Over the last 75 years, screens have become a ubiquitous part of daily life–from television, to the family computer, to the always accessible smartphone. Dr. Katie Day Good, the 2025 Emerging Public Intellectual (EPI), is bringing a message of hope that we can take greater control of our technology practices.

The EPI award recognizes and fosters emerging talent—those working in the Christian academy who excel in both academic and public spheres and whose work impacts the common good. The award is hosted by Redeemer University and sponsored by Acton Institute, Cardus, the Center for Public Justice, the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), the Henry Institute at Calvin University and the Mouw Institute for Faith and Public Life at Fuller Theological Seminary. Redeemer’s Albert M. Wolters Centre for Christian Scholarship will welcome Good on February 2, 2026 as she gives The World and Our Calling lecture.

Dr. Jessica Joustra, associate professor of religion and theology and director of the Wolters Centre, had this to say about the 2025 EPI winner: “Dr. Good’s work exemplifies deeply Christian scholarship for the common good. In her work, she tackles one of the pressing questions of our time: how might we engage with screens in a way that loves God, self and neighbour? As a Christian, teacher, scholar, parent and screen-user, Dr. Good speaks with grace, wisdom and creativity to this question, offering us the wisdom of the past to help guide and shape our actions today.”

Good is associate professor of communication at Calvin University and author of Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education. Her interest in communication stems from her love of stories–hearing them, telling them and learning from them–and the arrival of the home computer and internet in the 90s during her youth.

“I got a sense for the tremendous possibility to learn about the world beyond my own city, my own community,” says Good. She recalls how she first accessed the internet from her family’s home computer to connect with penpals. She also remembers her great-grandmother returning from global missions trips and sharing stories of her travels through photographs and a slide projector. Inspired by these humble communication devices, Good studied the history of educational technology in graduate school, obtaining master’s and doctorate degrees from Northwestern University.

What we’re discovering as we grow and age with these technologies is that they can also stand in the way of meaningful connection.

“I was driven to understand the history behind the arrival of educational media to American schools and the use practices of these media,” she says. This interest also inspired her book. She found that teachers have often been early adopters of technologies including motion pictures, stereographs, records, illustrated magazines and radio to enliven and increase the effectiveness of their teaching. 

“What also surprised me is that teachers were using these media in a very creative way to broaden their students’ cultural horizons.” Teachers around the world were eager to think about how these technologies could help their students think beyond their borders. It became about an ideal of a more connected planet.

“There was a real cyber optimism in the 1990s, and this idea that the information superhighway would do more than just inform us, it would help us be more connected to our fellow citizens in far away places.”

Flash forward to today, and all is not well in our relationship with technology. “The great promise of a number of our digital technologies is that they would help us feel more connected to others,” says Good. “What we’re discovering as we grow and age with these technologies is that they can also stand in the way of meaningful connection. They can even lead us to feel estranged from our neighbours, from our environment, from God.”

A challenge that lies ahead as our world becomes more digital, Good recently wrote in Christian Scholar’s Review, is learning to live with and use technologies in intentional ways that support our relationships with God and our neighbours. “God made us to be in relationship with each other, and to see each other as image-bearers of God.” She is interested in the possibilities of low-tech and “slow-tech” practices to address the challenges of digital distraction and social isolation that have emerged in recent years and may intensify with AI.

Good and her coauthor Michelle Ciccone recently introduced the term “media quiteracy” in the Journal of Media Literacy Education. This concept argues that consciously choosing to disengage from new media can be a powerful and active learning process for developing critical digital literacy. “Technologies are not neutral but rather they’re laden with values, so we need to think about the values that are inscribed in those technologies and also whether and how to use technology in accordance with our own values.” 

In her research, Good has seen signs of hope. “Something I’ve seen is parents banding together to create landline pods, using landline phones to encourage friendship and independence among their children without having to rely on smartphones.” She also learned about a group of students in Brooklyn, New York self-coined The Luddite Club, who have chosen to unplug and are working to connect young people in tech-free ways.

Good hasn’t just studied this phenomenon from afar. In 2022, she also co-founded Little Tech, a digital literacy service that fosters healthy relationships with screens and technology. The startup runs four-week workshops to help adults simplify their relationships to their smartphones by removing addictive apps and setting them to greyscale. Participants are encouraged to move the bulk of their online activities to a home computer.

Where I find a deep reservoir of hope is when I take extended breaks from technology and re-engage with my community, my family, my church and my students.

Good says this has been a transformative experience for both the participants and herself. “It helped put a kind spatial and temporal boundary around those online activities, and critically, as a parent, it made those activities visible to my kids. The smartphone really obscures a lot of our activities. It can be empowering, it can be fruitful to move those activities onto a shared device.”

The shared home computer is something that Good is thinking a lot about these days. She’s interested in telling the story about this forgotten piece of technology and whether it has practical application for us today. “It’s akin to a kind of hearth in the home. It’s a place where we all gather to talk and learn about the internet together and make our enjoyment of screen media a more communal experience.” She appreciates that as a parent she is able to see what her kids are doing on the computer, what they are interested in and how it can be something they can walk away from. 

Ultimately, she hopes to empower others, including her own family members, to make intentional choices about their technology use.

“We can live with hope in a technological environment where we can often feel discouraged, overwhelmed or chronically distracted. Where I find a deep reservoir of hope is when I take extended breaks from technology and re-engage with my community, my family, my church and my students. In that action of logging off I think we regain our footing.”