Foreword: The War on Physicality

 

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I seldom write things that I feel need to be written. More often, I am carried away by a subject that interests me and I enjoy the simple labor of translating amorphous ideas into concrete prose, using patristic sources as a baseline and widening them through a creative lens. But this series is something different; more urgent. Not because it is a unique idea (as we all share hesitation of the growing technological aberration) but because it somehow remains amorphous; a looming danger we are aware of but can't quite define. It seems to me that we all have the same sense that something here, in what we call the "online community", isn't quite right. In fact, something is terribly wrong.

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Christianity has, for the past two centuries, needed to defend the existence of metaphysics against a dissenting culture. The fallout of the Darwinian and Nietzchian rejection of metaphysics left 19th and 20th century Christian thinkers as bastions against those who would doubt any metaphysical reality at all. And we, as modern Christians living in the wreckage of postmodernism, usually dedicate immense energy and thought likewise into forming concise ideas around metaphysics, both theologically and apologetically. But in emphasizing the metaphysical reality that we experience, many Christians (myself included) have neglected to address physicality in any meaningful way. The war on metaphysics is largely over and the enemies of Christianity have turned toward the tangible in a new war on physicality.

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As the technological age has dawned, we must again face some disconcerting questions: What is the purpose and use of the body? What is humanity and what violates humanity? Even stranger still, what is reality itself and does it matter? The Church Fathers have much to say on these topics, but the novelty of the digital realm must be recognized as new grounds in human history. This series will aim to explore these questions and hopefully add some context to the issue. Answering these questions may seem obvious on the surface, but we must face that we too are somehow tangled in this web and the way out is neither simple nor clear.