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was, after all, a primary way in which Ignatius himself first understood his
own spirituality. Both Larson and McManus invite us into the path of the
pilgrim as that of St Ignatius who, in keeping company with others, in
listening to God’s voice along the way and in daring to live through the
struggles of everyday life, became the person we know him to be today. In
that light, the works of McManus and Larson stand as an invitation to
walk with them and to understand the spirituality of Ignatius with each
step along the well-worn path that leads to Compostela.
Michael Rogers SJ
Antonio Spadaro, Cybertheology: Thinking Christianity in the Era of the
Internet, translated by Maria Way (New York: Fordham UP, 2014).
978 0 8232 5700 3, pp.172, £16.99.
Carolyn Reinhart, A Fruit-Bearing Spirituality (Alresford: Circle Books,
2013). 978 1 7809 9441 3, pp.179, £11.99.
Ever since the historic and fascinating interview he conducted with Pope
Francis in the late summer of 2013, Antonio Spadaro has been a familiar
media figure. He is director of La civiltà cattolica, which serves both as the
Italian Jesuits’ cultural review, and also as a semi-official organ for the Holy
See. His intellectual background is in literature and theology—he is the
author, for example, of a work on the theology of Karl Rahner and its
implications for our reading of poetry.
Cybertheology is a short book, originally published in 2011. Synthesizing
Spadaro’s more recent academic work, it explores the new questions raised
for Christianity by the transformations in telecommunication that have
gathered such pace following the invention of the World Wide Web in the
late 1980s.
Correctly, Spadaro sees that we are not dealing here simply with a new
field of concern for moral or pastoral theology. More is at stake than
working out how Christianity can best use Facebook and Twitter as means
through which to communicate the message, and how the Internet can be
used ‘as an instrument of evangelization’ (viii). The new technology, rather,
is transforming the lived reality of Christianity itself. We now live in digital
as well as physical space, and our understanding of the Word dwelling
among us needs to be adapted accordingly. ‘The technologies are new, not
simply because they are different from those that preceded them, but
because they profoundly change the very concept of having an experience.’