Monday Office Hours | 4/28/25

🌵🌵🌵Thorny questions considered: the theological dangers of texting in the bathroom, how our work will be in heaven, and AI replacing humans. Yowza.

Welcome to Monday Office Hours! Thanks for being a sustaining contributor to the Low-Level Theologian community. Below are some fun questions I received this week. A note: I do my best to be concise and clear. However, in this effort, there are times when the space does not permit me to write as much as I wish I could. If you consistently finish reading what you find here and wish there were more—then I’m doing a good job. No weekly post can cover everything.

I was recently at a conference where the speaker said, “Could it be that our smartphones are our modern-day Tower of Babel?” They are everywhere, seemingly all-knowing, constantly demanding our attention. But we were never created to carry that kind of weight. In trying to, we are just crushed by it. I’m wrestling with this: Could solitude with Jesus be one of the most underrated but necessary investments in a believer’s life for remembering and strengthening their identity? Is there a relationship between identity and solitude?

Great question. Okay, a recent story—one I don’t think I’ve shared in a while. Not long ago, my family had just sat down to eat at the local burger joint. It was a Sunday afternoon, and a steady stream of churchgoers descended on the well-known spot for bottomless fries, hamburgers, and shakes. Watching the family sitting next to us, my eyes caught a glance at a five-year-old boy trying to get his father’s attention. Yanking at his shirt, the boy, try as he might, did everything in his power to get his dad to look down and appreciate the doodle he’d been occupied in creating. Who, to his outward annoyance, kept swatting his son’s hand away so that he could continue the unthinkable: scrolling through Instagram.

That day stuck with me, if for no other reason than it is a relic of our moment in time. As you rightly note, when big tech proudly handed the naïve public their first iPhones in 2007, little could have been predicted regarding how these devices would reshape society, the economy, and human relationships. Every blessing has its shadow curse; in this case, a never-before-seen loneliness epidemic, the rise of debilitating youth anxiety, and a slow breakdown of interpersonal communication skills. Relational atrophy has set in. And what was once called “social” media has shown to be anything but. Even as early as 2013, people like bestselling author Jonathan Safran Foer publicly lamented how our blind trade for information had led to a diminished humanity: “Each step ‘forward’ has made it easier just a little, to avoid the emotional work of being present, to convey information rather than humanity.”¹