Sunday, February 06, 2011

Power Failure Over at Lutheran Confessions (a review)

The best book reviews always seem to make me want to read the book being reviewed... or avoid it entirely. Sure I am trusting in the reviewer's sense. So the best reviews require that I have engaged in some sort of conversation with the reviewer and not just take swallow whole his or her word. This conversation is not always a direct face-to-face conversation. Reading the person's works for a while help, I think, give a sense of where he or she is coming from.

So I have a deep desire to pick up Power Failure by Albert Borgmann, which Clint Schneckloth reviews over at Lutheran Confessions. He has a great sense of Lutheran identity and theology. I trust his review because of the writing that I have read. Ironically, his writing and our subsequent conversation is done via the very medium that is being critiqued, the technology and subsequent manifestations of social media. But as he points out the technology is not to be rejected outright, nor overcome by a frontal assault to transform it, nor embraced without reserve. There is a call to develop practices around technology and social media. As a virtue ethicist, I am all for it. I want to read Borgmann's book. And I want to keep reading Clint's work too... including the second part of the review which is yet to come.

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