The Internet as Prayer
Readers might have noticed that I have had some involvement with the podcast This Catholic Life, which is run out of the offices of the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney. The podcast is unique because of its focus on the life of Catholics in Australia. Ironically, that which makes it unique also makes it a bit of an outlier in podcast-land.
You might remember that I recently posted an interview I did (together with my great colleague Peter Holmes) with Prof. William Cavanaugh of DePaul University, on the borders between the sacred and the secular.
One of the odd joys of my involvement in This Catholic LIfe is that I find myself on both sides of the interview panel, as either an interviewer or interviewee. In my most recent romp with the podcast, I became the subject of an interview by Peter Holmes and Rian Galliot on one of my long standing research threads on theology and technology.
More specifically, I was interviewed on the theological significance of the internet, especially as the internet becomes more pervasive through the dissemination of more mobile platforms with which one can get online. Without giving too much away, I began the interview by drawing a parallel between the use of the internet on the one hand, and the dispositions necessary for prayer on the other. With calls for acts of prayer to take place on the internet in response to the coronavirus pandemic, an interview that looked at the internet itself as a form of prayer seemed rather prescient.
As a side note, the prompt for this discussion was an essay I wrote entitled “Sarah Coakley and the Prayers of the Digital Body of Christ”, which was published as a chapter of the book Sarah Coakley and the Future of Systematic Theology (Fortress, 2016).
The discussion then branched out more generally to the subject of Catholics and communications, and you can listen to the full episode here.
Nota Bene: While we are on the subject of podcasts, I have recently started following Clerically Speaking. If you would like content that is both theologically solid as well as light-hearted, do check them out.
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