The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World

Crouch (The Tech-Wise Family), an entrepreneur and former executive editor at Christianity Today, reconsiders human dependence on technology in this impassioned critique. Crouch laments that “we have become embedded in a world of money, machines, and devices,” and recommends that readers push back against the inherently alienating nature of technology. The author argues that modern technology gives users impressive abilities with little effort, but he suggests this effortlessness “diminishes us as much as it delights us.” He also decries “Mammon” (the drive to worship money as if it were God) as the engine behind society’s ills, writing that money enables people to buy services or goods without forming the relationships that would be otherwise required to receive them. By way of remedy, Crouch urges his readers to live in “households that extend beyond family,” which generate bonds of interdependence; cultivate “canopies of trust,” which foster solidarity; and create communities of the “unuseful,” which reject the transactional nature of the modern world by valuing those with little to trade. Crouch’s cross-disciplinary approach impresses, jumping from scripture to Roman history to psychology with aplomb, but his focus on the individual does little to address the systemic roots of the problems he identifies. This provocative if imperfect treatise makes some original contributions to an oft-discussed topic. (Apr.)