Dr. Benjamin Gladd shares his methods and favorite tools for facilitating research and eventual publication of his writing.

Dr. Gladd is Professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi. He is the author of Handbook on the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2021) and From Adam and Israel to the Church: A Biblical Theology of the People of God (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2019). Along with G. K. Beale, he is the co-author of The Story Retold: A Biblical-Theological Introduction to the New Testament (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2020). Dr. Gladd is also series editor for IVP’s Essential Studies in Biblical Theology and Baker’s Handbook on the New Testament.

Links

• Richard Hays, Reading Backwards
• Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes (Reformed Media Review, ep. 126 on the subject)
• Drafts
• Notability
• Liquid Text
• Zotero (Reformed Media Review, ep. 129 on the subject)
• Papers
• SimpleMind
• Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
• Accordance
• Logos

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Introduction
• 00:07:02 Reading and Writing
• 00:10:08 Reading and Taking Smart Notes
• 00:19:16 Working with PDFs
• 00:23:43 Citation Managers
• 00:26:15 Writing for Teaching
• 00:31:11 Mind Mapping
• 00:36:07 The Effects of Technology
• 00:38:19 Cross References
• 00:40:50 From Bible Study to Writing Output
• 00:44:11 Plagiarism and Derivative Thought
• 00:55:44 The Cumulative Benefit of Consistent Study
• 00:59:39 The Pastor Is Called to Study
• 01:01:25 Going Deeper Independently
• 01:11:23 Updates on RTS Jackson and Dr. Gladd’s Books
• 01:13:08 Conclusion

Participants: Benjamin Gladd, Camden Bucey

For Christ the Center’s 300th episode, we welcome hip hop artist Timothy Brindle to speak about his work in Christian hip hop and the recent musical movement as a whole. The episode explores hip hop’s stylistic capability to communicate the gospel and reformed theology and includes clips from Timothy’s recordings. Timothy is a student at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, and his record label is Lamp Mode Recordings. Download “The Daily Gospel” by Timothy Brindle for free. The first 300 episodes of Christ the Center are available for download as a 7.3GB .zip file. We may not be able to maintain this link into perpetuity. Download the file while the link still lives.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jared Oliphint, Nick Batzig, Timothy Brindle

He Made Us Listeners

Now, if the word was and is the critical medium in God’s creation and governance of the world, then it follows that the senses involved in that medium are especially important. I’m thinking particularly of the sense of hearing—which allows us to perform the act of listening. Listening, we often forget, is not the same thing as hearing. We cannot help but hear what goes on around us, but that does not mean we are listening to it; we are well practiced at hearing someone’s words but not listening to them. In a general sense, listening is a conscious attempt to connect with the message of another being. In a biblical sense, our listening clarifies our allegiance; by our listening we show either that we hold the white flag of surrender to God’s will or the red flag of rebellion against it. Now, consider the encounter with Eve and the serpent. What is the primary medium in their engagement? Spoken language, of which the sense of hearing is an integral part. But the one speaking is going against the words of the Creator God—evidence that he has not listened to God’s words; he has only heard them. Eve’s suspicion should have been immediately raised. A subject of the speaking God is questioning God’s words. Satan is holding his red flag. Just look at the reversal in perceived authority between Gen 1:1–2:25 and Gen 3:1–7.^[2] God → Man → Woman → Animals (Gen 1:1–2:25) Animals (serpent) → Woman → Man → God (Gen 3:1–7) The serpent, a mere hearer of God’s words, tried to take the place of the true and eternal speaker. And Adam and Eve went along with it. Eve listened to the serpent’s words to the exclusion of God’s; Adam listened to Eve’s words to the exclusion of God’s. No one listened to the true speaker; every creature, instead, listened to the words of another creature. The fall occurred, in large part, because God’s creatures challenged their ultimate allegiance to His words. And so Satan’s first great assault on God’s listeners proved successful.

The Second Great Assault

Generations later, Satan would make his second great assault. He had attacked and defeated God’s first son, Adam. This time he would attack God’s eternal Son. We read in Matthew’s Gospel of how Satan fought with Christ, using a similar trickery. Look at what he does in Matt 4:

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. ² And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. ³ And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” ⁴ But he answered, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” ⁵ Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple ⁶ and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’” ⁷ Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’” ⁸ Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. ⁹ And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” ¹⁰ Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’” ¹¹ Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.

In the first instance, Satan is not quoting Scripture verbatim, but is certainly drawing on a biblical context—God’s giving of manna to the people of Israel during the Exodus. “If God can do it, so can Jesus.” But Jesus has not come to prove himself to be God; he has come as the second Adam, to fulfill Adam’s listening duties and to bring life where Adam brought death. Note Jesus’ response: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” This is the response of a listener. Jesus knows that God is the almighty speaker, and he knows his role in relation to that speaker. Jesus came not to serve himself, but to serve others through suffering—by being obedient to God unto death on a cross, by being a listener of God’s word to the very end, just as Adam should have been. Jesus faithfully raises his white flag in submission to God’s will, and by implication he calls Satan out exactly where he has always been in rebellion. In the second instance, Satan quotes Scripture from Ps 91:11–12, but this again only shows that he has heard God’s words, not listened to them. In this passage, the psalmist is praising God for His protection from the wicked (91:8). But the only wicked one from whom Jesus needs protection is the devil himself. Christ is not in trouble, but Satan is asking him to make trouble by throwing himself down from the pinnacle of the temple. And why? Just so he can prove to a trickster something he already knows? Jesus fires back at the devil with Moses’ words in Deut 6:16: “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” The devil has heard God’s words and then tried to brandish them before His incarnate Son, but there is no use. Christ has listened to God’s words, and his remembrance of them leads to his victory over the devil. He will not test his Father and suggest that His word is not enough. That would be to make the same mistake that Adam made. That would be to raise the red flag of rebellion. In the third instance, the devil tempts Jesus to measure the might of his rule, just as he did with David in 1 Chr 21. There the devil suggested David take a census of the whole nation to assess his military strength. David’s listening to the devil’s words was, in essence, his bowing down and worshipping another being—for God’s creatures have an unquestioned allegiance to His words alone. In Matt 4, the devil gets right to the point: “bow down and worship me and all the kingdoms will be yours.” Christ, however, has listened to God’s words in the voice of the psalmist. He knows that God “shall inherit all the nations” (Ps 82:8). What use are the world’s kingdoms when your Father already reigns over them? Jesus needs nothing from the devil. His white flag is flapping in the wind of God’s faithfulness, and once again he sends the devil away, his red flag cloven by a true listener of God’s holy and eternal word.

Who We Are

In Christ, the one who faithfully submitted to the word of his Father, we are a nation of listeners. Conceptually, this means that, in Spurgeon’s words, if “there speaks a God,”^[3] then “there listens a creature.” We need to pray earnestly that God’s Spirit would help us to make listening to God’s word our initial response to temptation. We need to pray that we would always be inclined to raise the white flag in submission to God’s will rather than the red flag in rebellion against it. Practically, this means we need to meditate on God’s words to the point that we can readily bring them to bear on our daily temptations. Satan is lethally injured; his defeat is sure, but a creature is often most dangerous when death is imminent. Satan will do all he can to make you a hearer rather than a listener of God’s words. So arm yourselves daily with Scripture. Take it to heart; be ready to wield it confidently, for “we know the end of the war. The great dragon shall be cast out and for ever destroyed, while Jesus and they who are with Him shall receive the crown. Let us sharpen our swords tonight.”^[4] Yes, and prick our ears.

One of the benefits of using the content-collector Evernote is a Chrome extension that grabs whatever article I’m reading and puts it into Notebooks (categories) I’ve created, in about two clicks. Since I scan an ocean of reading material every day, this comes in quite handy when I see a good article that may not be relevant at the time but I still want to archive it. The extension kind of lets you be an uncluttered digital hoarder, minus the cats. As I’ve started archiving articles and getting a sense of the conservative evangelical tone, I’ve noticed that the undeniably overwhelming majority of written pieces or links fall under the general category of Practical Theology, as opposed to categories like Biblical Studies, Systematic Theology, Church History, or Apologetics. So that we’re clear on what I’ve noticed, my observation is not the presence of posts regarding Practical Theology, but the proportion of posts under Practical Theology in comparison to other fields and topics. I should also note that there are some fantastic blogs with a great topical variety, but I’m merely pointing out a general trend that applies in varying degrees from site to site. If you’ll excuse a prelude, I want to express how helpful I found this post by Ray Ortlund on “Accusations of Legalism,” specifically the observation that “legalism is an easy accusation to make, and a difficult one to prove.” If legalism is as much of a problem as it is frequent in my twitter and RSS feed, the church has quite a heretical mess on its hands. (N.B. Legalism is a system of thought foreign to Christianity; legalistic thinking can be a dangerous but correctable slip by a genuine believer. Knowing this difference in ministry, and precisely articulating it, is beyond crucial.) If blogs and tweets focus mostly on practically-based matters, then most posted content is ethics-based. And if most of the content we read is ethics-based, then most of what we read involves morals, rules, and what we should and shouldn’t do. And if that’s the case, the impression that might be created is that the Christian life centers around what we do or don’t do. The indicative has become lost in a sea of imperatives. Consider an alternative: what if there were more posts on who God is, who Christ is, on a detailed treatment of specific Scriptural passages, on interpretive principles, on a biblical theology of the soul, etc.? If the imperatives, which are necessary, flow from the indicative and are not the basis of the indicative, what difference would that make in the breadth of content we produce? I understand the well-intentioned desire to speak almost exclusively into ethical issues. For evangelism and pastoral ministry, ethics and practical living are the issues on people’s minds: “How should we then live?” But day-to-day living in any capacity, whether it be in the workplace, within the family, at school, in your neighborhood, needs to be set into the proper context of what is; the reality of who God is, what he has done, and what he is doing. If communicating the deep realities of theology, church history, biblical studies, etc. is a rare occasion, the choices we make regarding proportionality of topics may contribute to a perception of an ethics-based version of Christianity.

Twenty-one years. If you or I live to be sixty-five years old, we will have spent nearly one third of our lives staring at screens—computers, televisions, tablets, cell phones, etc.^[1] If you’re gracious enough to read through this post, adding a few more minutes to your life’s tally, I hope you’ll emerge a more critical user of screens and of media in general. This, I admit, is no small task. To be a critical user of media takes constant practice and attention, for to assess what is closest to us—objects and devices felicitous with our routine—seems to run counter to the routine itself: we insult the comfort of ignorant iteration when we cross-examine its effects on other parts of our lives. We are not in the practice of examining an ordinary and familiar action, and that’s what keeps it ordinary and familiar. With screens, as with any medium, we are bound to meet harmful effects of this ignorance unless we turn to Scripture to guide our use and understanding of a particular medium.

Media: Evasive Influences

Before we get to using media critically, we need to understand what a medium is. For our purposes, a medium is anything used to achieve a desired end. What we need to notice is that whenever we use a piece of technology (i.e., a medium)—whether it be a fork, a pencil, a car, clothing, a computer, or a television—it affects (1) our abilities and perceptions, and, because of this, (2) it affects how we engage with the world in which we live. Now, human bodies are one of God’s most amazing creations. They adapt so efficiently to a medium that we seldom notice what is happening. Before we learned to hold a pencil, our fingers did not “know” how to position themselves to grip and angle a thin, six-inch rod. Now we pick up pencils without a shadow of a thought. We have adapted to the medium, and because we have adapted, our abilities and perceptions have changed. This is, in part, what media theorists have tried to explain to people: media “act on us” just as much as we act on them. Take the pencil, for example. It appears that we simply write words down on a piece of paper, and that’s it; this is simply all the pencil does. In fact, a pencil allows internal, abstract ideas to be made external and concrete. I can think about how I am awed by seeing a red-tailed hawk perched atop a telephone pole, biding his time and dreaming of field mice, but the pencil, along with the medium of language, allows me to represent that awe outside of my mind so that others can view and respond to it. The pencil combats the mantra that “the mind is a prison”; it provides me with a key, so to speak, with which I can unlock my thoughts and feelings and share them with others. Because a pencil draws out abstract things from our minds and places them outside of us, we may feel frustrated when we cannot manifest these feelings or thoughts within the bounds of the medium. If you have ever felt frustrated by this, welcome to the wonderful world of writing. Shakespeare and John Milton suffered from the same problem, though perhaps they did a better job than you or I at disguising it. So, the pencil “acts on us” just as all other media do; they change us in the two ways mentioned above: in our abilities and perceptions, and in affecting our engagement with the world around us—our expectations, frustrations, and desires.

The Effects of Screens

We must ask, then, in what ways does the screen medium “act on us”? This question is all the more exigent for Christians because Christian revelation (Scripture) is “disclosed by the word.”^[2] As a medium, language is relational, just as God is relational. In fact, “the Trinitarian character of God is the deepest starting point for understanding language.”^[3] God related to Himself with words even before creation, using what we might think of as an inter-Trinitarian tongue.^[4] As His creatures, our relationships are the fruit of spoken and written words. If language is a medium based in the Trinity, if it was used to create all things (Gen 1) and to restore all things (Christ is the Word of God), then shouldn’t we engage carefully and critically with a medium that tends to marginalize written and spoken words by bringing images to the fore of every communicative act and “screening” us from authentic engagement with people in our immediate environment?^[5] I should hope so. Here are three ways in which screens “act on us.” First, if we imagine screens as virtual windows, they affect us by allowing us to remove ourselves cognitively from any environment by looking into virtual spaces. We may be physically present in a living room when we are watching ESPN, but our minds are elsewhere. True enough, paintings and pictures have acted as “windows” throughout history, but nothing so enthralling as the light-based screen medium has so easily drawn our minds into virtual spaces. Screens act on us by giving us access to other worlds—times, places, fictions, etc. Second, screens act on us by encouraging immediacy. There is no sub-medium within screens (television, movies, web browsing) that fosters patience in us. Just think of how frustrated you were the last time you tried to load a webpage and waited more than a few seconds. This immediacy disseminates to other areas of our lives; it becomes ingrained in our pattern of expectation to the point where we expect immediacy from other people and from God. The time and patience fostered by language have in some ways corroded since the introduction of screen technology. While the screen may answer our demand for immediacy, it has potential to downplay our need for language-based communion—both with each other and with God. Screens act on us by fueling an already expansive desire for immediacy and efficiency that has the potential to short-circuit our relationships—relationships formed, sustained, and nurtured by spoken and written words. Third, screens work on us by allowing us to be detached and isolated and yet at the same time to feel connected. One of the reasons why we feel detached is that when we use screens it becomes impossible to be wholly invested in one environment—either the environment around us or the virtual environment made available by the screen. One author suggests that when we are surrounded by screens, we are easily fragmented, torn between two “spaces” and yet effectively not a part of either one of them. She argues that

the computer screen’s new connective possibilities further a tension between being ‘both here and there’ . . . and being ‘neither here nor there’—being overcome by so many screen-reliant spaces as to be effectively prevented from being consciously present in any of them.^[6]

In our attempt to be in more than one place at the same time, we end up being “neither here nor there.” So, screens act on us by creating a tension between multiple environments, one physical and the other virtual. Of course, these effects can be mitigated if we are critical users of screen-based media. But what does this look like? How can we be users of screen media in a way that is biblically prescribed? We have to start by keeping spoken and written language primary in our daily activities, both because language is relational and essential to us as creatures and also because we have always needed God’s Word in order to see the world correctly. We must know how to see the world aright before we can redemptively employ a medium that caters to our eyes.

Through the Ears to the Eyes

We’ve always needed revelation to use our eyes properly. Though after the fall, “we grow in understanding reliably only when the Bible has a central role in dissipating the cobwebs of sin,”^[7] even before the fall we needed special revelation to see the world aright. Van Til writes that “even in Paradise man was never meant to study nature by means of observation and experiment without connection with positive supernatural thought communication given him by God.”^[8] He continues, “If even in Paradise man was meant to interpret nature in terms of self, and both in the light of the supernatural communication of God’s thoughts with respect to the course of history as a whole, how much the more should man as sinner seek to understand nature in relation to self and to this self as interpreted in Scripture.”^[9] We have always needed God’s special revelation because without it we are bound to interpret the world incorrectly. This was the case before the fall, and, to a far greater degree, is the case now, for “man’s eye and ear and all his senses have been greatly weakened through the effects of sin.”^[10] This weakening means that we not only see poorly, but we have become even more confused as to how to use the sense of sight as creatures of God. The initial confusion came in Genesis 3 when Eve attempted to use her sight in isolation from God’s word. Eve’s eyes did not in themselves deceive her; there was not an irresistible optical appeal to the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. She was drawn into deceit not by sight but by language—the words of the serpent suggested she could operate outside of God’s instruction. The most important teaching concerning the medium of human sight in Genesis 3 is that sight involves more than just the eyes. In fact, the proclamation of the psalmist in Ps 19:8 speaks to the heart of the fall: “the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.” God’s commandment, His Word, is what enlightens our eyes, not any act that we can commit in feigned independence from Him. Adam and Eve needed some guidance, some verbal command of God in order to see properly. It is when they exchange this command for the words of the serpent that their vision becomes obstructed; their doubt of God’s words functioned as a wall blocking their peripheral vision. They saw only what was before them (the forbidden fruit, on which they now focused because of their allegiance to the serpent’s words) rather than what was all around them (the rest of God’s provision). If our depraved sense of sight has longed for pictures without reference to God’s Word, our renewed sense of sight in Christ re-sounds the original call for our eyes to be used in subordination to that Word. Processing this fact in light of screen technology suggests that we must be careful to hold Scripture’s prerogatives ahead of the world’s. When the world demands efficiency—even at the cost of fellowship—God’s Word demands relationship. When the world tries to engage us with shallow, emotional messages, God’s Word teaches patience, coherence, and deep meaning related by the most trustworthy speaker. It is only when God’s Word is viewed as primary in our engagement with a medium that we will use that medium in a way that complements the redemptive work of the gospel. I leave you with two simple points: (1) we need to be conscious of the effects of the screen medium because some of these affects negatively influence our position as relational creatures of God; (2) we need to go through God’s Word to see anything clearly, for His Word was always meant to be in a governing position over our senses. Given these two imperatives, we need to ask ourselves continually how our abilities and perceptions are being changed by screens and how they are shaping the way in which we engage with the world. For Christians, these questions must be followed by another: are these perceptions of and engagements with the world biblically prescribed? We might ask, more specifically, is God’s chosen medium of language being shouldered out of the way by our fascination with images and virtual spaces? In short, for Christians, what we see on a screen is not what we get. What we see is a message (often pictorial), delivered by a messenger and delivered through a medium. To focus only on the message is to forget how critical means are to an end and how the character of the messenger has a bearing on the truth of the message. What we see needs to be checked by what we’ve heard through God’s Word. We see through what He has spoken in order to see clearly what He has made. When we trust a screen-mediated message uncritically, we risk making a mistake that is hauntingly similar to that of Eve in Genesis 3.

Works Cited

Notes

[1] Brian Stelter, “8 Hours a Day Spent on Screens, Study Finds,” New York Times, March 26, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/business/media/27adco.html (accessed September 15, 2011). [2] John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Word of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2010), 15; emphasis added. [3] Verb Sheridan Poythress, In the Beginning Was the Word: Language—A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009), 17. [4] This is inference based on the plural cohortative verb נַֽעֲשֶׂ֥ה (naʿᵃśeh) in Gen 1:26. Some have argued that this is a “plural of majesty,” but I find this argument unconvincing. Given the canonical teaching that God is relational and triune, it makes perfect sense for God to commune with Himself in making a creature after His own image and likeness. [5] This is not to say that images do not communicate. This is obviously not true. Think of how efficiently a green light communicates to you as you drive down the street. Kenneth Pike makes a helpful distinction between verbal and non-verbal behavior. Non-verbal behavior (e.g., dancing, the flashing of a traffic light—which is a kind of behavior, given that man has devised it) still communicates a message, but that message must be supplemented by verbal or written explanation. It is this verbal and written part of language that tends to be marginalized by screen technology, which presents images with an immediacy that is not possible with verbal or written language, the latter being linear and coherent, the former being readily received by emotions and ingrained perceptions. See Pike, Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior, 2^nd rev. ed. (Paris: Mouton, 1967), 26–27. [6] Kate Mondloch, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 79. [7] Vern S. Poythress, Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006), 47. [8] Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology: Prolegomena and the Doctrines of Revelation, Scripture, and God, ed. William Edgar, 2^nd ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2007), 126. See also 128 and 132. [9] Ibid., 151. [10] Ibid., 163.

In his post “The Christian Leader in the Digital Age,” Albert Mohler raises a number of important issues for Christians (and Christian leaders) to consider in light of this generation’s technological advancements. Namely, is the digital world “real”? He writes,

Leaders who talk about the real world as opposed to the digital world are making a mistake, a category error. While we are right to prioritize real face-to-face conversations and to find comfort and grounding in stable authorities like the printed book, the digital world is itself a real world, just real in a different way.

There is still a stigma attached to digital media and online relationships. If a book isn’t available in a physical bookstore, we assume there’s something substandard about it. If you met your girlfriend online, you’ve probably felt just a wee bit sheepish about sharing that information with certain people. There may be good reasons for this. Regardless, an across-the-border categorization of online communication and digital media as somewhat sub-real is unfortunate and misguided. As Mohler notes,

Real communication is happening in the digital world, on the Web, and on the smart phone in your pocket. Real information is being shared and globally disseminated, faster than ever before. Real conversations are taking place, through voice, words and images, connecting people and conversations all over the world.

Dr. Mohler’s point is well taken. It’s time we recognize the “reality” of the digital world. But we should also engage it critically. Christians should not assume that all technological advances are beneficial; but neither should they assume that they are all detrimental. A shift to digital can have its benefits. It can also come at a cost. Our online relationships are not on par with our face-to-face “analog” ones, perhaps most pointedly because we reveal selectively to our online communities. There is a peculiar historiographical aspect—an editorial influence—to our digital communications. Whether we recognize it or not, we’re often fashioning and promoting a personal brand. It’s certainly possible to attempt such a presentation in our “analog” relationships, but it’s much more difficult, especially as people get to see us in a broad range of settings. It’s simple enough to conform your tweets and Facebook posts to the type of image you’d like to convey, but it’s much more difficult to shape public perception when someone sees your road rage. As Christians, we should seek to move deeper than the selectivity and superficiality characteristic of most digital relationships. It’s hard to think that a Philippians 1:3-8 or Ephesians 4:15-16 type relationship could be established strictly online. Humans are body-soul unities, and Christian fellowship must be concerned in large measure with physical presence (cf. Hebrews 10:24-25). But such a desire should not lead us to eschew all forms of digital communication. They are “real” human interactions insofar as we are speaking to people. In fact, they provide value and opportunities to communicate with people we otherwise would not have. So many families have come to recognize this, being given the opportunity to stay in touch with people around the world through a host of rich media technologies unknown to previous generations. Though digital media necessarily shapes our communications, we should not be so quick as to eschew it. Passages like Colossians 2:1-5 may speak to the usefulness of digital forms of communication in maintaining bonds we’ve established—or strengthened—by more traditional means. And so, to ask whether we should have an online “presence” may be the wrong question. Perhaps we should be more concerned with being truly “present” wherever we are.