Web 2.0 is a slippery term. For our purposes, I will use it to refer to the recent trends in the “social” Internet arising circa 2004. Sites such as Wikipedia, Del.icio.us, MySpace, Facebook, and Digg are all part of the Web 2.0 trend. While much of what makes up Web 2.0 has been around prior to 2004, the Internet has exploded into a plethora of “social” features such as voting, linking up with friends, recommendations based on user ratings and collaboration. Even “old media” sites such as the New York Times and CNN now include links with their stories that integrate features from popular Web 2.0 sites. It is now easier to incorporate their content into your own “reality.”

Many of us have taken these developments in stride without thinking about the potential consequences. We have come to accept personalization and the democratization of information as progress. A new book has raised a number of questions regarding this movement. Scott Lamb at Discerning Reader recently reviewed Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateurs. In it Keen claims the Web 2.0 phenomenon is seductively destroying our culture.

What the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than considered judgment. The information business is being transformed by the Internet into the sheer noise of 100 million bloggers all simultaneously talking about themselves[...] In the cult of the amateur, those who know the most can be persecuted by those who know the least[...] The most popular blogs are those that offer the seductive conspiracy theories and sensationalist antiestablishment platitudes that readers crave.

Although the questions he raises are good, Keen comes across as overly biased - something he has openly admitted¹. His book is designed to open a discussion of the issues. Given the nature of his intended audience, I can understand why he has chosen to present his argument in this fashion. As I’m sure he anticipated, much of the Web 2.0 world has labeled him as the digital antichrist and discredited the book without thinking about its critique².

As much as I’m a technophile and even a “Web 2.0″ programmer³, I must agree with most of what I’ve read in his book⁴. I suggest at least reading Lamb’s review. As Christians, we must think about these topics critically. We do not need to throw all of Web 2.0 out, however, we must discern with redeemed minds what should be used for the advancement of the Kingdom and what should be discarded.

1. I can’t cite the direct source - having [ironically] heard the audio clip on a podcast.↩
2. Needless to say, perhaps the most vocal opponents will not even read the book.↩
3. I created and maintain castlechurch.org↩
4. As a matter of full disclosure, I have not completed the book.↩

David Wells has an insightful book Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World. The book deals with hyperconsumerism and functional nihilism among other things and is well worth the read. In a chapter entitled Miracles of Modern Splendor, Wells sets forth an interesting proposition:

Years ago, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that we are “somewhat embarrassed by the fact that we are the first culture which is in danger of being subordinated to its economy. We have to live as luxuriously as possible in order to keep our productive enterprise from stalling.” Today, we are not embarrassed at all. It is exactly what we want and what, we have come to think, we need. This kind of avid consumerism, Christopher Lasch observes, “promotes an ethic of hedonism… and thus undermines the ‘traditional values’ of thrift and self-denial.” This never-ending transformation of luxuries into necessities, the experience of comfort only fueling the desire for even more comfort, “appeared to give the Anglo-American idea of progress a solid foundation that could not be shaken by subsequent events,” he remarks, “not even by the global wars that broke out in the twentieth century.”¹

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1. Wells, David F., Above All Earthly Pow’rs (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), 41.↩

What factors influenced the institutional development of the French Reformed church during the sixteenth century?   Glenn Sunshine argues that the typical perception of these churches as nothing more than miniature Genevan colonies fails to do justice to the innovative ecclesiastical model that arose in the French church as a result of their unique situation in Catholic France (Glenn S. Sunshine, Reforming French Protestantism (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2003), pp. 10-11).  In fact, Sunshine’s central argument throughout the book is that the institutional development of the French Reformed church was not the result of a primarily imported Genevan ecclesiology, but rather the result of original structural innovations that occurred in response to their own unique circumstances.  Further, Sunshine argues, these French Reformed ecclesiastical features subsequently spread to other reformed churches abroad and became an integral part of the Calvinist tradition in Western Europe (Reforming French Protestantism, p. 167).  To support his thesis, Sunshine’s book documents the complexities of the institutional development of the French Reformed church in France during the sixteenth century. (Continue Reading…)

What was the role of popular religious sentiment in the infamous massacre of Huguenots on St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572?

According to Barbara Diefendorf, traditional historiography has focused almost exclusively on the political dimension that framed this tragedy (Barbara B. Diefendorf, Beneath the cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (New York, Ny.: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 4). In her view, this exclusive focus on the political dynamic fails to adequately take into account the popular pressures that were exerted on the king and court during this period. In fact, Diefendorf’s chief contention in this book is that the period prior to (and extending through) the massacre of Huguenots in Paris on August 24^th of 1572 can only be properly understood when one factors in both the political and religious aspects of this turbulent era. In other words, Diefendorf hopes to steer a middle course through the historiographical landscape of the “Wars of Religion” during this era, and she hopes to avoid both a purely political or a purely religious interpretation of the motivation that shaped these conflicts.
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Brad Gregory argues that the collective dynamic of martyrdom helped shape the character of early modern Christianity (Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 6). Therefore, Gregory attempts to explore the meaning and significance of Christian martyrdom among Protestants, Anabaptists, and Roman Catholics during the Reformation era. Gregory’s book aims to produce a cross-confessional analysis of martyrdom (utilizing both nominalist and essentialist categories of thought) during the Reform era in order to arrive at a better understanding of early modern Christianity.
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By what label should historians refer to the “Catholic side” during the era of the Protestant Reformation? In John O’Malley’s, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in The Early Modern Era, the reader is introduced to the complexities surrounding the nomenclature of distinct historical eras, and more specifically, to the problem of naming the Catholicism of the late medieval/early modern era. The author admits that he was once ambivalent to the semantics of Catholic nomenclature for this period, but practical decisions (such as what to name Encyclopedia entries and monographs that he was working on) led him to reexamine the significance of the issue. As a result, O’Malley eventually came to the conclusion that the two most frequent designations in the English language for the Catholicism of this era, (i.e., “Counter Reformation” and “Catholic Reformation”) were inadequate and misleading, especially “when [they were] taken as all-inclusive terms for the much larger reality of Catholicism itself” (John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 2). Throughout the work, the author argues that terms are not neutral; they invite investigation in certain directions but they also direct attention away from other avenues of inquiry. In other words, they filter and exclude just as much as they allegedly describe. Consequently, O’Malley is disturbed by the careless and cavalier way that terms like “Reformation” are being applied to the Catholicism of this milieu. In response to this concern, he argues for a three-fold solution to this taxonomic dilemma: 1) a welcome acceptance of the multiplicity of names that have arisen as positive descriptors of the era; 2) a more careful reflection in the employment of these terms by historians; and 3) the addition of “Early Modern Catholicism” as a more comprehensive designation than the others. He attempts to persuade the reader to accept his proposal principally by tracing the history of the various terms for the Catholic side, and indeed this review of the naming process constitutes the vast majority of the book. In the author’s own words, however, he suggests that, more than a mere acceptance of his proposal, he hopes that the main contribution of the book will be to:

“…help us view ‘the Catholic side’ with new eyes, so that we become more aware of a breadth, depth, and complexity that earlier historians frequently either missed or, more often, forced into an inappropriate or inadequate interpretive framework–by inadequate naming” (O’Malley, Trent and All That, pp. 9-10).

With this ultimate goal in mind, the author introduces the reader to the problem of names – “where they came from, who used them, [and] what prejudices they entailed” (O’Malley, Trent and All That, p. 6).
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