Backing up to think about After Babel

To understand the rapid changes in 2024, it will help to know where Jonathan Haidt started

This time last year, I was trying to figure out what to publish during the final weeks in the 20-year run of GetReligion.org (click here for that archive).

However, my children had already laid down the law and told me that I was going to start a Substack called Rational Sheep, focusing on faith, family and the digital age. Thus, I started gathering ideas and material for what would become the overture for this project.

If you have never read that first post, here is how it opens:

The name of this Substack project is “Rational Sheep.” I am told that, in the original Greek, that’s “probaton logikon” — but that’s above this mass-media professor’s paygrade. In some Orthodox Christian rites this is translated as “reason-endowed sheep,” but that doesn’t work very well in a headline.

The key is that these sheep can communicate, with some degree of reason, and they are following their Shepherd. For the purposes of this project we will assume that they can read and use devices with digital screens.

But let’s jump in a time machine, flash back to 1990, and consider the academic adventure that is at the heart of Rational Sheep. I am referring to my leap from a mainstream newspaper to Denver Seminary, where I worked with the late Haddon Robinson on a project (it failed, in the end) to study the many ways that mass-media — think movies, television, music, news, etc. — shape the environment in which pastors, counselors, church-planters, youth ministers and others work.

From the start, I knew that the “Exegete the Culture” themes from classes in the Denver Seminary years, and later, would play a large part in this project.

Also, I had opened a digital file containing many of the essays — mostly at The Atlantic — that Jonathan Haidt was publishing about smartphones, anxiety and the social-media wave that was changing the lives of millions of children and young people around the world. However, I had no idea (I am by nature a bit of a pessimist about the human condition) that Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” would have such a major, positive impact on academic and legal discussions of this topic.

What about clergy and the leaders of religious institutions? We will see. However, a quick glance at this Google search will give you an idea how important the smartphones crisis has been to discussions here at Rational Sheep.

So, what is the “think piece” that we need to add to the mix this weekend?