The Reverend Dr.

In 2006, I served as Summer Minister for the Community Church of New York in midtown Manhattan, and a large part of my role then was supporting lay preachers who were leading Sunday services downstairs in the air-conditioned Fellowship Hall. The only summertime sermon I can now recall, twenty years later, was an impassioned plea delivered by a beloved pillar of that community, who titled her sermon simply “Cell Phones and Me.” In retrospect, it was as much screed as sermon; it was a powerful protest against the encroachment of mobile phones into every imaginable city space, including the crosstown bus and the corner bodega, spots near and dear to her heart. The preacher made no secret of her annoyance at the shrinking of what we might call the commons, those public places we simultaneously inhabit, where we could have chance encounters with strangers and neighbors alike. Why were her fellow New Yorkers so insistent on having conversations with people elsewhere, she wanted to know, instead of with one another? If her sermon had a subtitle, I imagine it would have been “Hang Up, Already”.

No one did, though. I cannot remember what kind of cell phone I carried at the time; it could have been a slide or a flip phone or a Blackberry complete with it own miniature keyboard; I had one of each of those at some point in the early Aughts. What I did not have — what none of us had then — was a smartphone, since none were commercially available. The first iPhone was not brought to market until 2007. Siri appeared on it 2010 and ChatGPT in 2023. What I do not think our impassioned lay preacher could have imagined that summer before smartphones appeared on the mass market was that soon people would be speaking not to other people elsewhere, but to the phones themselves. Today live in a period of both astonishing technological innovation and profound social isolation. The latest estimates are that Americans spend four to five hours a day on their phone, with the majority of those surveyed saying they believe they use their smartphones too much.

This June, to mark the start of summer, The New York Times ran series of four weekly series of articles in its “Touch Grass Challenge.” The Times encouraged readers “to ‘touch grass’… to put down your phone and reconnect with the real world”, and strategies to facilitate that, such as taking daily walks outdoors and reading actual books at bedtime. Summertime gives each of us a marvelous opportunity to experiment with and even embrace different rhythms and gentler ways of being human. It might be the best time for each of us to try to “touch grass” — and far fewer of our devices. 

At sleep-away summer camps across the country, young campers have been asked to surrender their smartphones and other digital devices for weeks at a stretch, much to their parents’ gratification. People planning their summer vacation have begun seek out remote rental cabins that have been intentionally kept off the grid from companies with names like Unplugged, which makes a promise alongside a pitch. Recently, a woman told me how delighted she was when she discovered, while away at a retreat center, that she had forgot her phone charger. She said the letting her battery die proved to be the most renewing thing that happened while she was there. Imagine! Outdoor outfitters have taken to touting the appeal of an “analogue summer” and increasingly, people seem sold on the notion.