All true conversations, really, are risks, exercises in improvisation where we have to listen and respond without knowing, fully, what is coming next, even out of our own mouths.

An awful lot of children born in 2007, turning ten years old as this book is published, have been competing with their parents’ screens for attention their whole lives.

Worship calls us out of the small pleasures of an easy-everywhere world to the real joy and burden of bearing the image of God in a world where nothing is easy, everything is broken, and yet redemption is possible.

We are continually being nudged by our devices toward a set of choices. The question is whether those choices are leading us to the life we actually want.

We will have to teach our children, from early on, that we are not here as parents to make their lives easier but to make them better. We will tell them—and show them—that nothing matters more to our family than creating a home where all of us can be known, loved, and called to grow.

Here is the heart of the paradox: Technology is a brilliant, praiseworthy expression of human creativity and cultivation of the world. But it is at best neutral in actually forming human beings who can create and cultivate as we were meant to.

Technology is in its proper place when it helps us bond with the real people we have been given to love. It’s out of its proper place when we end up bonding with people at a distance, like celebrities, whom we will never meet.

We benefit from all kinds of devices, but we don’t build our lives around them. We haven’t eliminated devices from our lives by any means, but we go to great lengths to prevent them from taking over our lives.

The central disciplines of the spiritual life, as taught by generations of Christian saints, have stayed the same for twenty centuries now: solitude, silence, and fasting.