EST - A new tag for a new personal focus

I am creating a new tag as of today -- EST. This will stand for exiistentialism, secularism, and technology. All three of these subjects have interested me at different times in the last, I don't know, 8 years or so? But I have generally been interested in them as somewhat separate subjects. Existentialism was a big focus for me in the latter portion of my graduate degree, especially Kierkegaard's existential, theological epistemology during my thesis. During that time, I also discovered Charles Taylor via James K.A. Smith, and his work A Secular Age, which I have only partially read but find useful a way to think about modernity, secularism, and what has brought about the current shape of religious thought. Also around this same time, I discovered Neil Postman as a cultural technology critic, and found his model for thinking about our cultural uses of technology (and the ways in which those technologies use us) as insightful.

The more I think about this, the more I believe these are, or can be, interconnected modules of thought. They overlap in interesting ways. Technology affects our mode of being and acting in the world more than ever before, Secularism (Taylor's version, anyway) can be seen partially as deeply intertwined with the technological progress of the last 200 years. And I think it somewhat goes without saying how secularism and existentialism are affected by one another.

I imagine that I will want to think of EST as more of a long-term personal idea project, and less as a year long personal project that I will somehow summit by the end of 2024. Alan Jacobs mentioned recently (somewhere on his blog) that technopoly (a Neil Postman term to describe our cultural habits w/r/t technology) was a decade-long research interest of his.

But, what better place to store thoughts, links, ideas, books, and whatever else I find related to this subject than my blog? I thought about placing them in Evernote or Notion or some other tool, but I don't think those will be as resilient as my site, since this already has a structure in place, and whether or not it stays online, I will always have the Markdown and HTML files to refer back to in a structured form.

Tagged: EST,