Preface in The Humiliation of the Word
Book Chapter
of Ellul’s forty books (others could have been added), as well as in ten of his six-hundred-odd articles. In Prayer and Modern Man (1970), for example, Ellul examines the difficulties we experience in prayer stemming from our present “tragic crisis…
Chapter 3: Technology: Master or Servant? in The Ethics of Enjoyment: The Christian’s Pursuit of Happiness
Book Chapter
…the pessimists1 is not that some particular technological developments will ruin us. Actually, Jacques Ellul, one of the most influential of them, is an optimist on this point. He maintains that the individual problems caused by technology can be cured…
The Political and Economic Conditions of Freedom of Information
Article
…Ellul) as the act of resisting necessity. One is not free when and where one’s actions are determined for one by habit, by parental or other training, by external authority. “Freedom of information” then must refer to the conditions which…
Chapter 2: Idols and the Word in The Humiliation of the Word
Book Chapter
…speaking. God is the liberator.(Among the countless works on Christian freedom, I refer the reader to Martin Luther’s, and to the following modern studies: Roland de Pury, Le Libérateur [Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1957]; Jacques Ellul, The Ethics of Freedom,…
Process, Creativity, and Technology: Reflections on The Uncertain Phoenix
Article
…but the full working out of its potentialities. Like Jacques Ellul, Hall holds that “[t]echnology obeys hut one rule, the rule of efficiency, and that “[t]he history of technological development shows itself to he the sort of accretive, self-augmenting process…
The Nuclear Reality: Beyond Niebuhr and the Just War
Article
…compelling temptation for human beings to use them. Jacques Ellul probed the deeper reasons why human beings must get control of weapons and weapons systems or be controlled or destroyed by them. In a technological society, Ellul points out, People…
The Nature and Function of Theology
Article
…(New York: Scribner’s, 1948-1949). 23 Ellul‘s principal work is his The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), but see also his The Technological System, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Continuum, 1980). Ellul‘s thought is helpfully analyzed…
Chapter One: Play: A Problem for the Contemporary Person in The Christian at Play
Book Chapter
…am,’ to the action-oriented stance, `I respond, therefore I am.’ “56 Echoing Jacques Ellul, he says, [Our society is] completely orientated toward technique as the instrument of performance, of power, of man’s worship……. So.far.has this worship, or what .we .may…
Chapter 4: Futurism: Projecting and Planning in Christian Biopolitics: A Credo & Strategy for the Future
Book Chapter
…starting point is analysis of the present directions of what Jacques Ellul has called “the technological society.” The central mark of this order, according to Ellul, is technique, “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for…