TRP on sloth...

[Bonnie Surfus (ENG)]

HEY--can anyone tell me what "acedia" refers to?  I may be able to 
reference this passage in a toalk I'm giving tomorrow, on Luddites and 
tech.  Please help.

Bonnie
On Fri, 22 Sep 1995, Bradley O'Neill wrote:

> Thanks Nicole, I found the sloth article. Now, anybody care to start a
> tangent off of the following?
> 
>  An excerpt from "Nearer, My Couch, to Thee", TRP
> The New York Times Book Review, 6 June 1993, pp. 3, 57.
> 
> 
> "Channel-surfing and VCR-jockeying may require a more nonlinear awareness
> than may be entirely compatible with the venerable sin of Sloth -- some
> inner alertness or tension, as of someone sitting in a yoga posture, or in
> Zen meditation. Is Sloth once more about to be, somehow, transcended?
> Another possibility of course is that we have not passed beyond
> acedia at all, but that it has only retreated from its long-familiar venue,
> television, and is seeking other, more shadowy environments -- who knows?
> computer games, cult religions, obscure trading floors in faraway cities --
> ready to pop up again in some new form to offer us cosmic despair on the
> cheap....Perhaps the future of Sloth will lie in sinning against what now seems
> increasingly to define us -- technology. Persisting in Luddite sorrow,
> despite technology's good intentions, there we'll sit with our heads in
> virtual reality, glumly refusing to be absorbed in its idle, disposable
> fantasies, even those about superheroes of Sloth back in Sloth's good old
> days, full of leisurely but lethal misadventures with the ruthless villains
> of the Acedia Squad."
> 
> 
>