Christian Worship and the Question Concerning Technology

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Notes

Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 4.

Heidegger distinguishes between “technology” and “modern technology,” as shown later in the current essay. For more detail regarding Heidegger’s genealogy of technology, see the development of his thought from “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Poetry, Language, and Thought (New York: Harper, 2013), The Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), and The Question Concerning Technology (New York: Harper, 1982). The argument in this essay depends upon Heidegger’s train of thought but shifts back-and-forth between technology and modern technology with perhaps more fluidity than he does.

See Richard Wolin, “National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks,” Jewish Review of Books (Summer, 2014), http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/993/national-socialism-world-jewry-and-the-history-of-being-heideggers-black-notebooks/.

Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, and Thought, 171.

Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 31: “To this end it is worth noting, that we observe how the ordering in advance infests all that is: nature and history, human and divine; then if today a poorly advised theology authorizes the achievements of nuclear physics, with the help of its divine evidence, then God will be placed in the domain of the orderable” (my translation).

James P. Kraft, Stage to Studio: Musicians and the Sound Revolution, 1890–1950 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

Albert J. Raboteau, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Theodor W. Adorno and Robert Hullot-Kentor, Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009); Theodor W. Adorno, Nachgelassene Schriften. Abteilung I, Fragment Gebliebene Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 13. Robert Hullot–Kentor quotes from Dickson Skinner, “Music Goes into Mass Production,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine (April 1939): 485.

Adorno and Hullot-Kentor, Current of Music, 1–2.

Terry Lindvall, Sanctuary Cinema: Origins of the Christian Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 7.

Ibid.

Kraft, Stage to Studio, 2.

Andrzej Bartzkowiak, director, Romeo Must Die, Warner Bros., 2000. See also Hoang Tan Nguyen, A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014) and Celine Shimizu, Straightjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).

Emerson W. Pugh, Building IBM: Shaping an Industry and Its Technology, History of Computing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).

“NSA Utah Data Center,” http://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/.

“LEED, or Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design, is a green building certificate program” that recognizes buildings with positive impact upon the health of occupants and that promote renewable energy. Four certifications exist as listed in ascending order: (1) certified, (2) silver, (3) gold, (4) platinum; see http://www.usgbc.org/leed.

David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth, “Internet Giants Erect Barriers to Spy Agencies,” New York Times (June 7, 2014), http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/07/technology/internet-giants-erect-barriers-to-spy-agencies.html?emc=edit_th_20140607&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=69006145&_r=0.

For the universality of das Ge-Stell, see Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 40. For the threat of complete forgetfulness of the truth of Being, see page 53.

Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 42, and Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 72. Italics in the quote are from the English translation.

Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 29.

For Ai Weiwei, see Julie Makinen, “Ai Weiwei Pondering Freedoms in Alcatraz Show—from China,” Los Angeles Times (June 23, 2014), http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-ai-weiwei-alcatraz-20140623-story.html. For Liu Xiaobo, see http://www.pen.org/defending-writers/liu-xiaobo, and http://www.pen.org/press-clip/2010/10/08/words-cell-cant-hold.

For Jacolby Satterwhite, see http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2014Biennial/JacolbySatterwhite.

For Kara Walker, see http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/arts/design/kara-walker-creates-a-confection-at-the-domino-refinery.html. Notably, Walker’s colossal sculpture also monumentalizes the historical exploitation of sugar plantation labor for other minority groups. For the history of United Methodist missionaries supplying Hawaiian sugarcane plantations with Korean immigrant labor in the early twentieth century, see David K. Yoo, Contentious Spirits: Religion in Korean American History, 1903–1945 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 4.

Though not an example of liturgical practice influenced by contemporary art, see the Rev. Vicki Flippin’s theological reflection entitled “Taking My Baby to Kara Walker’s Sugar Baby,” Huffington Post (August 27, 2014), as an example of how contemporary art can shape pastoral thinking.

Maxwell E. Johnson, “The Apostolic Tradition,” in The Oxford History of Christian Worship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 32–76.

Phillip Lyndon Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage During the Patristric and Medieval Period (Boston: Brill, 2001).

Catherine L. Albanese, “Understanding Christian Diversity in America,” in American Christianities: A History of Dominance and Diversity, eds. Catherine A. Brekus and Clark Gilpin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 29–58.

See Acts 5:1–11, 9:36, 12:13, 16:14, 17:34, and 18:26.

Teresa Berger, Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History: Lifting a Veil on Liturgy’s Past (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011).

http://www.noaa.gov/factsheets/new%20version/Earth_Observation_Satellites.pdf.

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Notes on contributors

Gerald C. Liu

Gerald C. Liu, an ordained United Methodist Elder, is a minister-in-residence at Church of the Village, New York City, and assistant professor of homiletics and worship arts, Drew Theological School, New Jersey.