06/15/2026
Recent research, such as that presented in Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book, “The Anxious Generation,” suggests that the digital age we are living in is “rewiring” childhood. In this age of constant distraction, the University of Notre Dame’s Contours of Wonder initiative asks an important question: How can the Church help children to recover a sense of wonder?
“Children are natural contemplatives. They’re natural wonderers. Yet the world wants nothing more than to s***f those dispositions out of them. Our digital devices do that handily,” Lesley Kirzeder, the Contours of Wonder Program Director, told Today’s Catholic.
When she says this, Kirzeder speaks both from personal experience as a mother of three sons as well as from well-researched insights gleaned through her previous work as the program director for the Church Communications Ecology program, which, like Contours, was an initiative of the university’s McGrath Institute for Church Life. Through that program, she worked alongside parish communications specialists, pastors and ministers to explore how people are being formed by the use of technology and how the Church should respond.
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Recent research, such as that presented in Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book, “The Anxious Generation,” suggests that the digital age we are living in is “rewiring” childhood. In this age […]
