12.

"Revolution? What Revolution?" Successes and Limits of Computing Technologies in Philosophy and Religion

Charles Ess

Who can foresee the consequences of such an invention?

Lady Ada Lovelace

Introduction

Computing technologies – like other technological innovations in the modern West – are inevitably introduced with the rhetoric of "revolution." Especially during the 1980s (the PC revolution) and 1990s (the Internet and Web revolutions), enthusiasts insistently celebrated radical changes – changes ostensibly inevitable and certainly as radical as those brought about by the invention of the printing press, if not the discovery of fire.

These enthusiasms now seem very "1990s" – in part as the revolution stumbled with the dot.com failures and the devastating impacts of 9/11. Moreover, as I will sketch out below, the patterns of diffusion and impact in philosophy and religion show both tremendous success, as certain revolutionary promises are indeed kept – as well as (sometimes spectacular) failures. Perhaps we use revolutionary rhetoric less frequently – because the revolution has indeed succeeded: computing technologies, and many of the powers and potentials they bring us as scholars and religionists have become so ubiquitous and normal that they no longer seem "revolutionary" at all. At the same time, many of the early hopes and promises – instantiated in such specific projects as Artificial Intelligence and anticipations of virtual religious communities – have been dashed against the apparently intractable limits of even these most remarkable technologies. While these failures are usually forgotten, they leave in their wake a clearer sense of what these new technologies can, and cannot do.

To see this, I highlight historical and current examples of how computing technologies are used in philosophy and religion. We will see that philosophers have been engaged with computing from its beginnings in the dreams of Leibniz in the seventeenth century¹ and the earliest implementations of electronic computers in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. And, perhaps because of the clear connections between computing technologies and a range of classical philosophical practices (logic) and fields (epistemology, ontology, ethics, political philosophy, etc.), computation has enjoyed an increasingly central place in the philosophical literature of the past fifty years. Indeed, many philosophers speak of a "computational turn" – referring to ways in which computing technologies have given philosophers new kinds of laboratories for testing and refining classical debates and hypotheses.

Similarly, religious studies scholars learned early to exploit the new tools – beginning with Father Roberto Busa's pioneering use of computers in the 1940s to analyze complex texts. More sophisticated versions of these early innovations gradually developed and became commonplace on today's desktops and even palm-held computers. In addition, the impact of computation in religion seems still more powerful in the larger domain of religious practice. In ways consistent with earlier technological innovations – especially such mass media as the radio and television – it is especially the religiously marginalized and proselytizers who have benefited from computation as instantiated in computer networks, i.e., the Internet and the World Wide Web.

In both domains we will see the same general pattern: an early period of enthusiasm, one that rode high on revolutionary – even apocalyptic – promises of radical transformation, followed by a quieter period of diffusion and incorporation of computing technologies within philosophical and religious domains. Hegel would remind us that it is in this relative quiet, aided now by a rich history of examples, that we are able to evaluate more critically and carefully the strengths and limits of these remarkable technologies.

Philosophy

"love of wisdom" (ϕιλoσoϕα) – systematic and rational inquiry into what is (metaphysics, ontology), how we may know (epistemology), how we may think cogently and avoid error (logic), and, especially given some account of who we are as human beings and our relation(s) to the larger world (possibly including divinity/ies), how we should behave individually and in community (ethics, politics).

The computational turn: logic, AI, ethics

Arguably, computing is philosophy – specifically, the branch of philosophy concerned with logic. Our computing devices depend on the logical system developed by George Boole in the 1840s and 1850s; prior to Boole, a number of philosophers in the modern era – most notably, Leibniz – concerned themselves with the possibilities of machines that might automate reasoning as the manipulation of symbols (Dipert 2002: 148). Hence, it is perhaps not surprising that some of the earliest applications of computing technology in philosophy were precisely in the area of logic – in efforts both to exploit the computer as a logical calculating device (e.g., for assessing argument validity and generating valid conclusions from specified premises; ibid.) as well as to automate the teaching of logic (perhaps most notably by Patrick Suppes, beginning in 1963: see Suppes, Home page).

Moreover, as computers automate and expand our ability to undertake logical analyses, they not only offer new ways of accomplishing classical logical tasks (from truth-table analysis through proofs to advanced logical applications – e.g., Tarski's World, etc.: see Barwise and Etchemendy 1999), they further open up distinctively new ways of exploring classical philosophical questions. One of the earliest, and most obvious, examples of this "computational turn" in philosophy is the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) – the effort to replicate human consciousness and reasoning through computing devices, prominent especially in the 1950s through the early 1990s. Computers provided philosophers with a laboratory in which to empirically test and refine hypotheses about the nature of reason and consciousness. Initially, so-called "hard" AI proponents believed and argued that machines would quickly outstrip human intelligence. It appears, however, that the hard AI agenda has largely moved to the margins – primarily because of repeated failures to live up to early promises. As in the natural sciences, however, both successes and failures are instructive: the successful efforts to instantiate at least some components of human reasoning in machines has helped philosophers sharpen their sense of how far computation and consciousness overlap – while the failures help demarcate how computation and human reasoning remain intractably distinct from one another. Indeed, there is a recent turn in philosophy – in fields as diverse as hermeneutics, phenomenology, and feminism – towards embodiment as a key theme of exploration: philosophers such as Albert Borgmann and Hubert Dreyfus use an understanding of who we are as embodied creatures to explore the strengths and limits of technology, including computing technologies, in contemporary life. In particular, Dreyfus recognizes the (limited) achievements of AI and the (limited) pedagogical advantages of distance learning via the Web and the Internet, but he further argues that these technologies do not help us acquire our most distinctive and important human capacities – those of making commitments, taking risks, and exercising phronesis (Aristotle's term for practical judgment and wisdom) in our ethical and political lives.

Indeed, the creators of modern computing technology have been aware from the outset that these new devices raise, precisely, questions of ethics with regard to the use of these systems, politics with regard to their potential social and political impacts, etc. As Bynum points out (2001), Norbert Wiener, in what amounts to the first book of computer ethics (Wiener 1950), recognized that computing technologies will impact, for better and for worse, life and health, knowledge and science, work and wealth, creativity and happiness, democracy and freedom, and inter/national concerns with peace and security. In Bynum's view, moreover, Wiener sets the agenda for the field of computer ethics – a field that begins to emerge only slowly in the 1960s and 1970s, but now includes an extensive literature, including the journal Ethics and Information Technology. More broadly, the computational turn is now well documented not only in AI and ethics, but also, for example, in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, epistemology, ontology, and so forth (Bynum and Moor 1998, 2003). Indeed, the late 1990s and early twenty-first century saw the emergence of philosophy of information as one way to provide a systematic overview of the impact of computing in virtually every domain of philosophy (Floridi 2003).

Hypertext

In the 1980s, both philosophers and other humanities scholars were excited by a new form of "non-linear" text made possible by computing technologies – hypertext. While the theoretical reflections and software experiments of such hypertext pioneers as Jay David Bolter and George Landow were most prominent – at least some philosophers were likewise quite interested in the potential of hypertext to open up at least alternative forms of argument. The best known of these, David Kolb, has in fact argued that hypertexts will make possible the recovery of argument forms (e.g., Hegel's dialectic) which are only awkwardly expressed in the (largely) linear frameworks of print.

CD-ROM databases (ethics, history of philosophy)

After appearing in the 1980s, CD-ROMs seemed the perfect medium for realizing extensive hypermedia programs and databases. Two examples can be mentioned here. First, effective hypermedia resources have been developed for exploring and teaching ethics (e.g., Cavalier et al. 1998). These resources are especially useful as they provide video documentary and interviews to bring more abstract discussion of general principles down to the fine-grained contexts of real persons facing specific ethical problems in particular contexts.

Second, while originally defined as a Greek classics project – i.e., focused on collecting primary and secondary literary and historical texts, as well as architectural, historical, and cultural resources (including extensive visual images of important sites, artifacts, etc.) -the second edition of the Perseus Project (Perseus 2.0 1996) also included both the Greek and English texts of Plato and Aristotle. Like its counterparts in Biblical studies, the Perseus CD-ROM not only provides an electronic library of these primary texts, but also allows for text searches and analyses. For example, I can find – more or less instantly – every example of Plato's use of the term ("cybernetes", a steersman, or pilot, and thus figuratively, the Divine as directing the destiny of humans – and the root, not coincidentally, of "cybernetics") as well as related terms. Through hypertext linking, the program can further take me to each example in the Platonic text, as well as provide morphological analyses. Such searches, of course, accomplish in minutes what might otherwise take weeks, months, or years of reading.

At the same time, however, while these are extraordinary resources and tools, they are also quite limited. While the primary and secondary texts made available on CD-ROM are extensive – and supplemented, of course, by a constantly growing electronic library on the Web – only a relatively small percentage of the literatures important to philosophers has been digitized. Moreover, word searches and morphological analyses are important components of scholarship – but they are only a very small component of our research, reflection, and writing. As with the specific history of AI, philosophers (and, it appears, religion scholars) are gaining a more realistic and nuanced appreciation of the strengths and limits of computing technologies in their disciplines, precisely as the successful resources and tools simultaneously mark out what the technologies cannot do (at least so far).

Computer-mediated communication

The sorts of communication most familiar to us in terms of the Internet and the Web also serve as a philosophical laboratory, one that allows philosophers to revisit classical questions in the domains of ontology, epistemology (including semiotics, hypertext, and logic), the meaning of identity and personhood (including issues of gender and embodiment), and ethical and political values (especially those clustering about the claim that these technologies will issue in a global democracy vs. the correlative dangers of commercialization and a "computer-mediated colonization": see Ess 2003).

The Internet and the World Wide Web

Interestingly enough, major projects in both philosophy (Perseus) and religious studies (Diana Eck's On Common Ground) that began on CD-ROM have migrated to the Web to join additional "electronic libraries" and online search engines. Two significant examples of online philosophical resources are the Hippias search engine and website, and Lawrence Hinman's Ethics Updates site.

Finally, these computer networks have made possible what is now the presumed environment of philosophical scholarship – namely e-mail, listservs, extensive online databases and search engines, and countless websites (of varying quality) that collect and "publish" (often) significant resources. It is commonly observed that, in contrast with the high-profile projects and experiments, in the end, it is the relatively low-tech tools that make the most difference – in this case, e-mail and listservs. Despite the explosion of scholarly resources and specialized tools available online and on CD-ROM, it remains debatable as to whether the computer revolution has markedly improved philosophical debate, scholarship, or insight (Dipert 2002). Nonetheless, the ability for scholars, geographically remote from one another and positioned at institutions of varying resources and prestige, to communicate directly with one another through e-mail and listservs organized by interests and specialties is arguably "revolutionary" indeed. At the same time, however, this ability is now a commonplace.

Religion

"rebinding" – religio – between the human and the sacred, expressed both individually and in community in terms of beliefs, values, practices, rituals, etc.; religious studies – academic studies of multiple aspects of religion, including studies of scriptures and beliefs, as well as through a range of disciplines such as sociology, psychology, philosophy, philology, history, etc.

While philosophers were closely involved with the development and early uses of computing technologies because of their disciplinary focus on logic, religious scholars were among the first to explore applications of computing in textual analysis. More recently, however – beyond the use of the Web and the Internet by believers and discussants – there appear to be comparatively fewer religiously oriented computing projects (perhaps because religious studies are among the most marginalized and underfunded in the academy?). As a representative example: the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia – arguably one of the most important centers for developing computing-based humanities applications – lists only two projects (out of some fifty or so) that focus on some aspect of religious studies. On the other hand, the open communicative environments of the Internet and the Web, while appropriated in much the same way among religious scholars as among philosophers, by contrast have been taken up with explosive energy by more or less every religious tradition whose representatives enjoy Internet access.

The use of computing technologies in religious scholarship

In the 1940s, Father Roberto Busa began developing techniques for encoding complex texts in ways that could be manipulated by computers – first of all, to develop a concordance for the corpus of Thomas Aquinas, followed by a more extensive project to develop a hypertextual edition of Aquinas that allowed for multiple levels of linking and comparison (Thomae Aquinatis Opera Omnia cum hypertextibus in CD-ROM). At least one Bible concordance (for the then new Revised Standard Version of the Bible) was also generated in the 1950s using a computer. As computers became (somewhat) less expensive and more widespread through the 1960s and 1970s, religious scholars began to develop ways of exploiting the computer's storage and processing abilities to undertake complex text analyses (Harbin 1998). Just as philosophers hoped to make the machine take over foundational but repetitive tasks of logical calculation, so their colleagues in religious studies sought to use the machine to take on the tedium of word counts and comparisons.

As microcomputers and CD-ROMs made processing and storage increasingly inexpensive in the 1980s, descendants of these early text-base and concordance projects moved to the desktops and laptops of religious scholars. First of all, Bible database projects flourished – i.e., collections of Bible texts, translations, and commentaries, with basic computing features (indexing, word searches, note-taking) that support both elementary and more advanced sorts of grammatical and textual analysis. These range from the historically oriented History of the English Bible (Beam and Gagos 1997) to such significant resources as Bible Works. These new technologies further allow other sorts of databases – for example, Diana Eck's On Common Ground CD-ROM and subsequent website that documents religious diversity in the USA.

On the one hand, these resources fulfill some of the fondest dreams of scholars. BibleWorks, for example, allows for complex searches through multiple Bibles – translations as well as critical editions in Greek and Hebrew. A scholar can accomplish in minutes an inquiry that would otherwise take weeks or months. This is the analogue to the way computing technologies have indeed revolutionized mathematics, the sciences, and logic by turning over to the machine repetitive tasks that would otherwise take humans months, years, and lifetimes to perform (cf. Hardmeier 2000). On the other hand, as in philosophy, the impact of these new resources and abilities on the quality and quantity of scholarship remains a very open question. In particular, computer-adept scholars observe that these resources exploit only the most basic potentials of the computer, and – echoing the Socratic critique of the technology of writing as leading to the appearance, but not the substance, of wisdom – run the danger of giving the untutored amateur the appearance, if not conviction, that s/he now knows as much as any Bible scholar.

More fundamentally, the emergence of these new technologies themselves – again, especially as interpreted through the lenses of postmodernism – all but required scholars in religion to consider and respond to what many began to see as the emerging "secondary orality of electronic culture" (so one of the premier theologically oriented theorists of new media: Walter Ong, 1988: 135–8, cited in O'Leary and Brasher 1996: 246). In response, the American Bible Society (after bringing out one of the first CD-ROM Bible databases) undertook an ambitious series of projects to "transmediate" important Christian narratives – i.e., to translate these, using scholarly approaches and principles of translation, into the multimedia environments made possible by computing technologies; to synthesize music, visual images, and scholarly resources as an environment for "telling the story" in a way intended to be attractive especially to younger people, who are oriented primarily to electronic visual media (American Bible Society 1995). Despite considerable investment and remarkable talent, however, these projects have met with only limited success in the religious marketplace.

Religious scholarship on the Web

As for philosophers, the Internet and the Web have diffused into the commonplace practices and environment of religious scholars. Beyond the explosive development of sites on the Web by diverse faith communities, there is also to be found a reasonably extensive but largely pedestrian use of the Internet and the Web to support

• listservs on scholarly topics of interest to religion scholars and lay persons;

• sites for religious studies professionals (e.g., the American Academy of Religion) that offer relatively little in terms of use or pointers towards use of computing technolo gies, but rather make use of the Web – sensibly – as an easily updateable archive for such things as their online syllabus project, etc.; and

• portal sites (e.g., Oxford University [Fraser 2000], the Society of Biblical Literature's Electronic Publications and Technology Resources for Biblical Studies) that list both institu tionally based resources and often very rich and helpful sites put up by individual scholars.

As with philosophers, these now relatively low-tech uses of the computing technology may have the most significance as they expand access to resources and the ability to communicate with geographically distant scholars who share similar interests.

The Internet, the Web, and religious communities

Whatever the potentials and impacts of computing technologies for religious scholars, religious communities have exploited the Internet and the Web with extraordinary energy. This religious colonization of cyberspace began first of all as the Internet and the Web afforded safe havens for those otherwise at the margins of North American religious life, e.g., Wiccans, Pagans, New Age seekers, etc., as well as (if more gradually) representatives of the world traditions such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. (O'Leary and Brasher 1996; Larsen 2001).

This enthusiasm was fueled (as elsewhere) by the rise of postmodernism, especially as postmodernism was theoretically conjoined with the technologies of hypertext and then the Web through such theorists as Jay David Bolter and George Landow. As postmodernism made its way into religious scholarship and theology, it was embraced especially by Evangelicals and Pentecostals, as postmodernism promised to unseat modern rationalism – and thus shift epistemological legitimacy and authority to emotive experience (e.g., the feeling of being saved), and undermine rationalist approaches to Scripture such as the historical-critical method, thereby eliminating the chief nemesis of Fundamentalist interpretation. More broadly, this trajectory has led to a number of insightful analyses of the relationship between new media and religion – including texts that both celebrate the media's ostensibly liberatory/revolutionary potentials (e.g., Careaga 2001) and those that directly challenge postmodernist communication theories by documenting how traditional religious beliefs and assumptions have shaped and constrained the development and use of the new technologies (e.g., Davis 1998; see Ess 2001, 2004 for an overview of this development and relevant literature).

Currently, the plethora of sites on the Web devoted to religion staggers the imagination: a Google search on "religion", for example, will turn up some 13–8 million hits. As yet, there is no authoritative study of this massive inventory. Two studies in progress suggest, however, an interesting pattern:

Evangelical/Pentecostal/Fundamentalist sites more fully exploit the interactive nature of online communication to proselytize; while sites representing the online "face" of more mainstream and conservative traditions – including the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church – largely provide extensive databases of authoritative texts and pronouncements, and relatively little interactive opportunity.

This pattern, moreover, is consistent with other studies that show, for example, that initial grassroots efforts to exploit the Internet and the Web for political activism are soon squeezed out as extant power centers learn, if somewhat more slowly, how to use the Web and the Net to re-establish their dominance and centrality online. Similarly, more ecumenical proponents of online religion hope that a global Internet may facilitate a global, dialogical culture that fosters the many voices of diverse religious traditions in a new pluralism. But the emerging patterns of use of the Internet, while giving a certain advantage to previously marginalized traditions, rather largely reflect and preserve the existing religious landscape, i.e., one marked far more often by allegiance to one's own tradition and proselytizing on its behalf.

Concluding Remarks

Should this overview be even approximately correct, it is then notable for two reasons. First of all, through the larger perspectives of research (including cross-cultural research) on computer-mediated communication (CMC), this curve from initial enthusiasm to more pedestrian applications fits the larger pattern of development from the 1980s and 1990s to the late 1990s and early noughties (so the British say) – i.e., from the heyday of postmodernism to a "post-post-modern" period that represents more of a hybrid between postmodernism and whatever came before it. Secondly, this pattern suggests that, indeed, the revolution has succeeded in certain remarkable ways – so much so that we no longer regard computer-based resources and tools as "revolutionary", but simply as "normal" elements of our lives – while at the same time, the multiple failures in philosophy and religion to exploit computing technologies have left a significant portion of our work and lives relatively untouched.

In my own case: I still marvel at having nearly instantaneous access to a remarkable library of important texts – both Biblical and philosophical – not only on my desktop computer, but also my palm-held computer, and that I can undertake searches that help me locate a familiar quote, and perhaps uncover new patterns and insights. In these ways, these computer-based resources and tools certainly enhance my scholarship and teaching. At the same time, as a number of contemporary observers of technology caution, the affordances of these technologies – what they make easy for me to do – thereby encourage me to pursue the paths they facilitate, and perhaps thereby discourage other aspects of scholarship and teaching that, as yet unreduced to computational algorithms, remain comparatively more difficult. As well, the very ubiquity and commonplace character of these technologies may discourage us from attending more carefully to whatever more subtle and long-term consequences they may have for us as scholars and as human beings.

But even these critical reflections, finally, may be an indication of the success and maturity of the computing revolution in philosophy and religion: perhaps like other revolutions we now take for granted, the computing revolution has proceeded far enough along to allow us to critically evaluate both its strengths and its limits.

See also chapter 4: Classics and the Computer; chapter 8: Literary Studies; chapter 10: Multimedia.

Notes

1 In the Science Museum (London) exhibition "Charles Babbage and his Calculating Engine", mounted on the occasion of the bicentennial of Babbage's birth and the Museum's realization of Babbage's "Difference Engine No. 2", the following is attributed to Leibniz in 1685: "It is unworthy for excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used."

References for Further Reading

American Bible Society (1995). A Father and Two Sons: Luke 15.11–32, CD-ROM. New York: American Bible Society.

American Philosophical Association. Web Resources. Accessed October 26, 2002. At http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/resources/.

Barwise, Jon and John Etchemendy (1999). Language, Proof, and Logic (text/software package). New York: Seven Bridges Press.

Beam, Kathryn and Traianos Gagos, (eds.) (1997). The Evolution of the English Bible: From Papyri to King James, CD-ROM. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

BibleWorks (2002). CD-ROM, 2 disks. Norfolk, VA: BibleWorks. At: http://www.bibleworks.com.

Bolter, Jay David (1991). Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Borgmann, Albert (1999). Holding onto Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Brasher, Brenda (2001). Give Me that Online Religion. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Bynum, Terrell Ward (2001). Computer Ethics: Its Birth and Its Future. Ethics and Information Technology 3: 109–12.

Bynum T. W. and J. H. Moor, (eds.) (1998). The Digital Phoenix: How Computers are Changing Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell.

Bynum T. W. and J. H. Moor, (eds.) (2003). Cyberphilosophy. Oxford: Blackwell.

Careaga, Andrew (2001). eMinistry: Connecting with the Net Generation. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel.

Cavalier, Robert, Preston Covey, Elizabeth A. Style, and Andrew Thompson (1998). The Issue of Abortion in America, CD-ROM. London and New York: Routledge.

Davis, Erik (1998). Techgnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Dipert, Randall R. (2002). The Substantive Impact of Computers on Philosophy: Prolegomena to a Computational and Information-theoretic Metaphysics. Metaphilosophy 33, 1/2 (January): 146–57.

Dreyfus, Hubert (2001). On the Internet. London and New York: Routledge.

Eck, Diana (2002). On Common Ground: World Religions in America, CD-ROM, 2nd edn. Affiliated web site: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~pluralsm/.

Ess, Charles (2001). The Word Online? Text and Image, Authority and Spirituality in the Age of the Internet. Mots Pluriels 9 (October). At http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP1901ce.html.

Ess, Charles (2003). Philosophy of Computer-mediated Communication. In Luciano Floridi (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Information and Computing. Oxford: Blackwell.

Ess, Charles (2004). Critical Thinking and the Bible in the Age of New Media. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

Floridi, Luciano, (ed.) (2003). The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information. Oxford: Blackwell.

Fraser, Michael and the Centre for Humanities Computing (2000). Computing Resources for Theology: An Introduction. Humanities Computing Unit, Oxford University. Accessed October 26, 2002. At http://info.ox.ac.uk/ctitext/theology/theolit.html.

Harbin, Duane (1998). Fiat Lux: The Electronic Word. In Formatting the Word of God (Exhibition catalogue, Bridwell Library, Dallas, Texas). Accessed October 31, 2002. At http://www.smu.edu/bridwell/publications/ryrie_catalog/xiii_1.htm.

Hardmeier, Christof (2000). Was ist Computerphilologie? Theorie, Anwendungsfelder und Methoden - eine Skizze [What is computer philology? A sketch of theories, fields of application, and methods]. In C. Hardmeier and W.-D. Syring (eds.), Ad Fontes! Quellen erfassen - lesen - deuten. Was ist Computerphilologie? Ansatzpunkte und Methodologie - Instrumente und Praxis [To the fonts! Understanding - reading - pointing to sources. What is computer philology? Beginning points and methodologies - instruments and praxis] (pp. 9–31). Amsterdam: VU University Press.

Hinman, Lawrence. Ethics Updates. Accessed October 26, 2002. At http://ethics.acusd.edu/index.html.

Hippias Limited Area Search of Philosophy on the Internet. Accessed October 26, 2002. At http://hippias.evansville.edu/.

Kolb, David (1996). Discourse across Links. In Charles Ess (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives on Computer-mediated Communication (pp. 15–26). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Landow, George (1992). Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Larsen, Elena (2001). Cyberfaith: How Americans Pursue Religion Online. Pew Internet and American Life Project. At http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/pdfs/PIP_CyberFaith_Report.pdf.

Lawrence, Bruce B. (2000). The Complete Idiot's Guide to Religions Online. Indianapolis: Macmillan.

O'Leary, Stephen D. and Brenda E. Brasher (1996). The Unknown God of the Internet. In Charles Ess (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives on Computer-mediated Communication (pp. 233–69). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Ong, W. J. (1988). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge.

Perseus 2.0. (1996). CD-ROM. New York and London: Yale University Press.

Society of Biblical Literature. Electronic Publications and Technology Resources for Biblical Studies. Accessed October 26, 2002. At http://www.sbl-site.org/e-resources.html.

Suppes, Patrick. Home page. Accessed October 26, 2002. Philosophy Department, Stanford University. At http://www.stanford.edu/~psuppes/.

Wiener, Norbert (1950). The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.