Foretaste

A note before the bibliography, because it matters more than the bibliography itself: almost nothing in this framework is original. The four pillars are not. The participation taxonomy is not. The foretaste-and-counterfeit binary is not. The appetite test is, in its essentials, Pauline. What is particular to Foretaste is the assembly — the four pillars integrated into one discernment instrument, the binary question made carryable, the participation taxonomy applied specifically to screens and the tools coming after them. Even that is modest.

This page lists the streams we drew from. Every reader who finds the framework helpful should be reading the people below — most of them more deeply than they read us.

The Streams This Draws From

Sacramental participation ontology. Hans Boersma's Heavenly Participation is the book that gives the Participation pillar its name. Boersma argues, recovering a patristic and medieval intuition that Protestant theology had largely lost, that created matter genuinely participates in heavenly realities. The screen, the tool, the made thing — each carries weight because it participates in created goods that participate, finally, in Christ. Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World runs the same intuition through the Orthodox liturgical tradition: the world is given as sacrament, humanity is its priest. Behind both stand the twentieth-century nouvelle théologie recovery (de Lubac, Congar). The bones of the Participation node are theirs.

Positive cultural-mandate theology of technology. Andy Crouch, across Culture Making, The Tech-Wise Family, and The Life We're Looking For, has been doing for decades exactly the corrective the church needs against fear-based theologies of technology — humans are makers, technology is part of the cultural mandate, recognition and relationship are the heart of personhood, magic and mammon are the twin counterfeits. John Dyer's From the Garden to the City is the first sustained evangelical theology of technology that takes formation seriously without lapsing into rejectionism. The Vocation pillar's confidence that making is part of being human comes through them.

Formation and liturgical analysis. Felicia Wu Song's Restless Devices is the strongest contemporary treatment of how the form of our devices catechizes us regardless of their content — the closest book in print to the Formation pillar. James K. A. Smith's Cultural Liturgies trilogy (especially Desiring the Kingdom) gives the deeper grammar: we are what we love, and cultural practices are liturgies that form our loves. Behind these stands the older liturgical insight, lex orandi, lex credendi, that the church always knew about its own worship and is only now reapplying to its devices.

Beholding and spectacle. Tony Reinke's Competing Spectacles and 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You are the closest treatments in print to the Light node — the screen as a rival spectacle competing for the gaze that, in 2 Corinthians 3:18, transforms whoever it lingers on. The Light card and the long-form Light node lean on Reinke directly. Anything we do well on beholding, he was doing first.

Philosophical critique and counterpractice. Albert Borgmann's device paradigm — articulated most fully in Power Failure — gives the secular philosophical case for what Christians ought to know on theological grounds: devices substitute for focal practices, and only deliberate, regular counterpractice resists the substitution. L. M. Sacasas's newsletter The Convivial Society is the contemporary heir to Borgmann; it inherits the questions Ivan Illich (Tools for Conviviality), Jacques Ellul (The Technological Society), Marshall McLuhan, and Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death) opened a half-century ago. The Reform / Restrain / Renounce path runs on assumptions from this stream — the medium is not neutral; the device shapes the user; counterpractice is required.

Closest active match. Bryan Wandel's The Sacramental Technologist series (Center for Christian Thought and Ethics) is the active project closest to ours. Wandel is explicitly applying Boersma's sacramental ontology to technology. Where he has gone first, we have followed; where the framework here goes further, it is most often by being more practical (Wandel is doing the slow theological work), not by being theologically deeper.

Orthodox eschatological foretaste language. The category of foretaste — the eucharistic meal as a real participation in the marriage supper of the Lamb, the Christian life as an unending epektasis into the infinite God — has been carried, with the most precision, by the Orthodox tradition (and by St. Basil's monastic criteria of moderation and simplicity). Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses is the source for the epektasis correction in the Eternal Life section.

What's Distinctive in This Synthesis

The contribution Foretaste tries to make — stated modestly, because it is genuinely modest — is largely integrative. Six small claims:

The four-pillar grid as one discernment instrument. The individual pillars exist in the literature. Their integration as one diagnostic, with the axes (upstream/downstream, human/artifact) made explicit, does not appear in this assembled shape elsewhere that we have found.
"Foretaste or counterfeit?" as a compact, moment-by-moment binary diagnostic for tech use. The two-word folding of the framework into a question that fits in a pocket is, to our knowledge, our particular framing. The biblical category of foretaste is ancient. The application of the foretaste / counterfeit binary as a daily diagnostic for technology use is what we are adding.
The participation taxonomy applied specifically and systematically to screens and the tools coming after them. Boersma supplies the method but applies it to creation and sacrament broadly; Wandel is heading toward the specific application but has not yet laid out the particular participations in a taxonomic shape. The nine goods — Light, Image, Word, Presence, Memory, Gathering, Time, Beauty, Naming — are our specific list, derived from Scripture and tested for fit against the actual structure of contemporary tools.
Bezalel (Ex 31:1–11) as a load-bearing positive text for the vocation of technology. Bezalel appears in the literature as an illustrative figure for sanctified craft, but is rarely set as the centerpiece of a positive theology of technology. We have made him centerpiece because he carries the weight — first Spirit-filled person in Scripture, filled to make things.
Epektasis (Gregory of Nyssa) deployed as the correction to "limitlessness." The pastoral significance of the epektasis correction is, in our reading, underappreciated in contemporary Christian discourse about technology. We have made it central because the screen's signature counterfeit is precisely the misdescription of heaven the correction names.
Cruciform restraint held inside the cultivation path. Most positive theologies of technology under-emphasize the cross. Most cross-centered theologies under-emphasize the positive vocation. We have tried to hold both together by putting cruciform limits as one of the four moves of cultivate, rather than as an alternative to it.

That is the list. It is short on purpose.

Annotated Bibliography

The shelf any reader of Foretaste should be reading from. We have grouped these by stream; within streams, roughly by importance.

Sacramental participation

Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (2011). Start here for the doctrine of participation. The book that names what the church lost and how to receive it again.
Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (1963). The Orthodox liturgical vision of the world-as-sacrament. Short, accessible, foundational.
Henri de Lubac, Catholicism (1938) / The Mystery of the Supernatural (1965). The Catholic nouvelle théologie source for the recovery; harder reading, deeper foundation.

Positive theology of technology

Andy Crouch, The Life We're Looking For (2022). The most accessible recent treatment. Recognition vs. mastery; magic and mammon as twin counterfeits.
Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family (2017). Practical household-shaped reform of the form.
Andy Crouch, Culture Making (2008). The deeper book under the practical ones — humans as makers in service of cultural cultivation.
John Dyer, From the Garden to the City (2011). The earliest sustained evangelical theology of technology that takes formation seriously.

Formation and liturgical analysis

Felicia Wu Song, Restless Devices (2021). The strongest contemporary treatment of how the form of devices forms us. Read alongside this app.
James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (2009). We are what we love; cultural practices are liturgies. Foundational for the Formation pillar.
James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love (2016). The accessible version of Desiring the Kingdom for a wider audience.

Beholding and spectacle

Tony Reinke, Competing Spectacles (2019). The screen as a rival to the spectacle of the gospel. The closest book in print to the Light node.
Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You (2017). Practical and pastoral.

Philosophical critique and counterpractice

Albert Borgmann, Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology (2003). Device paradigm and focal practices, applied to Christian life.
L. M. Sacasas, The Convivial Society (newsletter, ongoing). The best contemporary technology critic anywhere on the web. Read at length.
Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973). Foundational. The book that taught a generation to ask whether a tool can be held without owning its user.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). Still right. The medium is the message; entertainment is not a neutral form.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964). The original case that the form of a medium reshapes what it can carry.
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1954). Heavier reading; the most uncompromising older critique.

Eschatology and the new creation

N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (2008). The clearest recovery of what new creation actually is, against the spiritualized substitutes the church has lived with.
Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses (4th c.). The source for epektasis. Read with a guide — most editions have one.
C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (1941). Heaven not as escape from creaturely life but as its glorification.

Adjacent contemporary

Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness (2018) and You Are Not Your Own (2021). Distraction and identity in a secular age.
Samuel James, Digital Liturgies (2023). Liturgical analysis of digital habits.
Brian Brock, Christian Ethics in a Technological Age (2010). The most theologically serious recent academic treatment.
Bryan Wandel, The Sacramental Technologist (Center for Christian Thought and Ethics, ongoing series). The active project closest to ours.

Older theological foundations

Augustine, Confessions; City of God. The deep grammar of privatio boni and the orientation of love.
John of Damascus, On the Divine Images. The classic theology of the icon — the window-vs-mirror distinction the Image node leans on.
Basil of Caesarea, The Long Rules. Monastic moderation as the older Christian discipline of restraint.

A Small Request

If this framework has been useful, do not stop here. The streams above run deeper than any synthesis can fully carry. The people on this list have given their lives to thinking through what we have only assembled. Read them. Sit with them. Let them correct us where the assembly bent something they got right.

The deepest hope of this app — and of these pages — is that the discernment work it gives a small structure to becomes, over years, the kind of practice that the people on this shelf have been pointing toward all along. Foretaste of Jesus, or counterfeit? is finally their question. We are just trying to make it carryable.

Sources.