Surviving Technopolis: Essays on Finding Balance in Our New Man-Made Environments

Technopolis has no end in view other than bigger, faster, newer, and more. While giving us many material benefits--at least in the short run--in its wake are spiritual loss, alienation, and devastation. These essays not only evaluate Technopolis, but also seek wisdom to cope with our new human-made environments. Positively stated, they offer suggestions on how to bring us back into balance. Some of our best wisdom in analyzing Technopolis can be found in the voices of the Christian humanists. Unlike Enlightenment humanism, which tends to be human-centered, Christian humanism is concerned with the role of humankind within God’s created order. G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis represent this tradition. They, and others like them, understood that technological progress with no clear telos obscures what Eliot called ＂the permanent things.＂ Surviving Technopolis means restoring the things closest to us--those old identity-forming institutions of home, church, and community.

Arthur W. Hunt III is Associate Professor of Communications at The University of Tennessee at Martin. He is the author of The Vanishing Word: The Veneration of Visual Imagery in the Postmodern World (2003). His articles have been published in Touchstone, Modern Age, Christian Research Journal, and Explorations in Media Ecology.