Fr. Christopher Seith is a priest in the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., the director of Spiritual Formation and a spiritual director at St. John Paul II Seminary, and his name can be found in a TIME Magazine article titled, “How Millennials Are Reinventing the Priesthood.” If those last six words caught your attention, you wouldn’t be alone. And if you thought that Fr. Christopher might know something about social media, the internet, and technology, you’d be right. In his Ph.D dissertation, which will be coming out as a book sometime soon, he has written extensively about the effects that technology and the internet play in our lives, but also about what some of the remedies are. In this interview, Fr. Christopher talks about the philosophy of Josef Pieper, the importance of leisure, acedia (which is not merely sloth or laziness), the problem with the worship of progress, and why we need celebration and festivity. At first, most of those things don’t seem connected with technology, but they are. Fundamentally.
Devices and Distractions: a Priestly Perspective
