Surface Tensions: Searching for Sacred Connection in a Media-saturated World - Softcover

A millennial through and through, Nathan Robert’s book recounts his adventures in the new media jungle, blending personal experience with media theory, philosophy, literature, and theology to meditate on the question: How do we, and how should we, behave and believe in a media-saturated world?

Nathan’s adventures span the American landscape. In a journey that moves from suburban California, to rural Texas, to downtown Manhattan and back again, his story explores the often maddening, sometimes heart-wrenching, power of today’s media to create simultaneous presence and absence, as it reproduces (increasingly) powerful art and the uncanny echoes of other lives.

With humor and insight, Robert’s story calls us to conceive of “media” not only as a tangled postmodern phenomenon, a media jungle of befuddling proportions, but as a digital architecture that creates real meeting space where we can become ourselves, commune with others, and meet the God who created a world immediate, sensual, and oblique all at once, a world of surfaces illuminated by his presence.