The assessment, the study guide, and the book
Not misinformation.
Misformation.
The digital world does its work slowly and largely out of sight. It reorders our loves, shapes our instincts, and distorts our sense of how the world works until we find ourselves living as if the Triune God were absent. Fact-checking is necessary but insufficient, because misformation happens even when what we are told is true.
The mechanism
Convictions hold. Instincts drift.
Your doctrinal convictions may not change, but your instincts, priorities, and experience of the world shift. Belief and life pull apart, so that what we confess is not what we live out.
The digital world does not often challenge orthodoxy explicitly. It rearranges what we notice, rewards responses that do not conform to Christ, and encourages surface readings in place of depth. False information is a danger. The truth can be pressed into the service of misformation just as easily.
No stake in making disciples
It promises ease without Sabbath, information without truthfulness, and connection that widens the distance between us and others. It offers to expand the mind while narrowing our vision by denying and distorting God's self-disclosure.
A commission, not a platform
We were made in God's image to serve God, others, and creation for our mutual flourishing. Technology becomes a necessity after the Fall, and it also encourages self-sufficiency. Our capacity is most fully realized not through technological feats but in dependence on and allegiance to the Triune God.
Disciplined inquiry
Four ways of knowing.
The Quad takes the four ways of knowing described by cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and puts them to theological work. Most accounts of digital discernment involve evaluating the veracity of a claim. We need to check claims, sources, and facts, but discernment without theological depth is just information literacy. The other three ways of knowing are where the digital world does most of its work.
What do we know to be true about reality?
What know-how do we bring to the world?
What are we deeming most important?
What world of meaning are we co-creating with our environment?
Vervaeke describes how human beings know. The book asks what each way of knowing looks like when the Triune God is not treated as absent.
Buy the book →What you get
A dashboard, not a score.
Maturity is a condition. The assessment does not measure your spiritual maturity. It helps you recognize trends in your life that may inform and reform your ongoing practice.
The app asks questions, encourages you to think through your answers, and reminds you of what you have said. Whatever gap exists between what you say matters most and what you actually attend to day to day becomes clearer.
Items come in pairs. The first asks what you believe. The second asks what you do. The dashboard is built out of the distance between them.
- 01The dashboard. What you said you are reaching toward, what you are working on now, and what you have not worked. It does not tell you what any of that means. You supply the judgment.
- 02The daily surface. A small number of practices, chosen by you, at an intensity you set. Practices tend to feel disproportionate to their return long before they feel worthwhile. Nothing here is designed to hide that.
- 03The Quad. A guided reading of anything shaping how you see something: an article, a post, a sermon, a transcript. It will not tell you what to think about it. It will ask.
- 04The chapters that apply to you. The assessment does not hand you a reading list. It names which chapters of Digital Discernment speak to what surfaced, so the book is read where it is needed rather than front to back. The study guide carries the Scripture analyses and paired essays for each chapter, for individuals and for groups. It is downloadable and yours to keep whether or not you stay.Buy the book →
Start here
The assessment, the app, and the study guide.
One purchase covers all three. The assessment sets the starting point, the app carries the daily work, and the study guide is yours to keep.
- The assessment three times in the year: once to set the starting point, twice to recalibrate
- The app: the daily surface, the plan library, the Quad, and your dashboard
- Chapter-level direction into Digital Discernment, based on what the assessment surfaced
- The full study guide, downloadable and yours to keep
Both give you the same app and the same assessment cadence. The year costs less per month and asks you to decide once.
The book itself is sold by IVP Academic and is not included in either price. Buy the book
The book
Digital Discernment
A theological account of formation in a digital age, joining biblical theology, spiritual formation, and information literacy. Published by IVP Academic.
The book is the reference the rest of it points into. The assessment names the chapters that speak to what surfaced, the app serves them a chapter at a time, and the study guide works each one through Scripture. Read on its own, it is an argument. Read alongside the assessment, it is an answer to a question you have already been asked.
Buy the bookSold by IVP Academic. The assessment, the app, and the study guide are sold here.
These are the chapters the assessment points into.
Read the table of contents
- IntroductionDiscernment, formation, and the challenge of the digital age
- More than misinformationMisformation, mastery, and the digital age
- Human capacity and technologyWho we are and what technology does to us
- Being human in a digital worldImage, blessing, and the call to dominion
- Theological dispositionsReordering loves, reorienting attention
- The QuadFour ways of knowing for digital discernment
- Participatory knowingKnowing by being in a digital world
- Perspectival knowingThe God who is infinitely more relevant
- Procedural knowingHabitus and digital formation
- Propositional knowingTruth, authenticity, and the claims of information
- Good, true, beautifulDiscernment, affirmation, and pointing beyond
- Coordinating responseFragmentation, assimilation, inversion
- Re-formed for a digital agePractices for near, mid, and long-term formation
Who wrote this
James Spencer, PhD
James Spencer is a theologian, author, and host of the Thinking Christian podcast, writing on Christian formation, political theology, and technology. He holds a PhD in Theological Studies from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, teaches in Wheaton College's MA in Leadership program, and is an Associate Research Fellow at the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology.
He is the author of Serpents and Doves: Christians, Politics, and the Art of Bearing Witness and Christian Resistance: Learning to Defy the World and Follow Christ. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, Sojourners, and Christianity.com.
He and his wife, Kim, live in central Illinois with their four children.
Our deepest problems are not technological.
Removing the tools is not the answer, and neither is doubling down on them. What is required is a people who live according to the logic of the cross, whether the world is digital or analog.