenge: Because a mass requires water – this gets back to the sacramental imagination – would it be okay to have a communion using what she called “VR water?”
Teachers and moms Jenny Smith (l) and Michele Kendrioski were especially concerned with kids' excessive screen time.
There were, however some practical and more immediate suggestions offered: Digital literacy training should be part of seminary training; there should be some sort of pastoral guidelines, some kind of standardization for the conduct of online Masses.
“And parishes, at minimum, should have good websites, which is often not the case,” she concluded.
Schmidt cautioned that just because virtual space, as a tool, is a gift to evangelizing (as Billy Graham did with TV in the 20th century and Martin Luther with the printing press in the 16th century to spread the Reformation), there is much power and potential here. However, Schmidt also cautioned, “If we become the Church of the Metaverse, then we lose our ability to criticize it.”
By the same token, however, “Real-and-virtual is not a good dichotomy. It’s more like on a spectrum. An online [religious] community can be real. If it’s not real, then I cannot critique it, unless I acknowledge it.”
While digital spaces may be “extensions of creation,” what are the rules for you as an individual to conduct yourself there, according to the church?
That more down-to-earth ethical/digital issue is going to be addressed as the series continues on Dec. 4 when John Grosso, the digital editor of the National Catholic Reporter brings to the Eckhart Center a conversation on how to live out your values, that is, being your best self, online. Click here for more information.
