At the end of April 2013, the Rev Rachel Mann, author of Dazzling Darkness: Gender, sexuality, illness and God, gave the 5th Annual St Anselm Lecture, on the topic of social media and faith, at St Anselm Hall, University of Manchester.
The complete transcript, entitled 'The Ghost In The Machine - Finding God and The Other In Social Media', is available through Rachel's website [link below]. The delivered text departed from the script in a number of places. It provides a good, thoughtful and stimulating entry-point for people of faith to social media culture; and for social media buffs to an honest, humane, pioneering Christian experience of religion.
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My hands are sweaty. My mouth is dry and I am unaccountably thirsty. I cannot quite concentrate and am restless. I pace up and down. My skin is itchy and one thought keeps going through my head –‘Just one hit, it can’t do any harm, then I’ll stop.’
Any of you who – like me – have ever had what some professionals call ‘substance-based issues’ will know the ghastly mental tyranny of comedown and cold turkey. However, much as I know the agitation of withdrawal, I’m not talking about the arsenal of illegal drugs or even nicotine. I’m talking about my recent Lenten fast from Twitter and Facebook. For there is no other way of putting it: as much as I can & do – through iron-willed discipline – give up social media for six weeks each year, I am utterly and shame-facedly addicted to the creation.
Well, like all addicts, I decided to try and make a virtue of my addiction. If the likes of Jimi Hendrix or Syd Barrett or even, heaven forfend, Eric Clapton could try to make sweet music off the back of their drugs, I thought, 'Let’s see if there’s any theology to be had in this. Let’s see where God is, if anywhere. Let’s see what people like me and you have become in this digital age. Let’s see where the church – that bewildering, irritating, sometimes outrageously unjust and unfair and yet magnificent thing – lies in this wild west of internet exploration.'
Continue to read the lecture here: http://therachelmannblogspot.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/the-ghost-in-machine...
* More from and about Rachel Mann on Ekklesia: http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/rachelmann
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© Rachel Mann is an Anglican parish priest and writer. She is Resident Poet at Manchester Cathedral and her work has been widely published in magazines, anthologies and newsprint. This piece is excerpted from her regular blog: http://therachelmannblogspot.blogspot.co.uk/ Rachel's acclaimed book, Dazzling Darkness: Gender, sexuality, illness and God (Wild Goose Publications, 2012) has been reviewed on Ekklesia here: http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/17836
Diaspora*
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