Word: ideas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Just as urbanization brought people together for worship in cities--and ultimately led to the construction of larger and larger cathedrals--so the electronic gathering of millions of faithful could someday lead to online entities that might be thought of as cyberchurches. Already some Conservative Jews are considering the idea of convening a minyan (the minimum of 10 Jews needed before a communal service may begin) via speaker phone...
Many scholars credit the printing press with theology's next revolution: the Reformation. Thirty-seven years after Gutenberg's death, young Martin Luther renounced his plans to become a lawyer (his father's idea) and instead, seized by spiritual anxiety, joined the Monastery of the Emerites of St. Augustine. It was a fateful decision. Luther's tortured soul, which attached itself to new ideas with a fervor that seems strikingly modern, turned in a decade's time against the institution he had vowed to serve and created one of history's greatest religious splinter groups. Rome wanted to suppress...
...mind, the immutable God embraced by scholars like Plantinga make no more sense today than an unchanging computer operating system. "If God doesn't change, we are in danger of losing God," says William Grassie, a Quaker professor of religion at Temple University, "There is a shift to [the idea of] God as a process evolving with us. If you believe in an eternal, unchanging God, you'll be in trouble...
This biophilic notion of a living planet--of Gaia--partly converges, oddly enough, with a kind of technophilia that is indigenous to the Internet. The central notion of techno- sophy--that life is a technology--has as its flip side the idea that technology is a form of life. Strange as this sounds, it is an increasingly common refrain in cyberculture. If the idea is valid--if indeed fiber optics are living tissue--then it is easier to think of Earth in the Age of Internet as a coherent living system, a giant organism complete with a giant brain. Gaia...
...maybe that's not always a good idea. This year R.E.M., Pearl Jam and Nirvana, three of the genre's biggest and most critically acclaimed bands, all released new albums with comparatively little fanfare--and all three albums sold poorly, relative to the huge hits these groups have scored in the past. The chart slippage of these and other megagroups, coupled with the sad state of the industry in general, has set music executives abuzz--about the declining aesthetics of alternative rock, about what the next Next Big Thing will be, and especially about the tenuous status of their jobs...