[56.0] ttyl!
shhh the newsletter is sleeping
Hi pals!
You may have a sense where this is headed given the email subject; your divination powers are so impressive.
Over 55 issues, we’ve covered everything from Mormon trains to doomscrolling to baseball, Bill Gates, and Budwiser. But, after three years hanging out at the messy intersection of religion and technology, it’s time for Divine Innovation to rest and potentially reincarnate as a different thing in due time.
It’s been a delight sharing my cheeky musings with you all, and an even greater delight to receive feedback from you via email, text, Twitter, face-to-face conversation, telepathy, and so forth.
Religion certainly isn’t dead. Tech deffo isn’t either. If anything, these two wield unprecedented power in 1. obvious forms that aren’t responded to adequately (e.g. the Supreme Court + every other branch of government in the US letting a minority rule over everything) and 2. through less visible wavelengths (e.g. our technologized experiences of time).
I still strongly believe in the need to cover religion’s influence on our experiences with technology, and vice versa. But the millennia-old tradition of a sabbatical could do this investigative endeavor some good.
In plainspeak: I’m letting this work develop at its own pace for now, without the pressures of a tri-weekly missive. Allowing more time to dig into the 50+ books stashed under my couch because I ran out of bookshelf space, not to mention the books desperate for attention on my shelves. Or going on some reporting trips to finish some long-overdue hush-hush investigative work. Or waiting for a fuller picture to form before I clickity-clack type out my thoughts. Or letting these thoughts find a home outside Substack dot com, which has suffered from a regrettable, Rowling-esque vibe shift.
I’ll do my darndest to keep you updated on where these queries lead once my synapses and fingertips awake from their slumber. In the meantime, I’ll be sharing my other work here and here, and am always happy to hear from you. (Hear hear!)
The biggest shoutout ever to this newsletter’s editor, Vanessa, whose erudition, patience, humor, and on-the-nose observations elevated and elevated and elevated my writing—deworming every mealy-mouthed sentence that crossed her screen. I couldn’t have found a better thought partner for launching and sustaining a project that means so much to me.
And thank you, reader, for being along for the ride :)
Happy cuffing season,
Adam
Divine Innovation is a somewhat cheeky newsletter on spirituality and technology. It’s written by Adam Willems and edited by Vanessa Rae Haughton. Find the full archive here.