Richard Foster, in an interview with Shane Blackshear:

The deepest discipline on the American scene today is silence, because we are absolutely consumed with insane babble…. I've made conscious decisions not to participate in most [social media]. Why? Well, our biggest problem is distraction…. Why should i contribute to the constant noise? let's learn the discipline of large periods of silence.

People don't quite understand that, but it's a spiritual problem when we send out 150 tweets every hour and a half, just to fill our own ego. Why in the world do people want to know what I eat for breakfast? it doesn't help them.

I'm so glad the Bible does not say in the first chapter of john, "and the word became a tweet, and twittered among us." People can tweet if that helps to be relational to someone. But the idea that we have to reduce language that way…

I've mentioned Foster before, and I think his book Celebration of Discipline is a terrific introduction to contemplative practices that get too little attention. Ironically it's possible to grow up in America– even in the religious South, as I did– thinking of meditation as an exclusively Buddhist or Zen practice, and hear very little about centering prayer, or the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, or other forms of Christian contemplation. Though perhaps Pat Robertson and Jim Bakker and Jerry Falwell– the leading evangelical figures of my youth– talked about lectio divino and the Cloud of Unknowing, and I missed it.