Teresa Berger's @Worship offers an extended reflection on the relationship between digital culture and liturgical practice. Berger resists the temptation of so many theologians to decry the digital context as necessarily a threat to the sacramental life of the church. This resistance is one of the many triumphs of her book. Berger takes seriously the realities of digital spaces and the ways in which they are interacting with traditional religious practice. Moreover, she takes seriously the digitally mediated Christian practices, stating without qualification that “ignoring these practices is no longer an option” (xi).

Berger states that her focus is “internet-based ecclesial communities (xii).” This specificity allows her to give due time to this specific aspect of digital culture's interaction with the church. However, Berger's insights are so important for the ongoing conversation about this cultural matrix that one wishes her focus were not so circumscribed. Luckily, the foregoing text actually contradicts her insistence that this is her focus. Thankfully, she goes on to spend more time contextualizing the practices in the larger history of mediation and sacramentality in the Christian tradition. When Berger does zero in on digital religious practices, she does so in a way that only a scholar with keen sacramental sensibility can. As a liturgist, Berger understands that the church is fundamentally “multimedia,” and that this must have some bearing on how we understand our new media. Her text manages to balance the richness of the tradition with the possibilities for the church in the digital context. Berger recognizes (rightly) that the digital context has great possibility for both the sacramental sensibility of the church and its self-understanding: “the ancient vision of the communion of saints is present to contemporary worshippers in the nave of the cathedral through the use of digital technologies” (43).

Berger concludes by reflecting on pneumatology in light of the internet. “That this same Holy Spirit,” she writes, “might also appear to be peculiarly adept at moving among pixels should come as no surprise” (115). It is at this point, however, that Berger explains why her text stops short of offering a theology of the internet—or, more specifically, a pneumatology of the digital. She gives three reasons, only the first of which is convincing. Berger rightly resists what she calls the “facile correlation” of taking the “characteristics of digital media” and simply applying them to Revelation. I share Berger's concern here, and believe that it represents one of the persistent challenges to discussing digital culture from a theological perspective. The other two reasons, however, mark a rather abrupt end to the entire text, and do so along substantive rather than practical lines. That is, one would understand Berger insisting that she cannot in this particular work “seek to trace the Spirit's movement among pixels” (105) because one can only do so much in one book. However, she instead makes two related theological points. First, she argues that there is only so much one can say about encountering the divine, especially in prayer. In short, she is articulating the “centuries old” problem of the “limits of all human knowing and speaking” (115). In addition, she recognizes the multimediated world of the digital context, and thus extends the “unsayable” to a specifically media-focused argument. Berger abdicates, “This is where the writers of books reach their limits and have to hand over to the digital natives, the artists, the remixers, the meme-makers, and their imaginative visions” (116). While I appreciate Berger's acknowledgment that the internet is changing the form of knowledge and reflection itself, I fear that this concession only furthers a bifurcation that silos popular culture away from “serious” theological scholarship.

This book is recommended for scholars and graduate students of all theological disciplines. Those in biblical studies may also find Berger's work of great insight for their own work, as she places digital practices in the continuum of mediation that begins with the church's oral and written traditions. Although the text is most suitable for students at the graduate level, pieces of the text are crucial for undergraduate students in courses that take seriously the cultural context vis-a-vis digital technology. Work as insightful as Berger's should not be hidden in graduate seminars; her work is an important theoretical framework for engaging digital culture from a theological perspective, no matter the classroom.