Book Review
By Richard Moeck
These days my wife and I don’t go to restaurants as much as we used to, but the visual aspects have not changed much in the last several years. As you gaze around waiting for your food you see a familiar sight. There is a family to your right, dad, mom and kids, not talking at all, but instead staring at their cell phones. A couple of, what appears to be, college kids…staring at their cell phones. Why must we check them out so often? Is it because smartphones are such great tools for human flourishing or because they are evil taskmasters that make us less human with each other?
This is what the book, 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You, by Tony Reinke addresses. He opens the book by offering us this challenge: Is your smartphone changing you? How can it otherwise when statistics tell us that we check out our smartphones every 4.3 minutes of our waking hours each day. Reinke, a God-centered theologian, asks questions of us. Does new technology always bring us back to perennial questions like – what it means to be a creature and not creator, beauty vs. efficiency or about loving God and neighbor? Do we ever think about our longing for approval? Is our love like that of Narcissus, in Greek mythology that fell in love with his own reflection. Perhaps today there are too many metrics to measure our own beauty (tweets, followers, subscribers, likes and so on).
Our hearts, souls, strength, and minds are diverted and distracted and we are multitasking everything. Our spiritual condition today is one of spiritual ADD.
Reinke says he surveyed 8000 Christians and when asked whether they were more likely to check email or social media before or after spiritual disciplines on a typical morning, 73 percent said before. Free porn access on a smartphone is a spiritual epidemic of unprecedented proportions even for the very young and even in the church.
I highly recommend this book. It will challenge you and encourage you – not only to use your smartphone for greater purpose, but also simply to use your entire life for the same.
Tony Reinke. 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017. (213 Pages)