Take a peek at this snapshot of what’s been happening over the past few weeks in our current book club:
A group of faculty, grad student, and professional women at varying career points will gather online from across the US and Canada. You’ll meet women from different generations ranging in age from late 20s to late 60s. You’ll hear southern accents and Minnesota accents. You’ll engage the different experiences of women as together we think about our discipleship around digital technology as we read Felicia Wu Song’s Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age.
This is not a book that denies the good that technology and the digital bring — we at WSAP would be the first to appreciate the possibilities of technology as most of our work uses digital technology to connect women to God and each other. But the author names our profound attachment to the digital and unearths the ways the digital industry has spiritually shaped our collective souls such that we are becoming people very different to the traditional Biblical ideas of personhood.
Over the last few weeks, our participants experimented with exercises designed to explore our attachments to our technology and shared their experiences in small groups when we met. For the first exercise, we went for 24 hours without our phones — and made it! Some of our participants said that this book is just what they need at this time, because Felicia Wu Song puts to words thoughts and feelings that perhaps many of us have had but not known quite how to articulate.
We celebrated together an unplanned little victory of one person who forgot her phone on a trip to the other side of town only to remember it well into her ride and felt happy that she’d left it behind! And we were privileged to be trusted with some of the pain of another who had experienced the reduction of face-to-face relationships with people who live in the same town to the realm of the digital.
Our next two sessions will focus on forming spiritual habits that help us to flourish as human beings capable of relating deeply to God and to one another. Our hope is that as we live into the richness of being human, it will give us the perspective to steward our digital habits well without the need for a set of rules to follow. Sound interesting? Visit and get a taste of our Fall book club! If you’d like an invite for our next meeting or simply have questions, send us an email. And stay tuned — we will be hosting an online conversation with Felicia Wu Song on November 16. We would love to see you then!
Photo by WOCInTech from Nappy.co
