The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society: How Christianity Can Save Modernity from Itself (The Christian Practice of Everyday Life)

The advance of modern technology is certainly ambiguous. It has promised less work and more leisure, but we actually work longer hours than premodern peasants and villagers. Present-day Western societies are facing a moral crisis, argues Murray Jardine, and our inability to make ethical sense of technology is at the root of this crisis. Jardine shows how Christianity fostered an ethic of progress that led to our technological expertise. However, Christians never fully grasped the implications of technological progress and failed to create an ethic that embraced unconditional grace. Jardine advocates a Christianity that fully understands technology, its responsibilities, and its possibilities.

Murray Jardine is associate professor of political science at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama.