Communion via internet?

Our bishops have produced a brief service of Spiritual Communion When Unable to Attend a Celebration of the Eucharist which outlines a brief 'antecommunion' service culminating in an act of spiritual reception of Christ. This to avoid, it would seem, the pre-distribution of bread and wine to participants to be consecrated* by a duly ordained person present remotely by means of the internet. I would guess that this is because we collectively have not yet discussed this possibility in practical theological terms. And I recognise that my characterisation in the previous sentence already pre-loads some assumptions (so critiques might start there!)

 So what might be at stake in holding a communion service via an online meeting platform (Teams, Skype, Jitsi, Zoom, Big Blue Button etc)? It seems to me that there is one big difference that leads to consequential difference with a physically gathered community. The congregants are not together in one physical space: they cannot shake hands with one another at the peace, nor receive bread from one hand to another in that physical space, nor take hold of the cup of wine in that space that stood on the altar/table as the presider said the eucharistic prayer. In short there isn't a common loaf and a common cup.

The only way to make it work in real time is for each worshipper or household to bring to the event some bread and some wine of their own. But let's also note, near the outset of consideration, that the Church of England has traditionally not allowed communion to be celebrated by a priest alone**. That said, the definition of 'alone' is part of what is under consideration here. But I do note that if we don't count electronic attendance as 'presence', then a priest-presider cannot 'do communion' on their own even if they are 'witnessed' via media electronica.

The questions that, let's call it, 'remote presence Holy Communion' (RPHC) raise are as follows, I think.

• Do we need to have a common loaf and a common cup for it to be okay? (I'm avoiding the word 'valid' because that seems to me freighted with canon-law ramifications). 
• What is the value of physical presence that might make it decisive? 
• What indeed *is* human presence in such scenarios? 

 I wonder if concretising it might help to reflect upon these and any other issues. Imagine this: a duly ordained priest has before them on a clear table with a fair linen cloth on it (BCP allusion there!) a chalice of wine and a piece of bread. Perhaps they are in their home, perhaps a private chapel. Before them also is an electronic device using a conferencing platform so that people not in that room can see and hear and also vocally and visually participate in the proceedings. In rooms around the city are a dozen, say, people who are seeing and hearing the priest via their own electronic device connected to the same platform allowing them to be in a conference electronically with their priest. They have have the same order of service before them all. So the remote congregants pray with the priest silently and vocally, some of them read scriptures at appropriate moments, some of them lead the petitionary prayers at the appropriate time, they say the responses at the appropriate moments. They can hear each other and see each other. They greet each other with waves and nods and smiles at the peace. Are they at the same event?
 And then ... Well, what next?

Let's say the priest continues, prays the eucharistic prayer with the remote congregants joining in silently and aloud with the opening responses, sanctus and acclamations, Lord's prayer and words of humble access. The priest breaks the bread, consumes it and drinks the wine, in remembrance of Jesus. Has that priest taken communion? Now add to this scenario that each of the remote congregants has also before them a piece of bread and a glass of wine set on a fair linen cloth. Everything is as described in the previous paragraphs and also when it comes to the communion part, each remote congregant breaks the piece of bread before them and drinks the wine before them. Have they taken communion?

In the case of the priest alone consuming bread and wine in that scenario, the answer in BCP terms seems to be 'no' because there is no-one to communicate with the priest. If the remote congregants consume bread and wine also, then the answer is 'yes' if a meeting together really is a meeting together when electronically mediating otherwise remote congregants. It is 'no' if remote congregants do not add up to a meeting.

So at this point I notice that in another area of its life, the CofE has recently published something that may give us an answer to the question about what constitutes a meeting. This is to do with church council meetings check out the article linked to the next paragraph which summarises the article. So, are PCCs allowed to meet without meeting?

"PCCs should continue to meet, albeit remotely by Skype or Zoom or, where that is not possible, by a telephone conference call. Minutes can still be kept of such a “virtual meeting” and record as present all those members taking part."  So, for legal purposes a remote-participant meeting is okay. Can this 'okayness' transfer to a meeting for the purposes of Holy Communion? Well, clearly, the ability to act in community is possible since people can speak with and see one another. People's lives are affected by what goes on: minds are changed, emotions are roused or mollified, learning takes place, decisions with binding effect are taken in both kinds of meeting. In terms of the impact on people's hearts and minds clearly a meeting has taken place in both a remotely presenced PCC meeting and a service for worship together. It's not quite the same but the essentials as so far described are in place in both scenarios.

I asked previously whether the people in the scenario were at the same event. If they were watching a football match on a TV in a pub, I would say they were witnessing the same event but not 'at' the football match. However, I do think that the interactive nature of the scenario (they can see and hear each other and interact directly) means that they are doing more than witness an event (in this case a service), they are 'at' that event. They are participants in every meaningful way that I can think of.

The next question, then, is whether the addition to this scenario of bread and wine taken and shared in remembrance of Jesus depends crucially on non-remote presence in some way for it to be okay. Is there something essential added by the ability to physically touch other congregants? It's hard to say so when a number of congregations of the CofE have actually tried to avoid touching (in some congregations extreme social distancing has long been a norm) and yet still celebrated a Eucharist which is presumably okay. They have been remote in space. Though still housed within the same building -so is it being under one roof that is important, or in the same room? And if so, what would it be about that shared space that constitutes the okayness of the communion? If some congregants were in a different room, linked by a live electronic link and then some of the eucharistic bread and wine was taken to that other room for distribution, is that okay? (It's not far from what I've seen happen in some cathedrals when there's been a big service; there's been in effect two or three congregations sharing a common acoustic space -often electronically enhanced). I'm going to say 'yes' -even if not ideal.

Is there something essential added by having the same loaf and same cup of wine? -Given that many churches have already busted that by having wafers or more than one cup -even having individual cups ... well, let's say I don't think it 'breaks' communion; again even if it's not ideal. Is essentialness, then, in having the elements from the same altar/table? Maybe, but how far is that a convenience of administration? Ie if individual cups are pre-distributed, are they not consecrated? If a bunch of deacons held bread and wine as the president led the eucharistic prayer, would those pieces of bread and cups of wine be unconsecrated? I suspect no-one would seriously argue that.

I think you see where this is going by now. I'm struggling to find any essential thing missing from the RPHC scenario. It may not be ideal, but then a number of ways of doing communion often aren't. I don't think it's ideal to have wafers (far from it) but I don't think I don't have communion if the bread is a bunch of wafers.

The one last thing that occurs to me as something that might be essential and missing from the RPHC scenario is that the bread and the wine are the same bread and wine. In the RPHC scenario people might have different bread and wine: one has Sainsbury's white bread and a merlot, another has home-baked bread and homebrew and so on. And yet the fact that we can have wafers and individual cups seems to apply here too. And if we did think this was a deal-breaker, couldn't we arrange to pre-distribute to the virtual congregants -and wouldn't that be a grand way to symbolise the unity, fellowship and belonging to one another of that congregation? So, I can't really think of a substantial theological reason not to have RPHC. I'm left with only concerns about possible misuses. These would be things like whether people have suitable bread and wine, whether they can be trusted to be suitably reverent, to dispose of left-overs in a seemly fashion, not to open it up to mischief with irreverent persons making of with consecrated elements for no-good purposes, and so on. And there are practical ways forward for all of those things because they all exist in some form in the non remote way of doing things currently.
I have a final act of naughtiness to perpetrate on this reflection. Canon B40*** of the CofE canons says we're not normally supposed to celebrate Holy Communion anywhere but a duly consecrated building without permission from our bishop. The exception is that we may do so in the houses of people who are sick -such that they can't attend church. Clearly the situation of pandemic lockdown was not in view in drawing up that canon leading to the impediment of a priest from entering such a house for fear of infecting the household (or being themself infected). It does seem to me that allowing RPHC in such a case would be within the spirit of the canon.

 And as a bit of further reading: try this twitter search and find that lots of people are already not scrupled about this. (PS a more recent article in Church Times seems to coincide at points with this post)


 End notes 
 * I'm using the word 'consecrated' as shorthand for the processes of making sure that the bread and wine are the elements of communion when people take them in remembrance of Christ. You'll notice I'm trying to avoid being specific about which theological interpretation of it is foregrounded. I take it as unremarkable that God can do whatever God wants. So a further question could be -do we think God wants us to do this?
**I've not been able to find this in the CofE canons though the BCP says: And there shall be no Celebration of the Lord’s Supper, except there be a convenient number to communicate with the Priest, according to his discretion. And if there be not above twenty persons in the Parish of discretion to receive the Communion: yet there shall be no Communion, except four (or three at the least) communicate with the Priest. (Book of Common Prayer 1662, postscript to the communion service)
*** Canon B40: "No minister shall celebrate the Holy Communion elsewhere than in a consecrated building within his cure or other building licensed for the purpose, except he have permission so to do from the bishop of the diocese: Provided that at all times he may celebrate the Holy Communion as provided by Canon B 37 in any private house wherein there is any person sick, or dying, or so impotent that he cannot go to church"

The Green Good News | A review

What drew me in to reading this was that this description rang important bells for me as someone who since my teens in (winces) the 1970s when I joined what was then the Ecology Party and shortly afterwards, became a follower of Christ, The latter in part because my understanding of what was needed for a just and sustainable lifestyle implied, to my mind, also challenging and dealing with the inner life that drives or supports unsustainable living. We need people to become less materialistic in the sense of seeking after more consumer goods and more materialistic in the sense of valuing the material of the world that God has made and upholds, and co-operating with the systems of sustenance that God has caused to be: cycles of water, gases, bacteria, fungi and all the rest; networks of mutual living and dependence. For us to live otherwise is to sin against neighbour and so against God.

The description that got my attention was this:

The Green Good News |  The Green Good News finds a fresh take on the Gospels, painting a picture of Jesus as a humorous and subversive teacher, an organizer of alternative communities and food economies, as a healer of bodies and relationships, and as a prophet who sought to overturn an empire and restore a more just and joyful way of life.

I think this is a fair, accurate, summation of what the book does and the kind of perspective it generates in a willing reader.

One of the things I've been enjoying in reading this book is that it feels like it is developing with or out of a reading of the gospels which resonates strongly with Ched Myers' Binding the Strong Man (which is explicitly drawn on and referenced) or the historical background work on the gospels that we can see in Dominic Crossan's work. This is so nicely reworked with attention to the ecological implications and interweaving. Much of the book is, in effect, an extended meditation on the linkage between exploitative systems which impoverish many and their extractive effect also on the environment. This is a critique on the current models of doing business and distributing resources: they are unsustainable environmentally and murderous in their slow-burn effects on humans.

The long look at parables (and I like the phrase "the pedagogy of the parables" to capture the way that parables in general open up issues by implication and reading them against Empire context) and helping us to unpick them from being sewn to authoritarian and exploitative habits of interpretation, and that's really helpful because we have a lot of unpicking to do.

I also enjoyed the insight about gardening being referred to Jesus in the Garden (of Gethsemane). It made me think of the strand of interpretation of Genesis 2 which reminds us that the best understanding of where the Garden of Eden was supposed to be is north east Palestine -and Gethsemane would be part of that. Then there is the play with the figure of the risen Christ -mistaken by Mary for the gardener -except that it's not a mistake for he is, in a sense, the prototypical gardener, it's just that it's not the gardener she thought it was.

Quotes I liked

to dwell with Jesus as a branch of the vine will require the loss of certain parts of themselves — the loss of their illusions of independence, the loss of the promise and security offered by the Empire, the loss of their numbing agents, the loss of the rhythms of their past life. But as both the images of pruning and cleansing underline, this loss is an addition by subtraction. It is a loss that makes possible fruitfulness and that is made possible by self-giving love (p.59)

We are called not just to teach a man to fish rather than simply giving him a fish. Teaching him to fish will not feed him for life if the lake is polluted and his community is decimated (p.62)

By telling them that they will fish for men Jesus is not recruiting them into the shirt-and-tie, door-to-door business of saving souls. Rather he is taking a repeated image out of the prophetic tradition and telling them that they are going to overturn the whole imperial order. In Jeremiah the Lord, in disgust at the idolatry and iniquity of the elite of Israel says: “I am now sending many fishermen, says the LORD, and they shall catch them... For my eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from my presence, nor is their iniquity concealed from my sight” (Jer16:16–17) ... So to be made “fishers of men” is to be agents of justice who will fish out and remove the elite who have oppressed the poor and broken covenant with God. [p.67]

I enjoy the prayerful task of getting on my knees in the bulk food aisle and filling up our reusable containers with organic grains, beans, and flour. During the summers our small town holds a farmers market where we can purchase produce grown locally and regionally  [p.72]

Handing the hungry person a box of processed foods is a bit like the Roman Empire pretending they are feeding the fishermen by giving them back a small fraction of their catch in the form of fish sauce. These acts of charity that are taken to be the solution to the problem rely on the unsustainable food systems that are producing enormous ecological debt for future generations and are built on the backs of impoverished food workers [p.85]

What effect does it have on our understanding of the Creator, creation, and creatures, when we repeatedly hear stories that portray the divine as a vengeful slave owner, a profit-seeking businessman, a condescending rich man, a petty and murderous king, or a capriciously forgiving ruler?Alternatively, what vision of God and creation leads us to read a story of terrible violence and exploitation and assume that the perpetrator is ametaphor for the divine? And yet, this is how the parables are too often still read. [p.116]

By looking around, instead of up, we can come into different relationships of trust, solidarity, and love that help us find wholeness together [p134]

Link-Love for this Review

The Green Good News on Amazon
The Green Good News Website
T. Wilson Dickinson on Facebook 

#TheGreenGoodNews

Canary in a Coalmine? A missional meditation on university statistics.

I was looking at the religious-related statistics for my university and it seemed a significant milestone had been passed. For the first time, this year the number of those who ticked the ‘Christian’ box as they enrolled at the University fell below 30%. A bit of context will show the significance. Last year there were just over 30% registered as Christian. In 2012, when these figures were first collected, the figure was just over 36% (and the national universities figure was 43% in that year). Let’s remember that the census in 2011 showed 59% ticking the Christian box nationally -that figure includes a higher proportion of older people as well as a smaller percentage among younger people.

It shows quite starkly that there is a declining proportion of young people identifying as Christian. It alerts us to a significant cultural shift taking place.

Our response is crucial. It can be disheartening to see such figures but we need to recognise that and work through our grief.

Christendom is now largely gone and we haven’t yet properly begun to wrestle with what it means to be church in post-Christendom times. And the Church of England, pillar and bulwark of Establishment is perhaps in the worst position of all. So it’s little wonder that we’re struggling; no wonder we are showing, collectively, signs of being in the first stages of grief.

We are called through and beyond our grief to a profound re-orientation of mindset -and that’s something that an aging population are less likely to be good at! (And the Churches are older proportionally than the general population).

So let’s start by making room for lament: to recognise all the things we have valued that are now gone; to lay to rest our assumptions that were formed in Christendom and  let go of our nostalgia for it. It’s hard but unless we do this work of letting go, we cannot truly enter God’s future and we cannot connect with solid hope. Let’s allow ourselves to feel our shock, despair and sorrow at the passing of the things we have loved and hoped for or at least grown used to. Maybe we should do this as churches: liturgically mark the end of the era and commit ourselves to discovering our calling in the era that is beginning. Services of laying down and lament are called for. A season of lament is needed.

We might then ask what these figures could suggest to us. I suggest that perhaps one thing that is happening is that people are giving up the label ‘Christian’ as they recognise their own realities and experience less cultural gravity pulling them towards that label. Perhaps it’s mostly a cultural identification that is passing. Perhaps it is that people now see more clearly the gap between their life-commitments and following Christ. But perhaps too, there as just as many people who are responding the sanctuary of their own hearts to the first wooing of the Holy Spirit. It’s just that they don’t associate that with what the churches seem to offer?

Our approach to mission now requires a re-orientation like the one I see played out in a modern secular university. In Christendom, the church and the Christian story was part of the cultural centre of gravity in our society. This meant we didn’t even know the word ‘mission’ except as something that happened overseas. The church simply occupied a place where it naturally drew in people who developed an interest in spiritual things and there were well-worn occasions of interaction around life-events, seasonal happenings, parish groups and community use of buildings.

Now people who develop a spiritual interest are more likely to join a yoga class, go along to a meditation group or diy-construct their own customised spiritual path borrowing resources from the internet, books and occasional events. And in this cultural moment, the church does not seem especially attractive or credible. It sits alongside other offers in the marketplace of ideas and causes and may even be held in suspicion because of scandals and newsworthy groups like Westboro Baptists not to mention the newsworthiness of sociopathic Christian groups.

So we have to learn to reach out without the cultural heft and social power that characterised our previous 1000 (or more) years. And that’s hard: so much of what we do and how we think and how we imagine possibilities is wrapped up with an imagination created by that social and cultural power. Imagining and thinking differently is disturbing and difficult. To borrow insight from the sending of the 72 in the gospels, we are now called to learn how to be guests rather than hosts. To do that we will need to join ‘their’ things and discover God at work where we do not control the agenda… or the building… or the purse. And then we can work with them and find Church growing ‘out there’.

In Advent we recalled the ministry of John the Baptiser. He dressed in camel-skin and belt and so looked the part of a prophet calling people to God. We are called to look the part of a people in touch with God, so that when they develop an interest in the things of God (prompted by the Spirit -and they do and will) we will look like we can help them connect with the love, hope and power of God. What does that mean for our church life, our outreach and our discipleship?

A Wrath-less God Has Victims

[I]t’s actually the non-angry god who appears morally distasteful, for ‘a non-indignant God would be an accomplice in injustice, deception, and violence.’

Maybe, I can’t help but wonder, we prefer that god, the one who is a passive accomplice to injustice, because, on some subconscious level, that is what we know ourselves to be.

Accomplices to injustice is an important phrase in this. I would connect this insight up with CS Lewis' noticing that wrath is (or at least can be and in God's case is) something driven by love. When we love someone or something, we are affronted, outraged and/or saddened by abuses and disparagement of the object of our love. If we are not affronted or outraged, do we really love? I think probably not. So if we believe God to be love, then something like wrath must be part of God's reaction to wrongs done to beloved creatures (and I know that begs all sorts of philosophical questions around the relationship between time and eternity). 'Beloved creatures' -that would be all of us.

That last line, though, is something to take away and use to reflect on our own being in the world and indeed on God's call.

A Wrath-less God Has Victims (by Jason Micheli):

The gods, corporisations and the politics of a Psalm

Psalm 82 has been intriguing me for some months now, each time it turns up in the daily readings for morning prayer. Here it is in the translation the CofE uses for worship.

God has taken his stand in the council of heaven; •   in the midst of the gods he gives judgement:2  ‘How long will you judge unjustly •   and show such favour to the wicked? 3  ‘You were to judge the weak and the orphan; •   defend the right of the humble and needy; 4  ‘Rescue the weak and the poor; •   deliver them from the hand of the wicked. 5  ‘They have no knowledge or wisdom;      they walk on still in darkness: •   all the foundations of the earth are shaken. 6  ‘Therefore I say that though you are gods •   and all of you children of the Most High, 7  ‘Nevertheless, you shall die like mortals •   and fall like one of their princes.’ 8  Arise, O God and judge the earth, •   for it is you that shall take all nations for your possession.

I guess the central move, for me, is to read 'the gods' as corporisations -what commonly gets called 'principalities and powers' (based on NT language). I've had a look at some commentaries and a number of them favour this sort of interpretation.So I notice, if we take it that way, that this passage implicitly asserts a divine mission for corporisations to do justly, do well by the marginalised and to lighten their darkness with wisdom and knowledge. It also strengthens the 'originally good but fallen' understanding of them. I'm also thinking that in those days, pretty much the only corporisations would have been imperial admin and religious networks -often two sides of the same coin. Nowadays we would start to include branded corporations and NGOs etc.

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Screens change how we read scripture

I considered putting a question mark at the end of the title of this post. It's substantially the title of the CT article I'm about to comment on. However, I don't want to question the proposition of the title. I do want to question an implication and a supposed remedy of the article.

The suggested remedy seems to be to encourage Christian readers to return to using paper Bibles. The implication of the article is that Christians have always read the written word on paper and so we should return to that. I'm more interested in the matter of returning to supposedly ancient practice and so would then go on to question the reading on paper issue.

What concerned me was the unnoticed and materially poor consumer of God's word before rag-paper and moveable type kicked in to make a bible in every home or hand a possibility. You see, the remedy mentioned above elides most Christian interaction with the bible before then. I think we need to properly reckon with the preliterate experience before assessing the effects of the digital revolution. But before I say more about that, let me interject another concern.

There's a concern I have about the research that this is all based on. Basically, I'm unsure how much stock we should place in it at the moment. We are in a process of cultural reception and there are a number of variables that we don't yet know how to assess, so are we testing the right things, the right people and in any case what will things look like in 20 or 30 years (assuming that civilisation still supports such things) when/if people have evolved strategies of reading around screen use? I'm not sure how far this is an issue for digiborigines and how far for non-native digital tech-users. Which kinds of users have we been testing and how does a long background in different ways of reading affect the particular experimental packages of the studies? I'm not doubting that effects have been found, I'm just not sure whether other factors have been properly controlled for and whether what we are seeing are, in a sense, transitional effects of cultural change on particular groups as they adjust. It's not just about cognitive processing as the article seems to imply, it's also about cultural reception. We should also bring to the table the actual reading practices of recent and contemporary Christians with access to printed bibles. I think that the writer may be comparing the actual digital experience with an idealised analogue experience; not comparing like with like in significant parameters. I worry that this is a kind of sophisticated, low-key, moral panic.

So what about the longer-historical point? It's not new, but the writer of the referenced article hasn't weighed it heavily enough, I think. I was, frankly, a bit surprised that it wasn't considered more when the mention of icons was made. There, we were told, many icons have figures with open books and their fingers rest on open pages pointing to particular scriptures. (I found intriguing the link with Thomas with the resurrected Christ, btw, but that's another matter). That should have been the cue, in my opinion, to consider the reception of scripture within those kinds of cultural milieus (indeed, why icons and not written texts?), but instead the writer switches in short order to the post-Caxton era situations.

So, what I think we need to recall in this is the experience of an ordinary non-literate or barely-literate Christian in late antiquity or early medieval Mediterranean society or similar societies beyond and after. 'Similar', I mean, in the sense of the technologies relating to reading and their cultural embedding. In such societies, books and scrolls are expensive both in the materials they are made of and in the time that it takes to produce them. Partly as a result literacy levels are low. Most Christians and Jews would experience Scripture as oral/aural, not as something legible; ie not as something that they read themselves. They wouldn't be able to afford to have written copies of scriptures in their own possession. So, for them, interacting with scripture involved hearing someone else reading it, probably at a local house where they would meet for worship and fellowship. That might be once a week, perhaps more often in some situations. It probably wouldn't involve access to the whole of what we think of as the Bible but only whatever books their community had managed to save for and collect. In such a situation, what you do is hear passages read -probably a whole book at a time. You might also request to hear some parts again and you would commit to memory some passages. There would be likely some discussion, question and answer which would help recall as well as living out the message.

That's in many respects very different to how we experience scriptures nowadays. We read passages on our own, silently. We might journal about them. On our own. We rarely hear the words spoken except in church and even there often in paragraph-sized chunks but with a pew bible to hand if we want to check things out. And if we are honest, so many contemporary western Christians read small, decontextualised, chunks with a 'devotional' gloss which often does not really expound the passage or put it in context but rather reinforces popular spiritual tropes giving the impression of biblical engagement without it actually happening. So, I wonder whether some of what the digital research is picking up is in fact mirroring that and therefore it's not the digital reading that's the problem but a cultural habitus reinforced by certain bible reading artefacts which is also reflected in popular Christian culture. To be clear, Every Day with Jesus has long offered paper-readers decontextualised devotional nuggets and I think that what may be being tested is this way of using scripture transferred to screen. But it may not be inherent to screen reading.

All of which makes me wonder whether the suggested remedy is right. If earlier Christians 'fed' on God's word by aural means and oral exploration, is it so concerning that contemporary Christians may be retrieving some characteristics of pre-pan-literate culture? Does not the history encourage us to think that the new technologies may open up new opportunities (and re-open up old ones) as well as new dangers in bible-encounter? In spirituality? I'm concerned that the apparent remedy is about doubling down on what we have just been doing and not engaging with the new situation. This reminds me of the 600 year old laments about the printing press changing the way people read, think and write, implicitly calling people to eschew the mass printed book and retain the habits of listening and memorising.

Surely our task should be to understand well what is happening and to begin to craft spiritual habits that work with and through the emerging screen cultures? -Not simply resisting and damning them? The question of the article's title remains, "How will we process the Bible differently?" -and we need to discover the opportunities as well as name a few concerns.

I do think also we should not let the idea that reading the Bible should always be "deep reading" become too fixed in view. To be sure sometimes it should. But what I think the history of Christian interaction with the Bible tells us is that often the kind of deep reading seemingly in mind in the article has not been the main strategy. Rather, reflective reading, Christological reading, communal reading, prayerful reading has been predominant but I'm not sure that these add up to or compose the deep reading in view in the article. And I'm not sure that any of the research or interpretations of it make those sorts of reading less possible or intrinsically harder. In fact, I wonder whether they may be helped by screen presentation of texts.

The article tells us,

that the habit of superficial comprehension developed in digital reading transfers to all reading such that “the more you read on screens, the more your mind shifts towards ‘non-linear’ reading—a practice that involves things like skimming a screen or having your eyes dart around a web page" 

I think we should consider things behind and around that. I think I want to see more longitudinal studies on that assertion. I think I would want to see that correlated with the difficulties of many readers of conventional paper-based texts not least various forms of dyslexia. I would also note that many speed-reading courses attempt to wrestle with and train the phenomena mentioned in that quote. Would it be too much to ask for us to go back to Walter Ong's seminal book 'Orality and Literacy' before we try to discuss this more?

The article also reinforces the assertion that,

the physical layout of the biblical text is important for comprehension, memory, and “correct interpretation.”

That is my experience, but then I should remind us that this is not something necessarily to panic about. Recall, again, the experience of most Christians for over a thousand years. They would not have built a visual memory of the text or relied on printed text for comprehension or correct interpretation. Let's learn from them some tricks for the post-paper culture we may be heading into.

Screens Are Changing the Way We Read Scripture | CT Pastors | Christianity Today: As digital reading habits rewire our brains, how will we process the Bible differently?

Will AIs pray for us?

One of the motifs that stays with me from early adulthood reading science fiction is robots worrying about whether they have souls. I think I tended to think that if they worried about it, that probably proved they had one. But back in those days it was an interesting theological, philosophical thought experiment which had more traction in getting us humans to think about what spirituality, personhood and human nature are really about than being a 'live' question. No longer, perhaps.

It is starting to seem like perhaps we do have to face those questions after all. Self-driving cars, machines beating the best humans at chess, algorithms getting great at predicting human behaviour -better than fellow humans, the threat of 'white collar' jobs being taken by machines all seem to raise a related bunch of questions about the place of artificial intelligence in God's providence.

It is important, as we begin to think about that to be a bit careful about what we mean by the various aspects of the issue. What might we mean by 'artificial intellingence', what constitutes 'praying'. And then, we might want to recognise that some dimensions of the matter are already entangled with human technologies and could help us to think more about it.

You may be surprised by the idea that human technologies are already in the picture but is so, and some have been involved for a very long time. Perhaps your imagination has already taken you there: what are people doing when lighting a candle in a church or temple? What are prayer flags and rotating prayer gadgets in some versions of Buddhism? Written notes on prayer trees or boards? These all invite us to think about what we mean by prayer in our low-tech strategies.

I month or two back, the Church Times published an article I wrote as part of a special edition on artificial intelligence. It's relevant to put its 700 words here as they address some of the issues raised just.

Will AIs pray for us?

The film Bladerunner (based on Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) dramatically portrays the question of the humanity of artificial humans. I think I’d want to ask, do AI’s pray to Jesus's God?  And if they do, might we pray with them? Will they pray for us?

“Pray for us” could mean ”in our stead” as if we could outsource the work of prayer to relieve us of the task; a religious version of AIs taking jobs. It could, however, mean “intercede for us”: to ask them to hold us before God with concern for our wellbeing.

As we start to consider this, let's notice that we tend to think of artificial intelligence as a new issue, but maybe it is not. Amos Young following Walter Wink, interprets the Powers and Principalities as integral social entities having their own mission in God’s economy and having their own intelligence. If that is right, then we have had with us artificial, that is human-made, intelligences for a very long time. We collectively and unwittingly provide the substrate for these beings which emerge from our social interactions with purposes of their own and also a share in the fallenness of humanity. They process information, affect the environment and marshall human effort and allegiance. Scripture, names them “angels” as well as “dominions”, “thrones” and so on. So perhaps when we more purposefully make thinking artefacts, in these principalities, powers and angels, we already have a paradigm to consider their providential provenance.

Perhaps too, prayerful acts such as lighting candles might help us think about AIs praying. Votive lights in some traditions symbolically ask something of God. Presumably, without a human-generated intent, these are merely flames fed by a human artefact. But with a human desire motivating the lighting, they symbolically make that prayer. However, do they continue that prayer when the human has gone away and no longer focuses on it? Similarly we might appraise prayers written and put into a prayer wall.

Perhaps an AI praying might be like a candle or a slip of written-on paper. Either it is a mechanical and ‘soulless’ remainder of a once-live (and human) prayer or  the prayer remains in some way alive and active through the burning candle or the script. If there is some way it persists, then maybe that gives reason to think an AI could carry forward a human petition to God even if it didn’t ‘think’. 

If we believed that an AI could indeed think and so, perhaps, pray, I hope that we wouldn’t think that it relieves us of having to pray. That suggests a disturbing view of prayer as simply onerous work. Certainly, sometimes, prayer might be hard work, but surely more importantly prayer is the joyous cultivation of relationship with God. Why should AIs have all the fun praying?

Whether they might intercede for us is a different question. This would imply they could relate to God in such a way as to  form a request or to hold ‘in mind’ a situation before God (and how would we know?) It would assume Deity would listen, that is in practice, seek to enlist it in God’s mission. It would imply that the AI could seek to align itself with God’s purposes and become aware of what the divine agenda might be. Without these things, I do not think an AI would be capable of prayer in the fuller way we hope for ourselves.

We need also to consider that an AI may not be bodily like us -unless they really were like the replicants in Bladerunner. Without a human-ish body, an AI would sense and live in the world differently and have different priorities. Would it, then,  have the capacity to empathise with us to motivate intercession? Would it assess opportunities and threats to God’s reign differently or similarly to us? Would it ‘feel’ that we humans are a major problem and seek to pray and work for our reform or conversion? And what would that look like? Would we catch a glimpse of how an intelligent other might see us?

Some further reading on AIs praying

Clarke, Arthur C. The Nine Billion Names of God. https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.html accessed 7 July 2019

Another possibility is that AI will teach us new things about spirituality that we never considered 

Istvan, Zoltan. When Superintelligent AI Arrives, Will Religions Try to Convert It? https://gizmodo.com/when-superintelligent-ai-arrives-will-religions-try-t-1682837922 accessed 7 June 2019

If Christians accept that all creation is intended to glorify God, how would AI do such a thing? Would AI attend church, sing hymns, care for the poor? Would it pray?  

Jonathan Merritt.    Is AI a Threat to Christianity? https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/artificial-intelligence-christianity/515463/ accessed 7 July 2019

Siri basically responded, “I’m not programmed to do that.” But if a more advanced version Siri were programmed to pray, would such an action be valuable? Does God receive prayers from any intelligent being—or just human intelligence? 

Jonathan Merritt,   https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/artificial-intelligence-christianity/515463/ accessed 7 July 2019 -this in commenting on a classroom thought-experiment by Alistair McGrath.

“they will have such a different Umwelt that we will be completely unable to relate to it from our own subjective, embodied perspective. ”

Penha, Rui and Carvalhais, Miguel, If Machines Want to Make Art, Will Humans Understand it? https://aeon.co/ideas/if-machines-want-to-make-art-will-humans-understand-it?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=rss-feed accessed 1 July 2019

Further resources

http://www.religionlink.com/source-guides/god-in-the-machine-artificial-intelligence-and-religion-templeton-1/

As Artificial Intelligence Advances, What Are its Religious Implications? | Religion & Politics: Religious communities and thinkers are debating AI's moral and ethical issues.