Abstract / DOI
Sacramental Realism in the Age after Gutenberg: Christianity in a Post-Digital Age. In the last centuries our modern world oscillated between the belief in disenchanted strategies of bureaucratic control and surveillance, and the celebration of iconoclastic ruptures that were supposed to preserve our sense of freedom and dignity. Yet, the equilibrium between these poles has fallen out of balance after the turn of the millennium. While the obsession with control has released concerted efforts to replace our supposedly irrational intelligence by the ‹artificial intelligence› of digital technologies, the implementation of ICT technologies in our everyday life has undermined the iconoclastic conviction that artefacts are merely tools. Our smartphones have a ‹magic life› on their own – be it that they afford a life that we appreciate, or that they nudge us into a life that we abhor. The following essay will discuss the question to what extent the basic assumptions of the confessionalized religions of the post-Reformation era distract us from this challenge.