Sojourning with Heart

A summary of:
Schultze, Q. J. (2002). Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age. Baker Academic: Grand Rapids, MI, USA.
Chapter 8 - Sojourning with Heart

This is a pretty cheesey chapter to conclude the book, full of cliches about technology and cyber-life. I won't do a full summary, but just include some quotes that I did like:

• "Lost in the miasma of evaporating information, we cannot help but feel the lightness of digital being" (192).
• "Tom Wolfe overstates the case only moderately when he says that the Web 'does one thing. It speeds up the retrieval and dissemination of information, messages, and images, partly eliminating such chores as going outdoors to the mailbox to picking up the phone to get a hold of your stockbroker or some buddies to shoot the breeze with'" (194).
• "Virilio rightly contends that rationality and science in the modern world create a deus ex machina (a machine-god) that negates the transcendent God of revealed religion" (195).
• "...religious wisdom reminds us that we are always in the midst of creating a conditional future. It helps us to remember that we are responsible today for maintaining the traditions that will usher in a good tomorrow" (197).
• "At the heart of the Hebrew and Christian traditions is the mystery of friendship with God and neighbor" (201).
• "New beginnings too easily focus on ever changing identities and intimacies with no respect for intrinsic meaning or greater moral purpose. The information society constantly revises reality and updates experience so that the transformations themselves become our sole bearings" (205-6).
• "Running after change, we become techno-evangelists, surfing after the latest fads with no clear route or destination. Some people might call this freedom, but it is the freedom of the unatached and restless tourist, not the contemplatice freedom of the sojourner" (206).
• "Havel describes this tourism: 'Yet though we live, find pleasure, think, suffer, meet, part, pass each other by in various ways, that fatal lack of focus or perspective makes everything around us and within us somehow unstable, disconnected, confused'" (207).
• "The sojourner repeadedly poses the 'primordial questions' in order to examine the direction he or she is going.... As the Hebrew prophet Micah puts it, the sojourner seeks to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God (Micah 6:8)" (207).