About nine months ago, I wrote about abstraction being on my mind and my thinking about how games abstract human life in potentially problematic ways. Abstraction is still on my mind, not least because I’m continuing to read Jacques Ellul, whom I referenced in that post (among so many others). In particular, I think a lot about Ellul’s argument that efficiency and efficacy are the ultimate value in the technical society, and that everything essentially gets ground down to that. I also think a lot about how “efficiency” so often comes down to “less money for others, more money for me,” turning complex policy and other decisions into a single, self-interested abstraction.

There’s an interesting, even Ellulian, moral to this story about falling in love with the means and not thinking about the ends, but I think the story surrounding that moral could have been better done.

I began my sudden but immediately sustained interest in Jacques Ellul about a year ago now, and I’ve found his work to be terribly influential on my personal thinking and my professional work. I’m currently working on a manuscript that makes the argument that Ellulian thought is useful for drawing our attention in certain ways when considering artificial intelligence in education. I see theory as serving an analytical and rhetorical purpose for the way that it makes suggestions that a certain phenomenon works in certain ways and invites us to consider whether or how that is true.

Can’t even start a lazy Saturday archive binge of a decades-old webcomic without coming back to Jacques Ellul, concerns about quantification and metrics, etc.

J’avais déjà lu la traduction anglaise en 2025, mais depuis que j’ai reçu un exemplaire du livre original, j’éprouvais le désir de le relire. Vers la fin, je trouve que je ne comprend pas tout à fait ce qu’Ellul essaie de dire (c’est peut-être une question de compétence linguistique, mais je crois avoir éprouvé le même sentiment en lisant en traduction aussi), mais il y a des idées bien fortes dans ce livre aussi. En fait, il est fort intéressant de relire ce livre après avoir lu quelques-uns de ses autres livres pour voir combien de ses idées sont déjà présentes en 1948.

Yesterday, I got another opportunity to preach for the Beyond the Walls online Community of Christ congregation based in Toronto, Ontario. I enjoy contributing to their services when I can, and I was glad that the winter storm here in Kentucky (and so many other places) spared our power and internet so that I could show up as planned. I got to work Jacques Ellul into my sermon (perhaps unsurprising, given how often I reference him these days), though I did oversimplify his thinking a bit and would appreciate the opportunity to dive a bit deeper into what he had to say at some point.

Big Ellulian “image vs. word” vibes here.

« Chéri, t’as pas déjà assez de livres de ce type Ellul ? T’as vraiment besoin d’en acheter un autre ? »

« Ah, mais tu vois, chérie, celui-ci, c’est un livre SUR Ellul, c’est pas lui qui a écrit ! »

En fin mars 2025, craignant l’arrivée des taxes douanières, j’ai commandé un exemplaire d’un livre de Jacques Ellul d’une maison d’édition à Genève. Quelques jours après ma commande, j’ai reçu un courriel avec le message suivant :

Je vous remercie pour votre commande passée sur notre site. Afin de vous éviter des taxes douanières, j’ai enregistré votre colis en “cadeau”.

En fin de compte, mon livre est arrivé avant l’annonce des taxes, et ce n’était donc pas nécessaire, mais je me souviendrai toujours de ce brave employé qui savait que je vivais sous une présidence de folie et de cruauté et a voulu m’en épargner un toute petite chose.

One of the most interesting recurring themes in Jacques Ellul’s writing is one that contrasts reality (or facts) with truth. As Ellul distinguishes them, facts are what are and—implicitly—what must be conformed to, whereas truth is what ought to be. Ellul’s The Humiliation of the Word explores this distinction at length, but it crops up in plenty of his other writing. In fact, I’m currently reading his Présence au monde moderne (or rereading it, depending on what one considers reading the original French after reading the English translation last year), and I’m delighted to see that he makes this distinction as early as this 1948 book.

I don’t agree with everything in the book, but it’s full of great observations that I would gladly tweak to draw slightly different, really powerful conclusions. The author’s “reader-centered theology of scripture” is great, and its meditations on the weakness of God also really spoke to me. This made Ether more interesting than I remembered it being, and I’m grateful for that.

Fascinating read! I’m not as interested as the author in his largely geopolitical thesis, but the raw materials he uses to construct that thesis are depressingly fascinating. They could also make up the elements of an Ellulian thesis on the dangers of power, efficiency, and technical systems. It’s harder to use Apple products after reading the book—and it’s a stark reminder of how the world we live in is so different than the world I’d like us to.

If one idea from Ellul has made the most impact on me, it’s his fierce criticism of attitudes of inevitability.

Ever since blogging twice about the Liahona and Jacques Ellul’s technique six months ago(!), I’ve been thinking a lot about this story in the Book of Mormon as a possible starting point for a Book of Mormon-based theology of technology. As I first wrote then, I think this story is particularly interesting for the implicit tension in the story: Why would an all-powerful God need a mechanical(?) device in order to communicate their divine will to their followers?

There’s a lot I like in this book: the call for urgency; its focus on bottom-up movements; echoes of Ellul, Graeber, and other authors I’ve appreciated. It feels like an example of the prophetic voice, and I hope to keep it in mind in the years to come.

I’m not an economist or an environmental expert, so I feel inadequate in my ability to thoroughly review it. I wish it were easier to translate those lofty ideals into daily action, though maybe part of the point is that there are no easy answers to this.

I know I’m currently inclined to see everything through an Ellulian lens, but I think one lesson of the first episode of Pluribus is that not all science needs to be done, and especially not just because it can be done.

Easy to dunk on Grokipedia, but this article gets at some ideas that I think are particularly important. If I had more time for blogging this semester, I’d write something up on Ellul’s image vs. word dichotomy and how it aligns with Koebler’s thoughts here.

Honestly trying to figure out whether the reason I see Ellul everywhere is because I’m excited about a new scholar I’ve discovered or because his ideas are so well suited for the current moment. “We can be a leader or we can be left behind” captures the opt-in determinism of Ellul’s technique so dang well.

Of course, how the heck am I going to keep expressing concern about AI (through an Ellulian lens or otherwise) if the university has already decided that we’re all getting on board?

Technology, efficiency, and growing public and private power—this has Ellul written all over it. Gift link.

Wild to teach data visualization so shortly after reading Jacques Ellul rail against it in his “Humiliation of the Word.” As is often the case, Ellul’s complaints feel overstated, but as I talk through specific things with students, I find myself channeling his concerns.

Strong Ellul vibes in this passage:

The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it. Society as a whole will have to treat videos with as much skepticism as people already do words.

Unclear, though, whether Ellul would be cool with increased skepticism of the image or angry at the technology causing it.

Un peu par hasard, j’ai fini récemment ma lecture de deux livres différents par Jacques Ellul : Théologie et technique ainsi que Humiliation of the Word (la traduction anglaise de La parole humiliée, car je vais devoir en écrire en anglais, et j’avoue en plus que mon français n’est pas toujours à la hauteur d’Ellul « en V.O. »). Ça fait plusieurs jours que j’ai envie d’écrire quelque chose sur la relation image-parole qu’il établit dans les pages de La parole humilié, et je compte toujours écrire ce post-là, mais en terminant Théologie et technique, j’ai été frappé par un passage qui ressemble beaucoup ce dont j’avais envie d’écrire dans l’autre livre.

Oh là là, comme il a beaucoup exigé ce livre ! Ça fait des mois que j’essaie de le lire, et les écrits d’Ellul ont souvent dépassé ma capacité de comprendre le français philosophique.

Je pardonne beaucoup à ce livre pour trois raisons. D’abord, c’est surtout un brouillon, n’ayant jamais été publié, et ce qui était surtout pénible aurait sans doute été corrigé lors d’une vraie édition du livre. Deuxièmement, il y a beaucoup de pépites d’or là-dedans, même s’il faut beaucoup creuser pour les atteindre. Enfin, malgré mes plaintes, j’aime beaucoup la façon dont ce livre joint les deux grands thèmes de l’écriture d’Ellul lors de son vivant.

Ellul can be hard to review, and especially in this book! The core metaphor here is interesting and useful—I plan to draw from it personally and professionally. It’s also combined, though, with wild assertions, exegesis and theology that don’t land (for me), and moral panic that might be intentional hyperbole or might just be off base.

So, there are some parts of this that are excellent and some parts that don’t really work. That makes it hard to evaluate as a whole!

I love it when different books I’m reading come together in interesting ways. That happened recently while rereading Joseph Spencer’s 1st Nephi: A Brief Theological Introduction and restarting (this, time, in English) Jacques Ellul’s The Humiliation of the Word. In this post, I want to take up a distinction that Spencer makes in his book, suggesting that:

Question’s about the Book of Mormon’s truth tend to be of two sorts. First, we want to know whether it all really happened. Second, we want to know whether it really shows us who God is.