The heart of Christian learning?

What is at the heart of Christian education? It's a big question, and I like how Mary Hess addresses it in the first chapter of her book, Engaging Technology in Theological Education (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

Drawing on Parker Palmer's models for learning, she suggests that, rather than centering our learning around the supremely large (and paradoxically confining) subject of "God," we think about putting "the living tradition of the people of God--found first and foremost in the biblical witness" at the heart of our learning (8).

What might this mean for Christian learners? Hess suggests that it means we seek to understand the faithful Christian witness (biblical and otherwise) "because we want to inhabit this script, we want its language and ideas to become our own" (9). She goes on to talk about how we might do just that: learn the "script" of our Christian identity so that we become familiar enough to inhabit it comfortably in many different contexts and even to improvise with it (11-13).

I find this to be such a striking portrayal of what we're about as Christians--learning God's story and exploring how we fit into it. I particularly like the emphasis on navigating different contexts, and Hess points out later than mass media, including online outlets, are now one of the contexts we navigate (14).

So how can media in its multitude of forms (print, film, television, radio, online news outlets, blogs, social networking, etc.) impact our Christian identity? How can it help us grow in our understanding of who we are as Christians and how we fit into the story of God's people? How can it be a distraction or intrusion that draws us away from this identity?