CathNews New Zealand

“The kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these,” Jesus said of little children. But computer hackers might give the kids some competition, according to Antonio Spadaro, an Italian Jesuit priest.

In an article published earlier this year in La Civilta Cattolica, a fortnightly magazine backed by the Vatican, entitled “Hacker ethics and Christian vision”, he did not merely praise hackers, but held up their approach to life as in some ways divine.

Mr Spadaro argued that hacking is a form of participation in God’s work of creation. (He uses the word hacking in its traditional, noble sense within computing circles, to refer to building or tinkering with code, rather than breaking into websites. Such nefarious activities are instead known as “malicious hacking” or “cracking”.)

Mr Spadaro says he became interested in the subject when he noticed that hackers and students of hacker culture used “the language of theological value” when writing about creativity and coding, so he decided to examine the idea more deeply.

Continue reading the article in the Economist: What would Jesus hack? – Cybertheology: Just how much does Christian doctrine have in common with the open-source software movement?

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News category: Features.