The Silent Intruder
This excerpt is part eight of our summer series, How Shall We Live in the Digital Age?—a collection of short pieces and excerpts from the June 2025 Ex Fonte, exploring how Christians can and should navigate the ever-changing digital landscape.
A conversation with Dr. Autumn Ridenour about her new book Restlessness and Belonging: Augustinian Wisdom for the Digital Empire that explores the digital attention economy using the Augustinian concepts.
What inspired you to write a book about technology?
The inspiration came when I entered teaching after my PhD work—there was something different in terms of the classroom experience. It was the way the students were responding: I felt like there was an intruder in the room, and the intruder was this digital presence—that even if their phones weren’t allowed in the classroom, they were shaping their learning experience, social experience, the ability to relate to one another, and confidence in speaking. Then [I had] an aha! moment: in 2017, I read Jean Twenge’s book, iGen, on how phones have shaped this generation. This was the diagnosis to what I’d been experiencing.
What is the premise of your book?
As my research continued, I was aware that the intruder was tech [and] the attention economy. In the book, I’m asking, What does it mean to be human in a digital empire? It’s a large look at social media, how it’s splintered or fractured our attention from being fully present in the room to be kind of always on.
It’s a look at Augustine in particular, who lived in the fourth and fifth century in the Roman Empire. All his work is in relationship: What does it mean to be human or to be a faithful pilgrim? So, for us, what does it mean to be a faithful pilgrim in the digital empire?
What is the premise of your book? You touch on the Augustinian concept of “knowledge devoid of wisdom”—how is that evident today?
I was reading Augustine’s On the Trinity (De Trinitate)—I think it’s Book 12—it says after the Fall that knowledge and wisdom are separated. In a sense, our knowledge and wisdom are broken. That was a huge revelatory moment for me. For Augustine, of course, wisdom is always going to be tied to the Triune God, and how we are known.
Now we’ve got information moving at vast speeds. It’s what Max Fisher calls the chaos machine, social media. We are imbibing information removed from context. We’re already prone to miscommunication. That’s one of the first things that happens at the Fall in Genesis 3: blaming and miscommunication. I cite a lot of social science and people in tech, and I’m diagnosing the problem in the first two chapters—what it means to be living in a digital environment where we are often more disembodied and removed from one another.
Is the main problem, as you see it, the disembodied communication—the separation between one another?
Yes, I am challenging that we are not seeing the world or seeing each other. The digital lens has, ironically, hindered our vision. It’s like seeing through a glass darkly. I’m not seeing you in the image of God, but I’m seeing an image of the image. So, I’m further removed from the source of who bears God’s image, and I could be in the very same room with you. That’s my Chapter Four, “Face to Face.” We have to relearn how to behold one another face to face and encounter the presence of another. It requires intentionality.
What role should the church have in pushing back against the digital empire?
To help reorient us back toward ultimate love of God as our final good. Augustine’s sense of restlessness, which is the theme in the title of the book, is part of what it means to be human. We are restless: we are constantly trying to put temporal goods in the space of ultimate goods, [but] the temporal will not bring me satisfaction and happiness. Augustine says we are called to use the world to enjoy God. The problem is, we flip that, and we use God to enjoy the world. Technology is one more way that I’m constantly being sold information or commodities. It’s an intensified way that we use the world.
How did this book change you?
It’s still prayerfully changing me to think a lot more about intentional presence. Ironically, to write a book, you have to spend a lot of time by yourself away from the people you love, and behind a screen. Even my kids have acknowledged this, and we’ll joke: I’m on technology to write a book about technology.