One of the great “be careful what you wish for” stories is The Monkey’s Paw in which a family receives a magic item that grants wishes but discovers to their horror that all the wishes are granted in terrible, horrible ways. I can’t remember when I last read the story (though I’m confident I have—maybe in high school?), but monkey paw has stuck in my brain as the metaphor for this idea that wishes can go terribly, terribly wrong, so you really ought to think them through.

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?

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.

Last week, I read a post from Andrew Heiss on Bluesky that inspired me to take a look at whether/where I was cited on any Wikipedia articles. I knew my research had been referenced on one particular page, but I’d never done a thorough search for this and decided to give it a whirl.

While I can’t claim anything as cool as the page on Hosni Mubarak (where Andrew’s research is cited), my research is referenced on three different Wikipedia articles, which feels pretty cool, actually. It seems like my newer Mormon Studies work is what is getting traction on Wikipedia, as opposed to my historical (and continuing) focus on educational technology research. This doesn’t totally surprise me; I’ve observed for a couple of years (or longer) that while my edtech research gets a whole lot more scholarly attention, my Mormon Studies work tends to get more media and popular interest. I attribute this to doing niche work on subjects where a smaller number of people show a greater amount of interest in what I’m studying.

A few months ago, I announced a new publication from Dan Krutka and me based on our study of a teacher’s group on far-right social media. I’m happy to share that Renee Hobbs’s Media Education Lab has taken interest in the research, and that Dan and I will be giving a webinar for them next month.

The webinar is called “When Teachers Talk Politics Online: The Dark Side of Online Spaces for Teacher Professional Learning” and will take place on October 6th at 4pm EST. It is free, but you need to register here to get the Zoom link.

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.

I’m a big fan of the 404 Media tech news outlet, and I also really enjoy their podcast. I especially appreciated an episode that I listened to yesterday, which I’m embedding below as a YouTube video (as an aside, I simply do not understand how YouTube has become a major podcast-listening medium, so it pains me a bit to do this, but I’m once again trying to write something quickly before getting to real work, and YouTube embeds are relatively easy to do in Hugo, so that’s what I’m going with.

I have ten minutes to rage-write this post before I join a meeting, so it may not be particularly nuanced—though I’d love to revisit these examples in the future. I recently got to listen to Cory Doctorow read the first hour or so of his forthcoming Enshittification, and I was struck by two things in the first couple of minutes. First, by the way that he tied enshittification to platforms, and by the way he loosely defined platforms as intermediaries. I think there’s something important in both of those.

A couple of years ago, I worked with a graduate student to examine the geographic and linguistic diversity in an online Community of Christ ministry that made an intentional effort to cross borders during the COVID-19 pandemic (and before and since, but for all of the obvious reasons, this was particularly pronounced during the pandemic). I was pleased with how the work went and was eager to get it to publication. I’m happy to announce that that’s finally happened, thanks to the Journal of Media and Religion.

For reasons I don’t have to get into here, summer is one of the hardest times of year in mental health terms, and over the course of the past few months, I’ve had my fair share of existential dread and feeling adrift. As I wrote last week, that meant that I was hesitant to start reading the comics series Ice Cream Man, because I was afraid that it would further fuel that dread.

I am very excited that Rosemary Avance is coming to one of the Mormon Social Science Association sessions at this year’s Society for the Scientific Study of Religion to speak on her book Mediated Mormons. I’ve just started the book in preparation for the session, and I was struck by the questions that make up the first two lines of the introduction:

What does it mean to be part of a religious community? Is it the same as claiming a religion?

Merci à Matoo, qui a vu combien j’écrivais sur Jacques Ellul sur ce site et qui m’a donc recommandé la petite série de cinq épisodes « Avoir raison… avec Jacques Ellul », qui est sorti il y a quelques semaines sur France Culture. J’ai écouté la première épisode ce matin en faisant de petites préparations pour mon premier jour d’enseignement pour cette année scolaire, et je le trouve déjà très utile.

J’ai déjà lu trois livres par Ellul et je suis en train de lire deux autres (bon, en théorie — j’avoue que ça va lentement). Ce week-end, je vais recevoir quelques nouveaux livres d’Ellul que mon beau-frère a acheté à la librairie new-yorkaise magnifique Albertine, qui est soutenue par l’ambassade française aux États-Unis. Mon beau-frère va à New York tous les étés et me cherchent toujours quelques bouquins francophones, et ça fait qu’en ce moment, j’aurai bientôt beaucoup plus à lire d’Ellul. C’est la première fois dans ma vie que je m’engage à ce niveau avec l’œuvre d’un seul écrivain académique, et je trouve qu’avoir des résumés comme celui de France Culture m’aide beaucoup à situer ce que je lis en un moment particulier dans l’ensemble de sa pensée.

In the beginning of the year, I wrote a post about noticing that hoopla had stopped allowing screenshots in its app, which is super dumb. While my chief regret in starting to read the surreal horror comic series Ice Cream Man on hoopla instead of with the physical TPBs available at my local library is because it’s a raw deal for the library, I remembered this morning another reason: That I couldn’t take pictures of panels that impressed me in the same way that I could with a TPB. This is dumb, and I regret the use I’ve been making of hoopla over the summer. I’ve also taken a break from writing this post to reserve the next several TPBs at a library, so I won’t be tempted to go back to hoopla when my borrows reset on September 1st.

I subscribe to the “Religion Watch” newsletter out of Baylor University but usually don’t do much more than skim it. The first entry in the June edition, though, immediately stood out to me for this excerpt:

Paul Seabright’s recent book, The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People (Princeton University Press, $35), is unique for its comprehensive treatment of the religious past and present as well as its novel use of the concept of “platforms” in explaining the economy of religion.

Thanks to the magic of Bluesky, I came across Paul Musgrave’s essay “Classroom Technology Was a Mistake,” with the subtitle “Hopes that AI will improve higher ed need to reckon with the dashed hopes of the past.” As a whole, I appreciate the essay—I’m sympathetic to Musgrave’s argument, and I couldn’t agree with the subtitle more if I tried. I want to do one of those things, though, where one academic spends too much time quibbling with a minor part of another academic’s argument. In particular, I want to take issue with this part of Musgrave’s essay:

This morning on Bluesky, I saw some posts about a class action lawsuit against Anthropic for their use of pirated, copyrighted materials in training their generative AI models. One of the sources of these copyrighted materials was the LibGen database, which I took a peek at nearly six months ago to confirm what I was already sure to be true: that my scientific writing was also collected as training material by companies like Anthropic or Meta. I don’t love that big tech companies are profiting off of my work in this way, and I’m sympathetic to the authors who are taking legal action against Anthropic. However, as I’ve written repeatedly over the past few years (you can find some of those thoughts—and others—by scrolling through here, I don’t know that copyright is the right way of responding to this kind of abuse.

A year ago today, I wrote a post describing the difficult time I’d had that year attending a local “Reunion” (family camp) put on by Community of Christ. That reminded me of a post I’ve been meaning to write for months about this year’s much more positive experience at Reunion, so it’s time to get those thoughts out of my head and into a post.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve read a fair amount of anarchist fiction, and I’ve found that I like it. A lot. I don’t know that I’m ready to become a committed anarchist in the real world, but I love the way that anarchist fiction does two things: first, it dares to imagine a better world than the one we live in; second, it believes that human beings are capable of collectively creating this better world—and without being forced to do. One of my favorite imaginings in this genre of fiction comes from Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, where Shevek (the main character, from the anarchist moon Anarres) explains to some colleagues that in his home, everyone pitches in to take care of undesirable tasks like cleaning up waste (I can’t remember if this is human waste or industrial waste or something else… I really need to get a copy of this book so I can reference it for posts like this).

Ce weekend, quelqu’un m’a recommandé une épisode de la série « La science et ses mauvaises consciences » , qui fait partie de l’émission Avec philosophie sur France Culture. J’ai décidé de télécharger toute la série, et en écoutant la première épisode, j’ai entendu une des interlocutrices se servir de la phrase « en présentiel », après quoi elle s’est excusée pour avoir prononcé un anglicisme.

Cela m’a gêné un peu, car ça faisait quelques jours que je travaillais sur une version de mon CV en français, une partie importante de mes efforts d’avoir un site web plus ou moins bilingue. Comme je suis professeur, l’enseignement fait évidemment partie de mon CV. Je fais beaucoup d’enseignement en ligne, et je m’étais donc servi de la phrase « en présentiel » pour distinguer les autres cours qui se déroulent dans des salles de classe. Est-ce que j’avais fait une faute ?

Yesterday, I blogged (en français) on Jacques Ellul’s emphasis on the need for a technology-responsive ethic that emphasizes (among other values) tension and conflict. Ellul explores this ethic—one of non-power—in a few different writings that feel like different drafts of the same thing, and so I’ve seen that emphasis come up a few times as I’ve tried reading his work. Every time, it surprises me a little bit. Why, in articulating an ethical framework, would you emphasize tension and conflict?

Ça fait plusieurs mois que je m’intéresse aux écrits de Jacques Ellul comme base théorique pour comprendre les techniques et technologies de nos jours. En fait, j’ai déjà écrit en février au sujet de l’intelligence artificielle générative et combien l’œuvre d’Ellul semble utile pour les critiques de l’IA malgré le fait qu’Ellul a vécu et écrit bien avant l’ère de l’IA comme nous la connaissons aujourd’hui.

Je suis en train de lire son livre posthume Théologie et technique (bien lentement, il faut l’avouer—j’avais commencé le livre en mai avant de devoir recommencer il y a quelques jours), et je trouve qu’il y a plusieurs passages qui me semblent utile lors des débats actuels au sujet de l’IA générative.

Just over a week ago, I preached for the Beyond the Walls online ministry up in Toronto. I wanted to post the text of my sermon (I’ll also link to the video recording just before that text begins). I was excited about this particular topic, since it fit nicely with some thinking I’ve been doing in recent years, includingwhile reading Cédric Lagandré’s book Dieu n’existe pas encore and writing up some subsequent thoughts. I imagine I’ll continue to think on these kinds of themes, but I was pleased with how much the burning bush story—and Jesus’s riffing off of it in the Gospel of John—contributed to my thinking at this particular time.

I have long felt that it was important to recognize that technological development does not improve human lives as much as social change does. Reading through Jacques Ellul’s Théologie et technique (Theology and Technique), I liked the way that this passage (on p. 35) seemed to capture that idea:

La technique a enfin permis à l’homme de changer les pierres en pain. Et il est bien content. Mais il ne comprend pas pourquoi il n’est pas encore dans le Paradis après ce miracle. Il n’a aucune idée du prix qu’il a déjà payé pour y arriver.

I don’t remember exactly when I signed up for the beta of Flipboard’s Surf “social web browser”—probably shortly after blogging about it here—but my invite came in, and I finally installed the beta yesterday to give it a look. This isn’t a proper review so much as a few off-the-cuff thoughts based on a few minutes of fiddling around but those thoughts are mixed.

When I first linkblogged about Surf, I said that I wanted to see more apps like this, and trying out the app only reinforces that impression. I think the design of the app is great, and I’m very interested in the way that it seems to work as a client for Mastodon and Bluesky, not just a feed reader that’s Mastodon and Bluesky compatible. The podcast interface looks promising, too, and I just love all of these efforts to break media out of platforms and combine them into single, innovative apps.

Abstraction—and especially the abstraction of humans and their lives—has been on my mind a lot lately. It comes up in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years (though I need to read the print version so that I can take better notes—I have fond memories of the audiobook but can’t recall the exact details of his argument). It also comes up a lot in Jacques Ellul’s writing, which I’ve been consuming a lot of lately.

When I was in grad school, a faculty member in my program told me a story about his then-quite-young son, who was having a grand old time climbing on top of the kitchen table and then leaping off of it to the floor below. (Truth be told, my memories of this conversation are fuzzy, and the son might have been engaged in some otherwise dangerous behavior.) The father tried to tell the son to stop doing this, warning: “You could have hurt yourself!” The son’s response? “But I didn’t!” Sure, the action had been potentially dangerous, but the landing had been a success, and the son didn’t see what the big deal was.