A Chapter from My New Book

Exclusive preview of "Digital Liturgies"

Note: Below is an exclusive excerpt from my book Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age. You can now order the book from Crossway and other publishers.

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Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film Inception tells a fictional story about a technology called “dream-sharing,” invented at some indeterminate point in the future, that allows participants to enter into one another’s dreams via their subconscious. The main character, Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), is a professional “dream hacker” who is skilled at entering into people’s dreams and navigating their subconscious to find valuable information. At the behest of a billionaire CEO, Cobb assembles an expert team of hackers to invade the mind of a rival business tycoon and plant in his mind the desire to break up his company.

The movie is a dazzling thriller, filled with spectacular action sequences and mind-bending visual effects. But it’s also a subtly profound parable. Perhaps more so than any other major Hollywood movie before it, Inception is a genuinely insightful and disturbing meditation on the relationship between mankind and its technologies. As the film progresses and its main characters develop, the dream-sharing device turns out to be a terrifyingly apt metaphor.