Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

“This accessible but penetrating book shows how our late-modern, secular culture provides liturgies: soul-shaping practices and narratives that train us to turn from God to the sovereign self, from God-created nature to self-created reality, from living for truth and love to living for power. If you can’t see them, you can’t resist them, and the author gives you resources to do both. Samuel James has written an essential book. He is one of the small but growing number of young thinkers to whom the church must listen if it is to learn how to be effective in evangelism and formation in a post-Christendom world.”

“This is such a wise and insightful book. Its power lies in the way it exposes truths not just about the digital world but about us: the things we want, the way we try to find them, how the internet weaponizes them in ways we may not have noticed, and what we can do about it. Penetrating without being frightening, and positive without being naïve, Digital Liturgies is the guide we need.”

“Digital Liturgies is a book that issues both a challenge and a call. Samuel James challenges our perspective by pulling back the curtain so we see that technology’s effects are not neutral, and our digital habits tilt us toward an online world that makes the wisdom of God seem like foolishness. But James also calls us to a better way, reorienting us toward greater understanding, wisdom, and the practices of resistance necessary for faithful and fruitful living. An accessible book full of profound insight.”

“Virtually everyone I know feels exhausted by or enslaved to some aspect of digital life. In this book, one of the sharpest Christian minds helps us discover what exactly we’re looking for in our screens. Digital Liturgies points a path beyond the outrage, anger, shame, and boredom that we accidentally download into our souls.”

“After the first few chapters, I decided my teenagers should read this book, and maybe their whole school as well. Such good sociological insights. A few chapters later I decided I wanted my church to read it. Such helpful spiritual and pastoral insights too. By the book’s end, however, I realized I needed this book. It applied the gospel to me and my online habits, and I need worthier ones. What that means, friend, is that I’m pretty sure you also need this book. It explains the digital water we’re all swimming in and how that digital water has reprogrammed us more than we realize.”

“Modern-day Christians are so trained to think about the what (content) that we don’t often enough consider the how (form). Digital Liturgies—wisely, clearly, and compellingly—helps us to consider the ways in which we are formed by the digital world in which we live. Samuel James not only introduces some of the most important thinkers on this most defining quality of our age, but he also offers his own fresh insights.”

“Secular man is trying to supplant the divine Creator with a false one—the almighty algorithm. As Samuel James argues, we utilize digital tools believing that through them, we can make the world into our own image. With careless passivity, digital tools end up conforming us into its Silicon Valley–engineered image—alienated, fragmented, compulsive, and angry. There is no evangelical thinker I am aware of who has thought as critically, cautiously, and self-critically about the toll of digital life on our spirituality, psychology, and embodiment as Samuel James. From one of the most talented writers of his generation of evangelical thinkers, Digital Liturgies is one of the smartest books I’ve read from one of evangelicalism’s brightest lights.”