In a little over two weeks, I will attend the Humanae
Vitae Symposium at the Catholic University of America. It has an impressive
speaker line-up, including Archbishop Chaput, Mary Eberstadt, Helen Alvaré, Janet
Smith, and Richard Fehring. To be honest, even though I have attended lectures
or presentations by several of the speakers in the past few decades, new
insights from Humanae Vitae captivate
me like very few things do. This topic is right up there with the importance of
sexual difference and complementarity of man and woman.
Here
is a question I have been pondering: how can Pope Paul VI’s crucial insights be
lived in a culture that has become more heavily dependent on technology? When I started teaching NFP, we were still using flip phones. After the smartphone explosion happened, the 'touch'-screen shift has led to a technological dependency like never before. Even from a teacher's perspective, I checked students' charts on my app, and used it for my own charting needs. We haven’t
had time to digest this shift, and do not know its repercussions. What are the
implications of this subtle turn to dependency on technology, even for
something as benign as charting one’s fertility signs?
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