Numbers are telling. On average, Americans spend nearly 5 hours a day on their phones. Research shows that 45% consider themselves addicted to their devices. Our hands naturally pick them up, open a screen, and voila, we enter another world. Yet there’s another technology that also helps us enter other worlds: a far older technology that might be considered an anecdote to our phone addiction… books. Good fiction, in particular.

In this talk, Dr. Cassandra Nelson (Ph.D., Harvard) will discuss promises connected to technology and the ways technology fulfills — or fails to fulfill — those promises. She will compare the benefits of 21st century technology to the benefits of reading good fiction. And she will consider with us the question core to our scrolling and reading: What are we looking for?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Cassandra Nelson is a visiting fellow at the Lumen Center and an associate fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. Her scholarship centers on faith and technology in American literature and contemporary culture, and has appeared in publications such as Plough, Comment, Common Good, First Things, and The Point. Her first book, A Theology of Fiction, began as an essay of the same name for First Things and will be published in substantially expanded form by Wiseblood Books in early 2025.

From 2015 to 2018, she taught literature and composition at the United States Military Academy, where she developed a profound interest in virtue ethics, character education, and effective, inspiring writing pedagogy for first-year undergraduates.

Education

Ph.D., English, Harvard University

M.A., Editorial Studies, Boston University

B.A., English, Boston University