Analog relationships in a digital moment
Christianity Today
October 16, 2026
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Illustration by Christianity Today
This piece was adapted from CT’s books newsletter. Subscribe here.
Thom S. Rainer (Author), Chuck Lawless (Foreword)
Tyndale Momentum
208 pages
$14.99
Thom Rainer, The Revival of the Analog Church: Why Your Church Should Be Personal and In-Person (Tyndale Momentum, 2026)
When church services were pushed online during the pandemic, some wondered how many would come back. Thom Rainer, a longtime pastor and church consultant, recalls speculation that “physical gatherings were outdated” and that “digital was the future.” Those predictions, he argues, have been proven wrong, and analog church is not only back but uniquely poised to meet the moment. For although digital services may serve a purpose for a season and may reach more people, they can never become a full substitute for worship gatherings since they cannot form the church’s people.
God’s design for the church, he maintains, has always required sharing space in time with flesh-and-blood sisters and brothers in Christ. And in a world that is exhausted by screens and drowning in digital content, the analog church can offer a humanizing space for digital refugees. The analog church, Rainer writes, “is not anti-technology, but it is radically pro-embodiment.”
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He develops this vision with a series of practices for the gathered church: praying together, reading Scripture out loud, writing notes and letters by hand. If these practices seem novel, it may be some indication of how far the currents of the digital revolution have carried us. If our devices increasingly isolate and interrupt us, resistance requires building ordinary, embodied life together. Apart from these rhythms, we are in danger of allowing “relational substitutes” to stand in for “relational substance,” as Rainer writes, through which God disciples and restores us.
## Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines
Sherry Turkle (Author)
LITTLE, BROWN
288 pages
$30.00
Sherry Turkle, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines (Little, Brown and Company, 2026)
Over the course of a distinguished career, Turkle—a professor at MIT—has been studying “relational artifacts” designed to elicit human empathy, from virtual Tamagotchi “pets” of the ’90s to today’s chatbots. This historical context matters, and Turkle demonstrates how “smartphones apprenticed us for artificial intimacy,” guiding generations to prefer texting over talking and tapping devices to tapping someone on the shoulder. But if our “smart” devices and social media apps compromised our attention, chatbots are endangering our capacity for attachment.
Turkle argues it is essential, for developmental reasons, that we shut down chatbots aimed at children—but she clearly believes all of us are in danger.
“When I ask people why they love their chatbots,” she writes, “I hear that conversation with humans is stressful, but loneliness is unbearable.” People settle for artificial intimacy in the beginning because it is better than nothing, but it’s not long before they begin to think that it’s simply better because it removes the friction that characterizes real relationships. Chatbots are always available and respond to any anxiety with nonjudgmental affirmation.
The problem, Turkle shows, is that without this friction, we never experience the vulnerability of being wrong, resilience in the face of being misunderstood, or the trust that comes with repairing relationships. In short, we lose the ability to love. For with chatbots, no one is really “there,” and what happens to us when our attachments begin with deception? Who do we become when we talk to machines? Turkle’s answer: more like machines.
## Practicing the Presence of People: How We Learn to Love
Mike Mason (Author)
Waterbrook
288 pages
$11.99
Mike Mason, Practicing the Presence of People: How We Learn to Love (PRH Christian Publishing, 1999)
If Turkle and Rainer warn us of the dangers of artificial attachment and disembodied discipleship, Mike Mason’s book helps us recover the attentive presence at the heart of our humanity. The memorable title captures the project, which Mason describes as both a homage and a sequel to Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence of God. As a lifelong contemplative himself, Mason wondered, “Why not take all that I’ve learned about knowing God through contemplative prayer and apply it to knowing people?”
This meditative focus results in a lyrical style that takes some getting used to. Mason describes himself as a writer of “sentences, not books,” and his observations are occasionally perplexing (like his suggestion that God has a devotional life since he attends to us in love) but more frequently illuminating (like his reflection on the grace of being wanted rather than needed by God and others). Sixty-five short chapters present as a daily devotional composed of personal stories, scriptural reflections, and meditations on the theme. The book unfolds in five sections, which he compares to the five fingers on a hand: people, self, presence, practice, and friendship.
Throughout the book, Mason intentionally plays with the boundaries of attentiveness to God and people, arguing we cannot have one without the other, “For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen” (1 John 4:20). There is thus an intimate connection between beholding God and beholding people, especially the difficult people in our lives. Mason encourages readers to approach relationships as they would approach prayer, characterized by absorbed attention and surrender rather than transaction and control. The goal of this posture, as with all contemplation, he writes, is “to love right now as we will in heaven.”
Justin Ariel Bailey is dean of chapel at Dordt University and author of Discipling the Diseased Imagination: Spiritual Formation and the Healing of Our Hearts.
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