What has Silicon Valley to do with Jerusalem? More than you might think, but that question, of course, is a riff on Tertullian’s famous query, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” It was a rhetorical question. By it, Tertullian implied that Christian theology, represented by Jerusalem, should steer clear of Greek philosophy, represented by
Alan Jacobs, currently at Baylor University, was a long-time professor of English at Wheaton College. As someone with a professional interest in words and language, it is not surprising that he has given careful attention to technologies of knowledge. In 2011, he published, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, a wise and
There are a handful of anecdotes or canonical passages that get repeatedly invoked by critics and pundits writing about technology. My guess would be that Socrates’ critique of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus is the most common of these frequently cited vignettes. Among other things, Socrates worried about the effects of writing on memory. Contemporary critics