by Tim Shapiro

Recently the popular game show Jeopardy welcomed a rather odd contestant. The contestant, named Watson, was a powerful IBM computer. Watson arrived ready to play. Watson’s challengers were the two most successful competitors in Jeopardy’s history: Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. As the challenge began, the question was just how good of a competitor would Watson—the computer— turn out to be against these two talented human beings.

Well, Watson the computer was really good at Jeopardy. As it quickly became clear, Watson was incredibly smart about all subjects and quick-as-an-Indy-500-car when it came to ringing in on the all-important buzzer. It didn’t matter if the subject was science or literature or economics, Watson proved to be an excellent resource. By almost every measure, Watson was faster and smarter than Jennings and Rutter.

Well, almost smarter. On a few notable occasions, Watson came up with not only incorrect answers, but implausible answers. One time he repeated the wrong answer that had seconds before been provided by Ken Jennings. When asked in Final Jeopardy the name of a United States city with two airports named after references to World War II (“What is Chicago?”), Watson answered “Toronto,” perhaps leading the Canadian ambassador to the United States to put in a call to the State Department.

It seems that when it comes to certain information tasks, humans are still better equipped than the best computers (okay, yes, Watson was impressive).

Filmmaker Steven Rosenbaum has just published a new book titled Curation Nation. What’s the book about? Well, Rosenbaum argues that people are overwhelmed by too much information. To make sense of this world—and to make decisions—people need an experience that takes advantage of all the data available through the Internet and provides human sorting and filtering in ways that search engines like Google (or a computer named Watson) can’t achieve.

Rosenbaum asserts that individuals and organizations that do this—schools, medical facilities, business, non-profits, and (I would add) congregations—become trusted, valuable sources in an otherwise meaningless chaos of digital noise.

A generation ago, historian Henry Stout published a classic entitled The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England. A common theme for many colonial sermons was the covenantal relationship between God and the colonial states, which was not unlike (in the preacher’s mind) the relationship between God and ancient Israel.

Perhaps even more interesting, though, was how the early New England preacher was the channel of information for congregants. And not just about the Bible, but about the Bible and life. Preaching provided both religious education and education about many other subjects. It had a journalistic function. It supplied, as Stout wrote in 1986, “all the key terms necessary to understand existence in this world and the next.”   The “topical range and social influence” of the New England sermon “were so powerful in shaping cultural values, meanings, and a sense of corporate purpose that even television pales in comparison.”

The pastor was “curate,” someone who provides cure for souls. But the pastor was also “curator”—similar to the curator of a museum—by functioning as both an information steward and one who discerned what information was worth sharing and what was worth discarding.

What would happen now if a pastor were considered such a resource person? In what ways would this recover the tradition of the clergy as a resident (practical) theologian? How would such a “curate” and “curator” honor the gifts and talents of the laity in ways that would otherwise not be as fully developed? What would it mean for a congregation to view itself as a “curated” resource center for the soul of the wider community?

Pastors—and other congregational leaders—could become not so much the leaders of the congregation (in the 21st- century definition of “leadership”) but theological hosts to the banquet of resources that would enable congregants to live abundant lives for the common good.

Maybe “curation” is another name for good pastoral practice. After all, our religious claims and commitments about God have always needed a human intermediary for us to make sense of the grand vision of God’s realm and the hope that God is somehow in the details. Nowadays, there is just too much information to leave it to experts (those with power or celebrity) to figure it all out. And individuals still can’t do it as a lonesome, computer mediated exercise either (ever try diagnosing medical symptoms via the Internet?).

Congregations need curates. They also need curators. They need a form of congregational leadership and learning that takes seriously the cure of souls in the midst of too much religious and cultural data. Sometimes, for the good of our souls, abundance must be mediated. Or we end up in Toronto when all along we simply wanted to land in Chicago.

Additional resources:

The Pastor, by Eugene Peterson.

Tell It Like It Is, by Lillian Daniel.