Twitter Has a Very Specific Effect on the Leader Class

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i would love your thoughts on what is the effect that twitter is having in the sort of church leader class, and, you know, what can we do about it? That's a really important question and a really significant phenomenon. You've got a bunch of people who need to to use this sort of a meam a, a very online meam touch grass like get out in the real world and experience a real world. And my general view is that it makes people within this church leader class much more contentious, much more sort of prickly, be paranoid and very sensitive to criticism.

This week David and Curtis are joined by Karen Swallow Prior, writer, thinker, and research professor of English and Christianity and culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Karen talks to us about the current state of affairs in social media, particularly Twitter, and compares its impact on culture and the church to another critical technology, the printing press. She discusses how these modern technologies are impacting our brains, and how we can push back against this through the simple act of reading, especially the (necessarily slow and contemplative) reading of literature.

Show Notes:

-National Endowment of the Arts - “Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America”

-Caleb Crain (The New Yorker) - “Why We Don’t Read, Revisited”

-Sign up for David’s French Press newsletter

-Follow Curtis’ work at RedeemingBabel.org