Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
St. Nikolai Velimirovic: How Christians should view technology
St. Nikolai Velimirovic: How Christians should view technology
Apr 2, 2025 10:16 PM

Like Americans today, St. Nikolai Velimirovic witnessed dizzying technological changes between his birth in 1881 and the day he died in 1956 in a rural Pennsylvanian monastery. The former bishop of the Serbian Orthodox Church, who spent time in the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, shared how Christians should view technology – something equally important in our day, as everyone from parents to legislators offers their own solutions.

“The New Chrysostom,” as he was known, began with an eloquent turn-of-phrase: He likened religion and ethics to a deep and nourishing river. As long as the human race drank from these springs, technology “carried the water from this river into all the arteries of man’s life.” God’s faithful people dedicated all their works to His glory, including their progressive conquest of the world through technological progress.

However, sin estranged the human race from God and technology from its intended purpose:

When the feeling of God’s presence became dulled and spiritual vision darkened, that is when pride entered into tradesmen and technologists, and they started to give glory exclusively to themselves for their buildings, handiwork and intellectual works, and began to misuse their work; that is when the shadow of cursedness began to fall on technology.

plain against technology.

Many accuse modern technology for all the woes in the world.

Is technology really to blame, or those who create technology and use it?

Is a wooden cross to blame if somebody crucifies someone on it?

Is a hammer to blame if a neighbor breaks his neighbors skull?

Technology does not feel good or evil.

The same pipes can be used for drinking water or the sewer.

Evil does e from unfeeling, dead technology, but from the dead hearts of people. …

Technology is deaf, mute, and unanswering. It pletely dependant on ethics, as ethics on faith.

(You can read his fully homily here.)

The lesson for us is that technology is morally neutral. The creations made by tools depend on the designs and intentions of their users. It is the ethical standards we bring to the technology, and nothing intrinsic to the medium, that renders its use immoral. If even the Law has to be used lawfully (I Timothy 1:8), certainly new technologies must meet the same ethical criteria.

Cell phones may be used to stream pornography; in fact, 71 percent of all porn is viewed on smartphones, according to an online pany. (I will not link to the survey.) That’s up from 61 percent five years ago. But smartphones are also lifting the poorest residents of sub-Saharan African out of extreme poverty. They allow once remote and disconnected people to find buyers for their goods and banking services to protect their wealth. “Mobile phones help connect people to the jobs, business opportunities, and services they need to escape poverty,” according to the Brookings Institute, which calls cell phones the key to economic development.” USAID states, “They fundamentally transform the way people in the developing world interact with one another and their governments, and access basic health, education, business and financial services.”

The changes of recent decades have drastically altered the face of everyday life, including the number of people able to live fortable existence. “Massive investment in information technology and infrastructure has fueled innovation, greatly expanded global productivity, created tens of millions of high-skilled jobs around the world, and improved our lives in ways few could imagine two decades ago,” according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “Establishing ill-conceived rules could stifle the high-tech economy, especially if lawmakers bow to pressure from influential business interests or self-proclaimed consumer advocates to saddle emerging technology markets with arbitrary regulations or draconian liability regimes.”

Let technology flourish and each person answer for the ways he or she uses it. Any technology or medium can be used for the glory of God.

And that these creations may truly be honorable, let our moral standards evolve faster than the lightning-fast speed of technological progress.

This photo has been cropped. CC BY-SA 4.0.)

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
‘They want to punish the Church’: Italian priest fined for procession to fight coronavirus
The following translation is an exclusive interview that appeared in the weekend edition of the northern Italian daily La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, which has fiercely defended Italy’s religious freedom throughout the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Correspondent Andrea Zambrano interviewed a Roman Catholic parish priest, Rev. Domenico Cirigliano, who was slapped with a €400 fine by local police for processing with a “miraculous” crucifix. Rev. Cirigliano said he was performing essential “work” by blessing the town of Rocca Imperiale in order to...
Creativity will kill COVID-19
It is in the most desperate of times that we must not forget our principles. Globally, we are facing desperate times. In the United States, unemployment rolls doubled in just one week, climbing to 6.6 million unemployment claims for the week ending March 28, 2020. As more Americans are asked to stay at home, many have e unemployed. Additionally, the potential death toll scares us, and we beg for scientists to expedite new tests, anti-viral drugs, and vaccines. These are...
The Great Gaetano Rebecchini: Italy’s hero succumbs to the coronavirus
Gaetano Rebecchini was a great Italian, an extraordinary witness to our traditional national values, while challenging politically correctness and representing the best of our country. Today, Italy lost a good, honest, courageous person, an example for present and future generations e. Read More… Today was the first time I learned of someone I know and respect who lost his battle to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). He was a 95 year-old political warrior and defender of freedom: Gaetano Rebecchini. He returned...
Acton Line podcast: How to talk about rights in our polarized age
Today, our most contentious controversies are about morality. We disagree about questions of efficiency and democracy, but across political aisles, we also disagree about what’s right to do and who we’re ing as a people. How can we have productive debates with people whose worldviews are very different from ours? Adam MacLeod, professor of law at Faulkner University, addresses this question in his new book titled “The Age of Selfies: Reasoning About Rights When the Stakes Are Personal.” In this...
Coronavirus shows us how work impacts civilization
Many Americans are already struggling due to the ripple effects of the COVID-19 lockdown. Just last week, more than 6.6 million Americans filed unemployment claims. Some economists predict that total job losses could reach 47 million. In turn, much of our focus is rightly set on the material devastation—lost salaries, declining assets, and so on. Yet the economic lockdown brings significant social costs as well, reminding us that our economic activity has social value to our civilization that goes well...
April Fools’ Day: Italians are not joking around anymore as civil unrest builds
Culturally the first of April – April Fools’ Day – is the same in Italy as in America. It’s a day of practical jokes and laughs. Only here it’s called April Fish Day, because it is related to the ancient end of the Pisces or Fish sign in the zodiac. It also the day of jokes which Italians inherited from the ancient Roman feast of Hilaria (hilarious in English) celebrated around the spring equinox. During the Hilaria celebrations Romans would...
No one knows what a return to ‘normalcy’ after COVID-19 will look like
At some point, not today but perhaps in the next few weeks, we will be having more conversations about getting people back to work and restoring the $21 trillion U.S. economy. Some signs indicate the coronavirus pandemic may turn soon in the United States. Even if the entire nation makes an all-out effort to restrict contact, coronavirus deaths will peak in the next two weeks, with patients overwhelming hospitals in most states, according to a University of Washington study. The...
13,000 children are being denied an education over a funding fight
Millions of schoolchildren are currently out of school under state orders intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus. However, in Oregon, at least 13,000 students are being unnecessarily denied an education to benefit traditional public schools’ monopoly over education. Earlier this month, Gov. Kate Brown ordered all Oregon’s public schools closed until the end of March. She then extended that deadline to April 28. This would be unexceptional if not for the fact that she also closed online public...
Service is love for our God and our clients
For the Italian Nuova Bussola Quotidiana media outlet, I am publishing a series of short reflections on economics, virtue and spirituality during Lent entitled Lentenomics(go here for the first reflection on “sacrifice”). In the second of these six essays I turned my attention to the virtue of “service.” In summary, I write that “service has a supremely essential role within the economy, and not just in the so-called ‘service industries.’ Markets simply cannot function without services. They are the fundamental...
Three core principles to evaluate the coronavirus stimulus
As epidemiologists scramble to mitigate the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on public health, economists are evaluating its impact on the global economy. Experts in both fields absorb the flurry of data, interpret it through their scientific training and the lens of similar historical events, and endeavor to mend a path forward. Yet everyone knows that ultimately we are in unchartered waters, and possible es vary widely. As an economist, I am stunned by the nearly 10 million jobless claims...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved