Angela Williams Gorrell - Always on: Practicing Faith in a New Media Landscape

Our increasingly digitized lives provide both profound brokenness and opportunities for our shared humanity to be diminished. However, they also provide glorious possibilities to be more present with those who suffer from the ills and injustices of the world. In this inspiring new work, Angela Gorrell offers a compelling Christian vision of the good life within the landscape of new media. Incisively attentive to malformed visions of the good life offered by various kinds of new media, Gorrell contrasts those visions with the life and ministry of Jesus in ways that equip and empower Christians to engage in intentional practices that align with Christs transformative and healing vision for a new social order. Gorrell demonstrates that the new media landscape is neither simply life-negating nor simply life-affirming and that its possible to nurture a Christian hybrid existence that reflects Gods nonviolent and compassionate love for creation today and into the future.

Deanna Thompson , author of The Virtual Body of Christ in a Suffering World

In Always On , Angela Gorrell takes us straight into the new media abyss that we all face every day. Using her background as a pastor, theologian, and new media researcher, Gorrell invites us to consider how new media affects every aspect of our lives and how easily we can find ourselves lost in the process. She doesnt give in to the temptation to blame social media but rather helps us recognize how little attention we give to the ways we allow it to consume us. This is a helpful, practical book on one of the most pressing and real-life struggles we experience today.

Chap Clark , pastor of St. Andrews Presbyterian Church, Newport Beach, California; author of Hurt 2.0 and Adoptive Church

Always On considers how technology and social media impact identity and community formation. Exhibiting theological reflection for our sound-bite culture, Gorrell perceptively explains new medias ability to malign and abet both hope and harm. More than a simple description of the new landscape, this book examines the narratives that shape us in a way that both acknowledges harmful assumptions and invites interested conversations with those in the widest sphere of influencevirtual and visible conversation partners. Critical of how easily we yield to deficient interactions through new media, Gorrell argues for practices of righteousness, peace, and joy that exist online and in person. Fresh, contemporary, and practical: the language of this book is twenty-first century; the Christian call is first century; the promise of recovering humanitys capacity to bear the image of God in the world is eternal.

Joy J. Moore , ecclesial storyteller and lead pastor, Bethel United Methodist Church, Flint, Michigan