The Cyberdimension

In 2013, Edward Snowden released a trove of documents revealing the extent of government electronic surveillance. Since then, we have been inundated with reports of vicious malware attacks, election hacking, data breaches, potential cyberwars, fights over Net Neutrality, and fake internet news. Where once discussion of cyberspace was full of hope of incredible potential benefits for humanity and global connection, it has become the domain of fear, anxiety, conflict, and authoritarian impulses. As the cloud of the Net darkens into a storm, are there insights from Christian theology about our online existence? Is the divine present in this phenomenon known as cyberspace? Is it a realm of fear or a realm of hope?
In The Cyberdimension, Eric Trozzo engages these questions, seeking not only a theological means of speaking about cyberspace in its ambiguity, but also how the spiritual dimension of life provokes resistance to the reduction of life to what can be calculated. Rather than focusing on the content available online, he looks to the structure of cyberspace itself to find a chastened yet still expectant vision of divinity amidst the political, economic, and social forces at play in the cyber realm.

""Eric Trozzo's book is a welcome, first-of-its-kind exploration of the deeper 'spiritual' and theological significance of the dominant role of digital media in today's world. Trozzo does not traffic, like many before him, in half-baked metaphors and superficial comparisons, but through an understanding of the technical aspects of the internet persuasively argues that the so-called 'cyberdimension' mimicks, perhaps fatefully, divine incarnation in ways we have never encountered before.""
--Carl Raschke, Professor of Religious Studies, University of Denver and author of Postmodern Theology: A Biopic

""What have internet viruses, cyberware, electrohippies, and disruption to do with theology? Everything! In this page turner of a book, Trozzo succeeds in interweaving core theology, Christology, ecclesiology, and eschatology into an amazing web, a network, with cyber technology, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism. The threads of Tillichian deep dimensions and a cyberdimension tie it all together in the immanent transcendence of true Otherness. I commend this theological engagement in a most timely issue.""
--Else Marie Wiberg Pedersen, Aarhus University, Denmark


Eric Trozzo serves as the Director of the Lutheran Study Centre at Sabah Theological Seminary in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, while also lecturing in theology, philosophy, and ethics. He is also an Honorary Research Associate at Australian Lutheran College, University of Divinity. He is an ordained pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the author of Rupturing Eschatology: Divine Glory and the Silence of the Cross (2014).