Show Notes
What happens when technology is not just something we use, but something that quietly catechizes us? For millions of people, our phones, algorithms, and digital tools are actively shaping our attention and reworking our labor.
Finding a way to flourish in a tech-driven world is one of the defining spiritual challenges of our time, and many of us are underprepared to address it.
In this episode of Nuance, host Case Thorp sits down with Dr. Jonathan Lett, Director of the Faith, Science, and Technology Initiative at LeTourneau University, to explore the foundational questions we must ask before we build the next big thing. Jonathan argues that before deciding what to do with tech, we must first understand what it means to be human. Drawing on theological anthropology and his deep study of limits, dependence, and embodied existence, he makes the case that true freedom isn’t found in overcoming our boundaries, but in embracing them.
From challenging the “Silicon Valley ideology” to understanding how technology offers shortcuts around our natural limits, Jonathan’s work helps us integrate ancient Christian wisdom into our modern digital lives.
📚 Episode Resources:
Faith, Science, and Technology Initiative at LeTourneau University: https://www.letu.edu/academics/faith-science-technology-initiative/index.html
Karl Barth as Theologian of Nature by Jonathan Lett: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0567728315
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C9N2L56X/
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Visit wecolabor.com for resources, events, and more.
Episode Transcript
Case Thorp
What happens when technology is not just something we use, but something that quietly catechizes us or forms us? Phones in our hands, algorithms shaping attention, tools mediating relationships, innovations reworking our labor. Well, technology accompanies us in so many places, waking and sleeping, work, worship, recreation, and rest.
So today, we’re going to explore the Faith in Science and Technology Initiative at LeTourneau University, a group of scholars with foundational questions we must ask before we build the next thing. So let me welcome you to Nuance, where we seek to be faithful in the public square. And as always, please like, share, leave a comment. It helps the algorithms pick us up and spread this good content even further. I’m Case Thorp, and glad to have you with us.
And I’m also glad to welcome Dr. Jonathan Lett. Jonathan, welcome.
Jonathan Lett
Thanks for having me, Case.
Case Thorp
Good to have you. I was in Longview a couple months back and got to know Jonathan’s community and his church, One Hope Presbyterian, which is an awesome place to be. I’d never been to Longview, Texas. You’re not originally from there.
Jonathan Lett
I’d never been here until I applied for the job, actually, or even heard of it. So I’m with you.
Case Thorp
Yeah. Well, and I learned too a lot about LeTourneau. Wouldn’t that be correct in saying that LeTourneau is sort of the MIT of Christian universities?
Jonathan Lett
Yeah, I mean we’re certainly aspirationally looking at that sort of thing. We are a polytechnic Christian university, whereas most Christian universities are liberal arts schools with a little STEM stuff going on. We’re basically the inverse of that.
Case Thorp
Yeah, that’s really cool. Has that long been an emphasis for LeTourneau or you’re, like you said, you’re moving into that more and more.
Jonathan Lett
Yeah, so you know most universities right now are trying not to become technical schools and are reduced to trade schools, and we started as a technical institute, as a trade school, and so then became a university. So we do have this saga, so to speak, of being a very technically oriented school. And so what’s newer for us is to add more and more theological and philosophical reflection and then keep that going. Spiritual formation has been central to this mission from the beginning.
Case Thorp
Well friends, Dr. Jonathan Lett is the director at LeTourneau University’s Faith, Science, and Technology Initiative and an associate pastor of theology. He attended Duke University for his masters and St. Andrews University in Scotland for a PhD in theology. Dude, I’m so jealous. I’m so jealous. One day, I don’t need it, but I’m just gonna, because I’m a nerd, I wanna do it. I’m going to St. Andrews.
Jonathan Lett
I’m jealous of my former self.
Case Thorp
Well, you know, my sister told me never get out of school. Never get out of school. Well, his work has appeared in Modern Theology, the Journal of Biblical Literature, the Blackwell companion to Karl Barth, and he has experience in both collegiate ministry and chaplaincy. Now, LeTourneau’s Faith Science and Technology Initiative exists to foster cross-disciplinary conversation about the most basic, most contested questions in the modern world. Questions that inform every academic discipline, such as what is a person? How do humans flourish? What does a flourishing society look like? So Jonathan, tell me, what is your research emphasis in these particular realms, but also in your overall career range?
Jonathan Lett
Well, I was just sharing this with a class that I’m teaching yesterday. Sort of my vocation, how I found myself thinking about technology and theology started when I was a master’s student at Duke and I have an amazing theology and medicine program and great bioethics there. And my wife is a nurse. And so she worked at Duke Hospital. I worked at Duke as a student and I…the short story of it is I took a class on Calvin, of all people, and we were studying his thought on suffering. And my professor, Alan Verheye, said, you’re not gonna be able to understand Calvin’s view of suffering unless we go back in time and try to recover some of these lost instincts, because we just have completely different expectations about suffering than they do. So he basically goes through the history of modern medicine. And I walk out of that classroom with my head spinning and the world’s flipped, right? Because I think I’m at the center of it all, right here, this beautiful Gothic chapel. And I realized, actually, my wife’s hospital, which you can’t quite see because there’s beautiful Gothic facades in front of it, that’s actually the center. That’s where everyone learns what life means, what death means, what suffering means, what a good life looks like.
And so I just realized, wow, I can’t just do theology in isolation of these really important shaping forces. So medicine and technology, you know, go hand in hand. And so that was really the beginning of it. I then studied a more traditional topic for my PhD. I studied Karl Barth and his doctrine of creation. And that’s, and I thought, well, that’s what I’m, that’s the main thing I’m doing, the technology or bioethics. That was, you know, just a phase. So I get this job at LeTourneau and, in a couple of years, I, from being here in a polytechnic setting, start to shift my research and with some, the aid of some fellowships and start to think about technology again. And so it comes full circle. And I think that my training by thinking about the nature and order of being a creature is, I can’t think of a better training to ask questions about technology because all these questions about technology, they presuppose answers to a prior question about what does it mean to be human. So before you can decide what we should do with tech or how we should make it, you’ve got to figure out what it means to be human. And so I’ve just finished a book on Barth’s view of nature, of created nature. So hopefully that will be out at the end of this year. And it is called Karl Barth as Theologian of Nature, Christ and the Order of Creation.
So most people don’t think that Barth has too much to say about the importance of created nature in order because he rejects natural theology. And so I argue, actually he has a lot to say. There’s just some misunderstandings about what he means.
Case Thorp
Yeah, he has a lot to say on everything. I’m curious, just as a side note, have you read or come across the work of Bruce McCormack in your Barth studies? So he was a great mentor of mine at Princeton Seminary. And he actually every year took a small group of students to do a small group Bible study with. I got to experience that one year and it was very formative.
Jonathan Lett
Yeah, that’s awesome.
Wow, yeah, I’ve heard amazing things about him personally. Obviously his academic reputation is well known.
Case Thorp
Yeah, yeah. So very interesting. Go ahead.
Jonathan Lett
So, yeah, then I was just gonna say, and so the trajectory has been to think about basic, really basic technology like roads and cars and medicine of course too, but that even helps us think about the more advanced technology that’s coming down the pike. And so now, and now I’m focusing on digital tech.
And yeah, so now I’m working on a book called Discipleship in a Digital Age, which is really trying to think through, first of all, what discipleship means. I think the answer to our kind of contemporary challenges and ethics mean we need deeper theological reflection, deeper attention to traditional themes in order to answer these new questions. The resources we have in the Christian faith are just amazing. And so to kind of think, this is a new thing, we sort of have to do something else is, I think, a lost cause. I think what we have to do is go back to the well of Christian teaching.
Case Thorp
Well, I appreciate hearing that first question that the initiative organizes itself around. What does it mean to be human? For our listeners, anthropology is the bigger word there and what’s your theological anthropology? Jonathan, I’ve found in a number of the very contemporary church debates that we have a very poor anthropology. And so then when it comes to abortion or the, I get this as a pastor a lot, what do I do with my fertilized eggs that are frozen? In our denomination, which you and I both share, we are maybe are aware, having a large conversation on same-sex attraction, not not homosexual activity, but where does same-sex attraction fall within those who are ordained as pastors, elders, or deacons?
And over all these conversations, I just hear an absence or a lack of agreement, unbeknownst to the speakers, about a good, solid theological anthropology. Do you see that going on? And hence the reason you picked that main question.
Jonathan Lett
Yeah, actually my original big doctoral question was going to be theological anthropology. And you know, when you start these things, they’re so big and then they get widowed down. And so just the first part of that was creation. And that was it. And I think that sometimes some of this confusion that you’re, well, maybe it’s a little bit surprising, is because some of us use the words, like image of God, or even the word creation. But we really don’t have much beneath the surface. The content that gives that definition tends to be fairly superficial. Or maybe even imported into some pre-existing ideas. Like freedom. I think we just love freedom so much that…
Case Thorp
Give us an example. As Americans, you mean?
Jonathan Lett
Probably Westerners, but especially Americans. And I’m in Texas, so even more here. And so then freedom just plays this outsized role. And it pulls everything else kind of in this gravitational pull out of socket, out of joint. And so some of these concepts that we use, I think, tend to be shallower or just a little, I mean, a little bit modernized in a way that isn’t helpful.
Case Thorp
That’s right. Because from a theological perspective, well, we are not free because of the brokenness of creation, as Paul discusses the impact of sin. And so I can see what you mean. We will import our political American sense of freedom into our Christian theology and not really see that.
Jonathan Lett
Yeah, yeah. One of the main ideas that I work with is with limits and dependence because I think we have an allergy to limits, constraints, boundaries. Certainly as a culture and Christians and myself included, you know, I swim in this water too. We do struggle with the idea of limits, boundaries.
And so we tend to think that limits, dependence, those are obstacles that we need to overcome to flourish. And the reality is that they’re actually the very path to freedom. Freedom being obedience to God, to give yourself and love to God and to neighbor. You’re not free unless you can do that. And so there’s this self-giving that is at the heart of being a creature, and it’s tied to our interdependence and our limits. So rather than seeing these things as problems to overcome, which is where tech comes in, technology offers us shortcuts or to bypass these limits, we actually really need to see them for what they are. They’re a way that God has formed us to cling to him, to grow in relationship with him and in others.
Case Thorp
Well, the iPhone certainly has pushed so many limits of human capacity. And I have to remind myself, you cannot absorb, you can only absorb a limited amount of content or be engaged in so many ways. And yet that we seem to fool ourselves to think we can do more and manage more with that little tool.
Jonathan Lett
Yeah, that’s absolutely right. I mean, that’s a really great subtle example. Some of the, you started with abortion or with IVF or reproductive, assistant reproductive technologies. Those are also questions about limits.
Case Thorp
Well, and I find myself thinking, so my wife had a stroke a few months back and thanks be to God, she’s doing very, very well and recovered well. But it was amazing to me that they could do a thrombectomy, which is going up through the leg with the lead through her main arteries all the way to the left mid cerebral artery, grabbing that little clot, spraying some solution so the capillaries open and pulling it all the way out.
Okay. Amazing. And then I know people that die of heart attacks and certain cancers. And I fool myself to think, we can do anything in medicine. And we can’t, even though there have been great innovations and there will be more, but there are limits to this creative world. Now your second question that the Institute seeks to answer is how do human beings flourish?
Jonathan Lett
Yeah.
Case Thorp
So the first, what does it mean to be a human? And now how do human beings flourish? Talk to us about that.
Jonathan Lett
Yeah, well based on how you answered that first question, it’s gonna set you up to answer the second. So I think that human beings are made in the image of God. And part of what the image means is that we’re actually embodied and dependent creatures. And it is through that embodied dependence that we give ourselves to others and image who God is as the one who gives Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in love to one another and then who gives his Son to us in Jesus Christ. That’s the basis for creation. That’s the basis for being human. And humans mirror that in God through their embodied dependence. We’re sort of, it’s got by God’s grace, we’re in a sense, forced to look outside of ourselves. We have to depend on the earth. We have to depend on other human beings, on animals, and that isn’t a bad thing. That’s actually the way that God moves us outside of ourselves and into deeper life with himself and his creation. And so for flourishing, we need to keep those things in mind because we want to create lives that are ordered or oriented towards giving ourselves to God, to neighbor, to creation. And when we do that, we flourish. We find life abundant. And you can tell that right up front, this picture of flourishing has a kind of suffering baked right into it. Rather, you know, and that’s one of the challenges of thinking about a good flourishing life. How does suffering fit into that? Well, there’s different kinds of suffering and suffering, you know, for learning to play the piano. My kids are practicing their scales. That’s a different kind of suffering or practicing dribbling and soccer or basketball or hard work for a dissertation.
Case Thorp
Yeah, writing a book on theology.
Jonathan Lett
Like, yeah, writing a book, all that hard work, all that giving of yourself, there’s a kind of suffering there and it makes sense. It has a purpose and a point and it’s rewarding. And so the suffering that really undoes us is the kind that appears pointless or thwarts what we think our purposes are, which would include life, living in a basic sense. And so that’s what I would say we’ve got to start for a picture of what flourishing looks like with those embodied limits.
Case Thorp
And you don’t mean flourishing as, plenty of money in the bank and I’ve got my B & W and I don’t have ailments and such. You don’t mean that per se.
Jonathan Lett
No, I don’t. Yeah, not material success, but more like the Lord blessing the work of our hands. And that I don’t mean just literally, know, gardening or whatever we’re doing with our hands, but just the tasks that we’re called to, the work that we’re called to in the work of parenting, of friendship, of being a neighbor, of our vocations that we find in art, various jobs. All of those things are blessed when the Lord is with us and when what we’re doing shares and participates in His love for the world.
Case Thorp
So good. You said something that just caught my attention, but it’s escaping me now. This is it. When you use the term embodied existence, that’s a fancy term. So explain embodied existence.
Jonathan Lett
Yeah. Sometimes we think that bodies are just sort of a coincidence about human existence rather than central to being human. And so I’m really trying to emphasize that when we think of the image of God, we shouldn’t think it’s this thing that you can imagine complete, separate from the body. Human beings, however you want to think about this really hard problem of body and the soul, you know, they’re embodied souls and in-souled bodies there’s a distinction but you can’t separate these so that the fact that we’ve been given a body is central to human identity, human purpose, and the way, like the very means by which we receive and share in God’s love and receive and give and share in love with other human beings and in the world. You know, so there’s I think a lot of kind of scientific research that’s been coming out about attention or focus or learning, education. And one of the interesting ideas is embodied cognition. So cognition is how we know. And some of these conversations are coming up in terms of AI. Like can AI do what we do? Is it really intelligent even?
Case Thorp
Can it know itself?
Jonathan Lett
Can it have human intuitions? Can it have the same intuitions that human beings can? And one of the main reasons, or perhaps even the primary reason, that some philosophers are arguing the answer is no, is because we’re embodied. And there are very subtle ways that being embodied helps us intuit, helps us perceive, helps us make judgments. You know, when I teach a class, I tell my students the studies that have been done about how much you can retain reading a book versus reading something on a screen. So like a physical book, like touch, yeah, like there’s something tactile.
Case Thorp
I love them. I prefer them.
Yes, they’re my friends. They live with me. Look at all the books behind me behind you. I don’t know if there any listeners who do this, but I don’t get the whole Kindle thing.
Jonathan Lett
Yeah. I could see why if you didn’t care about what you were reading. But if I need a relationship with what I’m reading and I need to mark it up, I need to touch it, and that’s not just sort of, I mean it’s kind of me and my eccentricities, but it’s also being human. So it’s the same thing in a classroom. The fact that there’s an embodied person there and the way they move, even their humor, where they stand in the classroom. Yeah, I mean all that stuff is, it really does make a difference. So it just points to this idea that being embodied matters and it’s essential to being human. And I mean that’s what the resurrection really affirms.
Case Thorp
I don’t like online learning.
Jonathan Lett
I mean, the debates in 1st Corinthians that Paul seems to be addressing are all about what kind of body do we have in the resurrection. The key thing is the redemption of our bodies, Romans 8. And then the question is, well, what’s that body going to be like? Rather than thinking about the architecture of heaven, the issue is, what’s that body going to be like? That’s actually kind of hard to believe.
Explain to me how that works. So again, we have the incarnation, we have the resurrection. These things show that it’s just not an accident that human beings were created this way. I think it shows us that God always intended human beings to know Him through embodied life.
Case Thorp
Thank you. Right. And for that reason, we emphasize spiritual formation through so many elements of The Collaborative. This is not just an intellectual endeavor to pour more ideas in one’s head, but that we are practicing the ways of being with God the Church has historically enjoyed. Now, Augustine, fourth, fifth century theologian, was big in what you’re discussing. I think it was sort of a reaction to his time is in the Manichee religion where they thought light and soul and purity getting rid of the ugly dangers of the body was so important. Talk about how Barth approached this and was he in line with Augustine or had critiques?
Jonathan Lett
Yeah, it’s a good question. You know, what’s similar is they’re both speaking directly into their context.
Case Thorp
And for everybody to know, Karl Barth was a 20th century theologian and from Switzerland, he really and encountered Nazis and a lot of the issues of the mid-20th century.
Jonathan Lett
Yeah, and so one of the interesting things when he spends a lot of time talking about the human person is that he really doesn’t think, first of all, that you can say anything that matters ultimately unless you understand the way that human beings are made in the image of Jesus Christ.
So Jesus Christ is the template for humans rather than thinking, there’s this human and then Jesus sort of matches that. So there’s a really, it’s complicated and controversial, but the idea here is that the incarnation is not God’s plan B. It’s not God’s backup plan or safety net. God always intended to dwell with human beings in bodily form. And I think there’s really good reason to see that biblically. But when Barth thinks about how to understand the human being, his context is an incredible…with a burgeoning field of psychology and science. And so, yeah.
Case Thorp
Sure. He overlapped a bit with Freud. Do we know if they ever met?
Jonathan Lett
I don’t know if they did.
Yeah, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s father, from what I understand, sort of corresponded or debated Freud, because he was the leading psychiatrist in Germany for a while in Berlin. So, yeah, so Barth is engaging psychiatry and psychology and science, and he calls these things kind of like epiphenomena.
So they’re sort of like the things on the surface.
Case Thorp
The things on the surface, explain that.
Jonathan Lett
So something, it’s not like the main thing, it’s on the surface of it. So the, you know, it’s above what’s going on underneath. So if you think of like little bubbles in the surf in the ocean or something like that, like the bubbles are the result of what’s underneath, right? The tide, the rocks, the current, all of that stuff. And so he’s saying, look, when we talk about human beings psychologically, biologically these things stem from their core identity and that they are made for God and for others and that they are body and soul in a given time and place. And so he really thinks, he really, I used his phrase earlier actually, thinks that human beings are in souled bodies and embodied souls, and he thinks if I can say it this way, know, embodied souls, and then flip it and say, in-souled bodies, then even though I’m saying body and soul are distinct, I’m not ever thinking of one in isolation of the other. And so that’s just his way of really trying to hold these together. And it’s totally good.
I mean, some of the, so like Augustine, I mean, Augustine really is fairly radical in how good he thinks human beings are. Because of course he thinks desire, you know, is distorted. But his underlying point is our desire for romance or you know, he’s talking about his own life his desire for sex his desire to belong his ambition all of that stuff comes from a fundamentally good desire to be known and to know to love and to be loved and so He you know, it’s like man the problem is not desire. The problem is that you don’t love the right thing in the right way. It’s not that you have too much desire. It’s that you have the wrong kind of desire in the wrong kind of way and for the wrong sorts of things. And so the solution is not don’t feel, don’t desire, but rather reorder, reorient, inflame the desire for the things that actually satisfy. I think Barth is going to be less, he’s not going to focus on desire in the same way, but he thinks that human beings are just made for joy.
And one of my favorite, one of the more surprising things is that he thinks that human beings sort of can’t help it, but enjoy fellowship with one another. So he sort of thinks, all right, think about how sinful people are. Think of horrible human beings, just totally depraved. They still enjoy fellowship, friendship, some kind of, and so he’s saying, look how good we’re made. Even the most wicked of us can’t quite get rid of this fact that we were made for fellowship with God and with other people. So, yes, I think that both of them are very subtle, very sophisticated, very nuanced in how they affirm the radical goodness and embodied nature of being human. And at the same time acknowledge how insidious sin is and distorting that.
Case Thorp
Sure. Okay, this is fantastic. The initiative at LeTourneau first asked, what does it mean to be human? We’ve covered how do human beings flourish? And then this third and final emphasis, what does a flourishing society look like? So Jonathan, what does a flourishing society look like?
Jonathan Lett
Yeah, I’ll just say I don’t know. Right off the bat.
Case Thorp
You mean it’s not when the Republicans or the Democrats are in charge?
Jonathan Lett
I just think about a lot of toothpaste is out of the tube already in our world and it can’t go back in. I do have some ideas, so I do have some ideas for sure, but the question itself that I think we need to ask is, it comes from this recognition, which again strikes, think, at the heart of particularly American sensibility, especially a Texan one, which is each person needs to decide for themselves how they want to live their life.
We just, that’s sort of the founding ethos in America in a sense. Each person has the right for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So as long as you pursue your goal of happiness however you define it, and I pursue my goal of happiness however I define it, we’re good. So long as we don’t get in each other’s ways. Now, what is painfully obvious right now is that we used to have more shared values, a shared sense of what that happiness and good life look like. And now we don’t. It’s completely up for grabs. And we have incredibly differing views of that. And we’ve always had issues. Abortion, you brought up, is a key issue. You just can’t sort of not legislate something about that. Or slavery.
Case Thorp
Well, and slavery. The suffrage movement.
Jonathan Lett
Yeah, there’s all sorts of things, like public education, maybe healthcare, something…But we’ve made different decisions about healthcare versus about education in terms of if it’s, in what way is it a public good, right? So we fund education in a way that we don’t fund or regulate healthcare, even though healthcare is very regulated and very funded federally in a way. So that’s just to say that we have these common goods and that one of the traps with technology, and there’s actually a documented ideology, like a worldview that’s called the Silicon Valley ideology. And that is basically, I’m just making this piece of technology and you can use it however you want or don’t use it but I’m not really like forcing it on anyone.
Case Thorp
Or responsible for its shortcoming.
Jonathan Lett
Or yes, exactly. And so that is a huge question right now, responsibility. So, you know, hey, I just made Facebook. Facebook has been probably the textbook example because of its important role, but also because of its court battles. You know, Facebook, you can use it any way you want. It’s not forcing anyone to use it, but the reality is Facebook has been kind of like a road. It’s the infrastructure for news. It’s replaced news. It’s transformed media. It’s transformed how we know what we know.
Case Thorp
Sure, I know, I have found, I’ll go on X, Twitter, and the little magnifying glass for search and hit news. And it will help me figure out what’s the most important thing or not important, what’s the most talked about thing. And I will use that as sort of a guide then to filter my reading of Wall Street Journal, New York Times, you know, other media outlets.
And I also have found, especially when an event happens, inauguration or even a tragedy, you get much faster information on Twitter. Now there’s lies and made up stuff, but on the whole, it’s interesting.
Jonathan Lett
Yeah, for sure. And so, you know, the point here is we just can’t sort of say there don’t have to be any public decisions about these things. We can just leave it to individuals to do what they want. That’s just not how technology works.
Case Thorp
And trust corporations or human greed behind those companies.
Jonathan Lett
Yeah, right. The business models do not match their stated goals.
Case Thorp
How I wish I could have been a fly on the wall in that first meeting of Facebook’s staff when somebody posted something that was just even shocking to them and they looked at each other like, what do do? I am a big fan of Simone Weil as a theologian, she was a 20th century French existentialist in many ways for those that may not have heard of Simone. And she was in exile in England during World War II and working with the exiled French government there. And they asked her to draw up a draft constitution such that when the Nazis were kicked out, they could come in and establish government again. This is what Charles de Gaulle and his cronies…well, she wrote, maybe you know this, and constitution not based on freedoms and liberties, but based on responsibilities. The obligations we have towards one another as humans. And of course they laughed and never made it very far, but I just keep that in mind as a, my goodness, you know, what a different approach. And now we see some of our Silicon Valley corporations trying to catch up on, have they been called to the mat on your responsibilities?
Jonathan Lett
That’s amazing. Yeah. So I think we have to make decisions right now about, I mean, here’s one that really has gotten a lot of traction, is with phones in school, screens in children. And a lot of this is from Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and his institute that he’s founded. And they’ve just shown more than correlation, even causation about this, well, okay, so we’re embodied human beings, right? So we’re also developmental. That’s part of being embodied, is that we develop. And so for me to use a screen is not the same thing for my three-year-old to use a screen. And that just like it’s not the same thing for me to have alcohol, that’s very different for someone who’s 10, 12, 16, 18 possibly, depending on development, because we know the frontal cortex isn’t finished. So we have to make decisions. And we are right now saying, you know what? We do not want schools to allow phones. We want to try to create a screen-free childhood as possible. And so that’s a perfect example of how we have to decide what kind of society we need and what are those necessary conditions to get us to flourishing.
So if we, well I mean, so mental health is something that gets universal agreement on, like that matters and we could rally around that. And so it’s just so clear that screens for children and teens are harming mental health, that we have an epidemic on our hands. And so we’ve gotta change our society in our use of screens. Just like we have with DDT, the chemical for killing bugs and when we harvest crops. You know, serious, serious birth defects, major poison in our ecosystem. And so we just can’t let anyone use any poison they want. We can’t just let screens go unchecked. We’ve got to decide what kind of society we want to be. And so that’s what that third question gets at. We’ve got to make decisions about public good, what we want to, and really what we have to preserve at this point.
Case Thorp
Yeah, yeah. Well, you’re just speaking our language because my interest in how we exercise our faith in the public square is so very important and a question that must be asked. I would encourage everybody to go to the LeTourneau Initiative for Faith, Science, and Technology’s website because Jonathan, y’all have got a great feature documentary on there.
And you interview students and I’ll tell you when one of the students said this, my ministry is coding. I mean, my heart melted. Like my ministry is coding. And I thought, what a great way to help illustrate that we’re all called into ministry in different forms. It’s not just me wearing a Geneva gown on Sundays. And, that’s a byproduct of y’all’s great work.
Jonathan Lett
Yeah, I mean, just to kind of make that point in a different way, I think, I mean, I tell my students, I’m not going to be the one designing or coding. That’s you. What I can do is try to give you a way to see the world that tracks with reality and try to give you a sense of what human nature is, what it’s like, what its purpose is, and how God intended it to flourish. And you have an incredible opportunity to design tech, to make applications that fit with that.
It’s not gonna be me, you know, it’s gonna be you. And so I think that’s why I think it’s so important to have a university like ours and to think about these questions. We can’t just say, this is what like pastors and theologians and humanities type of people do. Like we need theologically astute engineers.
Case Thorp
Preach, preach. Well, this podcast came about when I was so sorely disappointed with some of the reactions I saw during the pandemic. And it dawned on me, we have such a poor public theology, or at least one that’s not shared. And so I thought, all right, I want to do something about that.
That’s where, you know, there’s nuance to these things and it’s not so black and white as folks might think. But yet there is truth and an objective truth that scripture and our faith can guide us in. Jonathan, this is awesome. Thank you so much. Really appreciate this. I want to encourage folks to go learn more about the LeTourneau Faith Science Technology Initiative. We’ll have a link in our show notes. You can go to letu.edu, letu.edu, or even Google LeTourneau’s Faith, Science, Technology Initiative. Jonathan, is there a place to get more on your particular work?
Jonathan Lett
You know, I have a Substack in the works, but it’s not there yet. So, honestly, the best way is to, I have a faculty webpage and you can find me that way.
Case Thorp
Yes, yes. We’ll put a link to that. Good. Well, friends, next week, Jonathan’s going to be with me again and a bit of a very different topic, but one that’s been very, very much on the radar in this past year. We’re going to focus on the seventeen-hundredth anniversary of the Council of Nicaea from which we in the church get our Nicene Creed. So Jonathan is a smart fella and he’s going to jump from iPhones to 1700 years of doctrine, right?
Jonathan Lett
Yeah, whiplash.
Case Thorp
Well, friends, thank you for inviting us into your day. If this conversation has clarified or helped your particular thinking and faith, please share it with a friend, a parent, a brother or sister who might equally benefit. You can leave a review wherever you find this. It really helps us. Go to wecolabor.com, our website, wecolabor.com. Drop us your email and I’ll send you Zeitgeist, our latest journal of articles on faith, work, and culture. Many thanks to the Stein Foundation for supporting today’s episode. I’m Case Thorp, and God’s blessings on you.
