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Advent 2025 December 17 Living embodied

 In sending his only Son Jesus, God “showed his love among us,” it says in verse 9. In Advent, we anticipate that coming: the Word made flesh. Embodied. Incarnational. Not God in a spiritual or digital form, but God who sits at the table and laughs with you. God at a coffee shop, if you will. (Carrie McKean, Christianity Today article)

She wrote this in a series of books about educational technology and its failure in the school system. I am reading The Digital Delusion by Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist at Harvard. It is a bit dumbed down for my taste (no in-text sources, either), but otherwise it's quite good. 

My area of study includes digital v. embodied communication and oral v written communication. A source I was reading yesterday recommended Walter Ong; Ong changed my life. Orality and Literacy should be required reading.

Enough of that. We are supposed to live in our bodies. We are not just in bodies; our existence is embodied and we are our bodies. Dualism, which I find so problematic, lives today in all this talk of uploading our consciousness to the Internet and AI and, yes, Educational Technology as the hope of our future for teaching and learning. 

It isn't working. Children are not learning what and as well as they used to. No debate.  

So we come back to McKean's quote. Until we get back to face-to-face existence, we are missing our humanity. Christmas, which hinges on the Incarnated presence of Immanuel, should be the spark, the impetus, for that reform. 

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