M ust we have a church of either techno-savvy modernists or dull conservatives? No. Conservatives need to have enough backbone to become repristinators, and enough vision to become techno-savvy. It is well-known that Lutheranism was originally spread by means of the printing press, which was a technological innovation in its time. At one point, half the presses in Europe were busy just printing Luther's works. But we did not stop at adopting innovative technologies. We also used innovative media. Not just theological treatises, but cartoons were used to spread the Reformation message.
This section of the oldsolar website will be devoted to the use of media in spreading our Reformation heritage. One idea driving this section will be, what would the Reformers have done if they had our current technologies to employ? We are not the first people to ask this question. But I think we will be exploring it more broadly than others. For there are many approaches suggested by just the one question.
Would they have produced a Gutenberg Bible in Flash? Or would they have been savvy enough to use Flash to do what Flash does best? (Would the Reformation have gotten anywhere if the Luther Bible took hours for the first page to load? Nobody was ever tempted to press "Skip Intro" in Luther's day.) If they used Flash well, would their Renaissance design sense have been thoroughly modernized, or could it alter how they used our media even when they were using it according to its strengths?
This section of our site will contain both resources to use, and discussions of design philosophy shaped by our tradition. We will be much more careful about maintaining a pristine theology than in staying within "proper bounds" with design. For part of what we wish to do with our graphics is to gain attention for our material. We can likely do this even if some of our design choices are less than ideal.