In the dance with technology, who leads?

In 1954, Jacques Ellul published La Technique, the French Protestant intellectual’s groundbreaking work on the emerging technological world, a world he perceived as monolithic and inevitably totalistic. A decade later, the English translation appeared as The Technological Society. The book’s troubling and prescient takeaway is that technology is out of our control; in fact, it controls us. Resistance is futile. Having been enlightened to the problem of technological control, readers are left with a sense of powerlessness before the cold mercy of Technique, a dehumanizing idol that grows ever stronger and steadily coerces us toward its own ends, about which we are in the dark. Ellul doesn’t offer solutions to his disturbing conclusion—perhaps in part because he doesn’t discuss the distinguishing human quality of responsibility.

Thankfully, human responsibility toward technology is front and center in Everyday Sabbath. Paul Patton and Robert Woods have written an exceptional book that provides answers to the problem Ellul diagnoses. Using the metaphor of dance, they offer a biblically grounded musical score for learning how to lead when dancing with technology, social media, and pop culture.

Patton and Woods are all about developing our God-given, albeit often neglected, responsibilities toward digital technologies. We have these useful technologies at our fingertips all day long. The authors see them as gifts from God. Yet they can easily gain control—not just occasionally but habitually. And when they do, our relationships with God, family, church, friends, school, work, and even play take a beating.