First Blog

For a Flourishing Society

On November 25, 2019, I had the privilege of presenting a paper titled “The Academy, Imagination Formation, and Social Media” at the American Academy of Religion (AAR) Annual Meeting. Held jointly with the Annual Meeting for the Society of Biblical Literature, this conference brings together over 10,000 scholars and practitioners in the field of religious and biblical studies.

My paper was submitted and accepted for the Ethics Unit—one stream of whose call-for-papers held the theme: “scholars and the use of social media to create new publics.” This theme captured my attention in large part because of my conviction that social media is a powerful and potentially transformative tool to be used by scholars (and non-scholars) to put forth visions of truth, goodness, and beauty, ultimately for the sake of the building of the Kingdom of God.

We Become What We Behold

The premise of my paper was, in essence, as follows: Arguably, the point of scholarship is not only to make advances in the enterprise of human knowledge, but also to bring such knowledge to bear on society for its flourishing. Scholarship should make a social difference. Consequently, if an Augustinian theological anthropology is somewhere near correct, then more than what we believe, we—as creatures of love—become what they behold. And the sites that we, as a society, behold more frequently and consistently than any other are the sites of social media. Thus, if as scholars we seek to produce work of transformative value, we would do well to utilize the various sites of social media to disseminate our work. (Much like this blog post itself!)

My main contention was that: what we become is a function more of what we behold than what we believe: for what we behold are the things we love and the things which shape our loves. This point holds for our growth in Christ-likeness (consider: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” [2 Cor. 3.18, ESV]); as well as for many other aspects of our lives such as when a young girl, who seeks to become beautiful like her mother, beholds and then mimics her mother’s way of putting on make-up; or when a young boy, who seeks to become a great baseball pitcher like his favorite player, beholds and then emulates the player’s stance, “look,” and mannerisms down to a T. Both intentionally such as with our sanctification and perhaps more subconsciously in the case of makeup and baseball—whatever the case, we become what we behold.