NOTES

1: WIRED SOULS IN A DIGITAL WORLD

[1] “Digital native” and “digital immigrant” are terms coined by author Marc Prensky. They have become a part of the cultural jargon regarding the technological revolution. He explains: “Digital Immigrants lived in two cultures: the pre-digital and the digital. Digital Natives have known only the digital culture. A great many of the Digital Immigrants’ deeply-felt attitudes and preferences were formed in, and reflect, the pre-digital culture and age.” Mark Prensky, “Digital Natives,” accessed September 1, 2015, http://marcprensky.com/digital-native/.

[2] Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (New York: Current, 2013), 87.

[3] This is called the Hebbian theory or Hebb’s Law, after Dr. Donald Hebb, a neuropsychologist who combined the study of human behavior with brain science. He summarized his findings in the book The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1949). The actual principle is stated in the book as follows: “When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A’s efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.”

[4] Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009), 22, 252; Judith Horstman, The Scientific American Day in the Life of Your Brain (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009); Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman, How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist (New York: Ballantine, 2009).

[5] Lectio divina, or sacred reading, seems to have begun with Saint Benedict as part of his Rule, which involved both individual and corporate reading of biblical passages over and over, with a goal of experiencing the presence of God. In the twelfth century a Carthusian monk named Guigo II wrote a letter to another monk with a treatise on prayer that he called “the Ladder of Monks.” It incorporated four steps of growth —lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio. In the twentieth century, the Second Vatican Council recommended lectio divina for the general public; its practice has since become widespread across many Christian groups, both Catholic and Protestant.

[6] I am using each of these four components of lectio divina as separate metaphors to represent the kinds of growth desired and the practices that can aid in it. I am thankful to Maria Lichtmann and her book The Teacher’s Way: Teaching and the Contemplative Life (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 2005) for this idea.