A library that became an environment: embraced as infrastructure by every tradition’s teachers, and governed — by placement rules, communications ethics, or platform law — wherever its formation of persons is taken seriously.
Tagged: Communication and media Anabaptist Catholic
The network arrived as a library and settled as an environment. The traditions’ responses split by function: the same bodies that built digital scriptures, streaming liturgies, and global teaching networks also produced the era’s disciplines of refusal — Sabbath movements, phone fasts, and the Amish districts’ placement rules applied to a glowing pocket telephone with a consistency earlier technologies trained them for.
The Stance Register
Each stance is recorded with its rationale in the tradition's own terms and its sources. Where a tradition argues with itself, the register says so.
Anabaptist, Mennonite, and Amish Regulated
Smartphones are governed by placement and purpose in the stricter districts — business use at the shop or the shanty, no home internet in Old Order districts — while progressive Anabaptist bodies adopt the tools and argue about formation. The judgment is the Ordnung’s standard one: what the device does to attention, courtship, and the settlement’s boundary.
- Donald B. Kraybill et al., The Amish (2013)
Catholic Regulated
The Church built into the network early (the Vatican’s site, 1995; the first papal tweet, 2012) and regulates its own use by communications ethics — truthfulness, dignity, the refusal of outrage economics — restated for the platform era in the Dicastery for Communication’s Towards a Full Presence (2023).
- Dicastery for Communication, Towards a Full Presence (2023)
Secular and naturalist Contested within the tradition
Secular argument divides between the network as the enlightenment’s infrastructure and as an attention-extraction industry; the regulatory turn of the 2020s (platform liability, age gates, algorithmic transparency) is the argument becoming law, unfinished.
- EU Digital Services Act (2022)
See this register as a side-by-side comparison
References
- Heidi A. Campbell, When Religion Meets New Media (2010)
Related Across the Site
- Digital technology and community Flashpoint — Attention as the substance of community: streaming congregations and phone fasts, the industry’s own defectors making the ascetic argument, and the placement rules of the Amish applied to the pocket screen.
- Catholic Culture Library — An online library, dictionary, and document search representing more than 2,000 years of Catholic scholarship and teaching.
- Verbum Library — A Catholic digital library with interactive study tools and packaged collections of Scripture, the Fathers, and Catholic scholarship.
- Renaissance and Reformation Science Era — Print, recovered Greek texts, and confessional rivalry reshaped European knowledge: Copernicus the canon published a heliocentric cosmos, Vesalius remade anatomy, and Jesuit colleges became engines of mathematical science.
- Industrial agriculture Technology — The yield is not in dispute; the terms are: horsepower governed by scale among the Amish, waste forbidden by bal tashchit, the technocratic paradigm indicted by Laudato si’ — and the Green Revolution’s billions fed, recorded in the same ledger.
- The printing press Technology — The book made cheap: the Reformation’s engine, Rome’s regulated instrument, and — in Arabic script — a technology admitted by placement, its sacred texts reserved to the scribes for three centuries.
- Vaccination Technology — From Jenner’s parish campaigns to polio fatwas: mostly embraced, sometimes governed, and fought over in our century along lines that cross every tradition.
- The Catholic World View World View — Catholic Christianity confesses one triune God and receives his revelation through Scripture and Tradition, guarded by the Church Christ founded and its apostolic teaching office.