Dr. Subhasis Chattopadhyay Ph.D. –

The Medium, the Message, and the Messenger: Digital Evangelisation, Patristic Kerygma, and the New Hagiography of Jerin Thobias Vakayil: The Digital Evangelist: The Youth Who Did God’s Bidding! By Verghese Joseph Vadakkethala.

Publisher: Carmel International Publishing House

Price: Rs. 240/-

I. Introduction: The Digital Apostolate and Its Witness

When the Pontifical Council for Social Communications published The Church and Internet in February 2002, declaring the Internet a new “forum” for proclaiming the Gospel, it extended a trajectory of magisterial reflection stretching from the Second Vatican Council’s Inter Mirifica of 1963, which first affirmed the laity’s duty to “strive to instil a human and Christian spirit into these media” (§3), through the Pontifical Commission’s Communio et Progressio of 1971, which grounded communication theology in the Trinity and Incarnation, to John Paul II’s characterisation, in Redemptoris Missio (1990, §37), of modern communications as “the first Areopagus of the modern age.” Yet the institutional Church’s theoretical embrace of digital culture has rarely been matched by empirical documentation of how that embrace is lived on the ground, particularly in the Catholic communities of the Global South. Verghese Joseph Vadakkethala’s The Digital Evangelist (Trivandrum: Carmel International Publishing House, 2025) addresses this lacuna with a biographical study of Jerin Thobias Vakayil (2000–2023), a young Syro-Malabar Catholic from Bengaluru who used digital media for evangelisation, pioneered the livestreaming of Holy Mass during the COVID-19 pandemic, developed mobile applications for the Jesus Youth movement, and died suddenly of cardiac arrest at age twenty-three. All parenthetical page references in this review refer to Vadakkethala’s edition.

The book merits sustained scholarly attention for at least three reasons. First, it provides primary documentation of Catholic digital ministry in India at a moment when the field of digital religion studies, shaped above all by the work of Heidi A. Campbell, particularly her When Religion Meets New Media (London: Routledge, 2010), which introduced the Religious-Social Shaping of Technology (RSST) framework for analysing how religious communities negotiate their adoption of communication technologies, is beginning to attend more carefully to non-Western contexts. Second, it raises methodological questions about the genre of devotional biography and its place within what Rick Kennedy has termed the “New American Hagiography”: academically responsive life-writing characterised by “epistemological populism,” a method that takes seriously the testimony of ordinary believers as evidence for holiness (Rick Kennedy, “The New American Hagiography: Academically Responsible Biography of Holy Persons – A Review Essay,” Christian Scholar’s Review 44, no. 3 [2015]: 293–305). Third, the narrative of Jerin’s life invites theoretical engagement with the frameworks of Marshall McLuhan, Manuel Castells, Henry Jenkins, and Axel Bruns, whose combined insights illuminate the deep structural relationship between digital communication, participatory culture, and the Patristic kerygmatic mandate.

II. Structure and Content of the Volume

The book is organised into fourteen chapters spanning seven thematic sections: mission, childhood and family, faith formation and catechesis, youth and innovation, digital media and its deployment, testimonial reflections, and key takeaways. It is constructed almost entirely from first-person testimonies of more than one hundred individuals who knew Jerin. Vadakkethala, founder and editor of Indian Catholic Matters, writes with a journalist’s ear for testimony and a catechist’s instinct for evangelisation. The volume’s concluding chapter distils Jerin’s significance into a series of themes that frame the entire project:

Jerin’s life was not merely a sequence of events, but a living testament to the transformative power of faith, family, and community. His story unfolds as a tapestry woven with threads of devotion, resilience, and an unwavering commitment to serve others – qualities that resonate far beyond the boundaries of his immediate world. (p. 189)

This programmatic statement establishes the register in which the book operates: it is at once devotional archive, communal memoir, and, implicitly, a bid for the recognition of a particular form of digital sanctity. The opening chapters situate Jerin within a deeply catechetical family. His mother Blessy and father Thobias began their married life with the daily recitation of the Prayer of a Husband and Wife, “a gift from her aunt – and they have remained faithful to it ever since” (p. 46). The household rhythm was “steeped in devotion” (p. 46), establishing the spiritual formation that would later express itself through digital channels.

Fr. Jose Murickan, the parish’s first priest-in-charge and a doctor of Social Communications from the Gregorian University, provides an assessment that encapsulates the volume’s theological horizon:

Truly, Jerin’s journey reminds us that holiness is not measured by years but by the depth of one’s love and service. (p. 33)

The central chapters (V–VIII) document Jerin’s digital initiatives in considerable detail: the Kairos Studio YouTube channel, the Cloud Catholic e-commerce platform, the Jaago Conference mobile application, an AI live-chat help desk that Jerin “championed until his untimely passing” (p. 139), and the “Holy Habits” Instagram competition, “a faith-based competition for children who dress as saints, which drew over 500 participants in its inaugural 2023 event” (p. 139). When the pandemic struck, it was Jerin who approached his parish priest: “Father, why not stream the Qurbana online?” (p. 34). Fr. Benny Asharikunnel recalls that Jerin then

meticulously gathered the necessary equipment, set up systems, and ensured that every Mass, liturgical prayer, and sacrament reached our homes seamlessly through virtual means. For nearly two years, his technical expertise and faithful commitment sustained the heartbeat of our parish life. (p. 34)

This single initiative transformed St. Norbert Church into the first parish in the Diocese of Mandya to offer live broadcast worship, establishing a precedent that the volume’s episcopal endorsements repeatedly affirm.

III. The Medium and the Messiah: McLuhan’s Incarnational Principle

The most fruitful theoretical lens through which to read Vadakkethala’s account is the media theology of Marshall McLuhan, whose Catholic faith was constitutive of his media theory. As Nick Ripatrazone has demonstrated in Digital Communion: Marshall McLuhan’s Spiritual Vision for a Virtual Age (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2022), McLuhan understood the Incarnation as the paradigmatic communication event, collapsing the distance between medium and message. Ripatrazone’s study reconstructs how McLuhan’s conversion to Catholicism in 1937 and his lifelong devotional practice informed even his most secular-seeming theoretical formulations, revealing an intellectual project in which theology and media theory were never separable. McLuhan himself stated in The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion, edited by Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek (Toronto: Stoddart, 1999; reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2010): “In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same” (pp. 102–103).

Read Mercer Schuchardt has extended this insight by arguing that the Incarnation functioned in McLuhan’s thought as the fixed constant against which all other media ratios are measured, much as the speed of light functions in Einsteinian physics. For McLuhan, Schuchardt contends, the Incarnation of Christ was the one absolute reference point in a universe of relative media effects, a position rooted in McLuhan’s understanding of light itself as having both physical and theological significance (Read Mercer Schuchardt, “The Medium is the Messiah: McLuhan’s Religion and Its Relationship to His Media Theory,” Renascence 64, no. 1 [Fall 2011]: 43–53). Schuchardt’s essay is indispensable for any scholar of new media seeking to understand how McLuhan’s theoretical apparatus was undergirded by a coherent, if often unstated, Christological vision. This merits a digression: I am a Hindu as my long-time readers here know. Often Hindus neglect the Catholic Faith of McLuhan. Hence this paper on McLuhan is all the more important for my fellow Hindus. And, the fact I am reviewing this book, is a testament to interreligious friendship. Be those as they may, we return to the review at hand.

Jerin’s life enacts precisely the McLuhanite coincidence of medium and message. The volume is saturated with testimonies that describe his digital work and his devotional life as inseparable, not as two separate domains but as a single integrated practice. Fr. Justin Thayyil observed how Jerin

saw the modern world’s digital tools not as distractions but as opportunities to share the Word of God, inspire faith, and build virtual communities of prayer. His work in digital ministry became a bridge between tradition and modernity – a sacred mission to bring Christ into online spaces. (pp. 37–38)

What is striking about Fr. Thayyil’s testimony is the language of “bridge”: it echoes McLuhan’s own understanding of media as extensions that collapse spatial and temporal distances. In Jerin’s case, the bridge was simultaneously technological and theological. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964; reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), McLuhan argued that electronic media extend not one particular faculty but the central nervous system as a whole. Andrew Stout’s recent work (“Incarnation and Digitization: Marshall McLuhan and the Digital Humanities,” New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication 3, no. 1 [2023]) identifies a productive tension between electronic extension and what McLuhan called “discarnation”: the risk that digital environments might sever communication from its embodied, sacramental ground. In Jerin’s case, the testimonies consistently emphasise that his digital ministry was anchored in daily Eucharistic reception. Archbishop Peter Machado of Bangalore confirms this integration directly:

During the difficult days of COVID-19, when many hearts were heavy and discouraged, he became a true digital apostle, working tirelessly to telecast the Holy Mass, ensuring the faithful remained connected to the Eucharist, despite the lockdowns. (p. 15)

His digital evangelisation was, in McLuhanite terms, an extension of his liturgical body, not a substitute for it. The Archbishop’s phrase “digital apostle” unwittingly captures the McLuhanite fusion: the apostolate and the digital medium are presented as one reality, not two.

IV. The Network Society and Mass Self-Communication

Manuel Castells’s analysis of the network society provides the structural framework within which Jerin’s ministry operated. Castells’s central claim in The Rise of the Network Society, vol. 1 of The Information Age, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), that “networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies” (p. 469), finds its religious corollary in Heidi Campbell’s concept of “networked religion.” In her seminal article, Campbell argues that the practice of religion online exemplifies several key social and cultural shifts at work in religion in general society, identifying five defining traits of networked religion: networked community, storied identities, shifting authority, convergent practice, and multisite reality (Heidi A. Campbell, “Understanding the Relationship between Religion Online and Offline in a Networked Society,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80, no. 1 [2012]: 64–93). Each of these traits finds expression in The Digital Evangelist, but the concept of “multisite reality” is particularly germane: Campbell proposes that for digitally engaged believers, religious practice involves “an invisible or seamless flow” between online and offline spaces, producing “a sort of online-offline experience of religious hybridity” (Campbell, p. 82). Jerin’s simultaneous presence at the altar and on YouTube was precisely such a multisite reality.

The concept most directly applicable to Jerin’s practice is Castells’s “mass self-communication,” elaborated in Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): communication that is simultaneously mass (many-to-many) and self-generated (autonomously produced) (p. 55). The book under review documents how Jerin, without any institutional appointment or hierarchical mandate, autonomously created a communication infrastructure that reached an entire diocese. Vadakkethala writes:

His digital initiatives – online Masses and other media projects – offered solace and spiritual nourishment to countless people, bridging distances and sustaining community when physical gathering was impossible. In these efforts, Jerin embodied a new kind of missionary zeal, one that harnessed the tools of the digital age to spread hope and faith. (p. 190)

This illustrates what Campbell has identified, in The Distanced Church (College Station, TX: Digital Religion Publications, 2020), as the “transform” strategy of pandemic-era digital church: not merely transferring existing liturgical formats to a screen but creating genuinely new modes of participatory engagement that reconfigure the relationship between clergy, laity, and the digital medium itself. The volume confirms that the live-streamed Qurbana was not a facsimile of the physical Mass but a different kind of communal experience, one that drew participants who might never have attended in person and created new patterns of digital devotion.

V. Participatory Culture, Intercreativity, and the Produsage of Sacred Content

Henry Jenkins’s concept of participatory culture provides the third major framework for reading The Digital Evangelist. In Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), Jenkins, together with co-authors Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton, and Alice J. Robison, defines participatory culture as one with “relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship” (p. 3). The significance of Jenkins’s framework lies in its insistence that participation is not merely consumption by another name; it involves the active creation of cultural content by communities whose members move fluidly between the roles of audience and producer. Jerin’s career at Kairos Media instantiates every element. Vadakkethala records that Jerin’s humility was itself a marker of his participatory orientation:

In a world where recognition is often sought after, Jerin’s mantra was simple: “I am an unworthy servant; I have merely fulfilled my duty.” (p. 125)

This self-effacement, far from being a merely personal virtue, aligns with the logic of participatory culture as Jenkins describes it: the individual contributor’s value lies not in celebrity or institutional position but in demonstrated competence and willingness to serve the community’s shared goals. The book records that he “reached out to Kairos Media during his engineering studies, eager to contribute his skills in video editing, sound editing, graphic design, and website development” (p. 113). No institutional appointment preceded his involvement; he was a volunteer whose competence became indispensable.

Jenkins’s later work with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2013), deepens the analysis through the distinction between “spreadability” and “stickiness.” Sticky content draws users to a centralised platform; spreadable content is designed to be shared across networks by users themselves. The Cloud Catholic app was designed for stickiness, functioning as a centralised portal for Kairos’ magazines, books, and resources. The “Holy Habits” Instagram competition, by contrast, was designed for spreadability: children dressed as saints shared their images across personal networks, turning each participant into an evangelist whose family and friends encountered the content organically. Sarah McFarland Taylor, in conversation with Jenkins and Diane Winston on Jenkins’s academic blog Pop Junctions (September 2018), proposes treating religions as “media franchises” engaging in transmedia storytelling, observing that “religion is always historically entangled with media, co-constituted with media, expressed through media.” Taylor’s framing, developed from her position as Professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University, illuminates the degree to which Jerin’s ministry was not a departure from Catholic tradition but a continuation of it through new technological means.

It is Axel Bruns’s concept of “produsage,” however, that most precisely captures the granular mechanics of Jerin’s digital ministry. In Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), Bruns argues that networked collaborative environments create a fundamentally new mode of content creation that cannot be adequately described by the term “production.” Drawing on Tim Berners-Lee’s concept of “intercreativity,” Bruns distinguishes this from mere interactivity: in intercreative environments, users collaborate on the development of shared informational resources of common interest, taking into their own hands the tools to create content, rather than merely interacting with material already available (p. 16). This is not a reconfiguration of the producer-consumer balance but its dissolution. Participants take on a hybrid user/producer role that inextricably interweaves both forms of participation, and thereby become what Bruns terms “produsers” (p. 21). The outcomes of their work are not “products” in any industrial sense but “artefacts”: inherently incomplete, always evolving, modular, networked, and never finished (p. 22).

Bruns identifies four key principles of produsage that map with remarkable precision onto Jerin’s practice as documented in the volume. The first is open participation and communal evaluation: the assumption that the more participants examine and extend the contributions of predecessors, the higher the quality of outcomes. Jerin’s work at Kairos Media exemplified this; he was one node in a collaborative network including editors, designers, priests, and youth coordinators, each evaluating and building upon the others’ contributions. According to Benita, who documented Jerin’s role extensively, he was responsible for diverse outputs ranging “from graphic and video design to sound editing and web development,” skills that “quickly made him the indispensable backbone of the Kairos Media team” (p. 138).

The second principle is fluid heterarchy and ad hoc meritocracy: rather than occupying a fixed position in a hierarchy, contributors rise and recede based on the quality and relevance of their contributions. Bruns grounds this in Michel Bauwens’s concept of “equipotentiality”: the assumption that it is the immediate practice of cooperation, not prior formal credentialing, that determines expertise and level of participation (p. 25). Jerin held no formal title at Kairos Media; his authority derived entirely from demonstrated competence. Joshy Joseph, Managing Editor of Kairos Global, recalls:

This brilliant young man approached us with great zeal, asking how he could put his knowledge and talent to use for God’s kingdom. (p. 113)

Joseph’s language is revealing: Jerin “approached” the organisation rather than being recruited into it, and his claim to participation rested on “zeal” and demonstrated “knowledge and talent” rather than on any credential or appointment. This is Bauwens’s equipotentiality operating within a religious community.

The third principle, unfinished artefacts and continuing process, is particularly illuminating. Bruns argues that produsage outcomes exist not as complete packages but as perpetually evolving entities whose creation is a process of continuous update, extension, and revision (p. 22). The Kairos Media website, the Cloud Catholic app, and the Jaago Conference mobile application were precisely such unfinished artefacts. Nobin Jose, Editor-in-Chief of Kairos Buds, recalls requesting Jerin to update a poster on the official webpage, to which Jerin responded within an hour with a characteristic “Done” (p. 114). The brevity of the response belies the depth of the practice: each “Done” represented another iteration of a perpetually evolving digital artefact, maintained through collaborative effort. The fourth principle, common property and individual rewards, describes how content in produsage communities is shared across the network while individual contributors gain reputational standing. Jerin’s individual reward was precisely the esteem documented throughout the volume. Shirlin Dcruz, a senior manager on the Jaago app team, recalls how Jerin, “despite lacking specific technical experience, quickly became an indispensable member of the team. He learned new skills, took on complex tasks, and gained the trust of his colleagues – not through assertiveness, but through reliability and a clear, thoughtful approach” (p. 127).

Crucially, Bruns also insists that produsage is as much about social construction as content creation: it involves the maintenance and construction of both content and the social relationships among participants (p. 23). The testimonies in The Digital Evangelist confirm this with striking consistency. What the witnesses remember about Jerin is not only his technical outputs but the social bonds he maintained. Joshy Joseph describes how Jerin “was the friend who would answer late-night messages with thoughtful, detailed responses” (p. 126). Mikhil George, who collaborated with Jerin on Kairos’s social media segment, recalls that despite interacting “only through phone calls and online collaboration,” he “felt a deep and endearing connection with Jerin” and that “their collaboration was marked by joyful brainstorming sessions that often blended work with light-hearted moments, including shared laughter over ‘Tom & Jerry’ memes” (pp. 129–130). Bruns’s framework reveals that Jerin’s ministry was not merely the deployment of digital tools for evangelisation but the construction of a participatory community in which content creation and faith formation were inseparable. Jodi Hunt’s empirical work on digital discipleship among Catholic youth has documented precisely this pattern: digital platforms become not merely instruments of catechesis but constitutive environments within which discipleship is practised and deepened (Jodi Hunt, “The Digital Way: Re-imagining Digital Discipleship in The Age of Social Media,” Journal of Youth and Theology 18, no. 2 [2019]: 91–112).

VI. Digital Creatives and the Rethinking of Religious Authority

Campbell’s Digital Creatives and the Rethinking of Religious Authority (London: Routledge, 2021) provides the most precisely targeted framework for understanding Jerin’s role within the parish and diocesan ecosystem. Campbell’s central argument in this volume is that religious “digital creatives” occupy a novel position within religious communities: they are neither clergy nor conventional laity but technological mediators who deploy what she calls a “technological apologetic” to justify the spiritual rationale behind their work. The digital creative must persuade the community that technological innovation is not merely permissible but theologically mandated, a form of faithfulness rather than departure. The testimonies in The Digital Evangelist reveal precisely this dynamic. Bishop Mar Adayanthrath states:

Jerin played a stellar role in enabling St. Norbert Church to pioneer live broadcast among churches in the Mandya Diocese, a testament of his entrepreneurial spirit. Moreover, his diverse talents included proficiency in programming, and he held the sole responsibility for the Cloud Catholic mobile application associated with Kairos media magazine. (pp. 24–25)

The Bishop concludes this assessment with a comparison that functions as an episcopal imprimatur on Jerin’s form of ministry: “In a way, Jerin embodied the spirit of St. Carlo Acutis within the Mandya Diocese” (p. 25). The significance of this comparison, coming from the diocesan bishop, cannot be understated: it is the institutional Church recognising a lay digital creative as a model of sanctity. Fr. Benny Asharikunnel recalls that “it was Jerin who came forward with a profoundly simple idea that changed everything” (p. 34). Johnson Jose, a Director at Google, testifies to Jerin’s “ability to use coding skills for God’s glory” (p. 121). In each case, technical competence is framed in explicitly theological terms. This is Campbell’s “technological apologetic” in its purest form, operating within the broader framework of what Campbell and Stephen Garner have called “networked theology”: the process by which religious communities negotiate the theological significance of digital technologies in light of their existing traditions and values (Networked Theology: Negotiating Faith in Digital Culture, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016).

Bruns’s concept of equipotentiality deepens this analysis. Jerin’s authority within the Kairos ecosystem derived not from hierarchical appointment but from what Bruns calls the “holoptism” of networked communities, in which “any participant” can “see the whole” (Bruns, p. 19), and leadership emerges organically from demonstrated competence rather than institutional designation. Yet what distinguishes Jerin’s case from the secular produsage environments Bruns analyses is the explicitly theological framing of this emergent authority. In secular produsage communities, meritocratic authority is justified by pragmatic outcomes; in Jerin’s case, it was justified by fidelity to the Gospel mandate. The volume repeatedly frames Jerin’s humility not as a leadership style but as a spiritual practice. Sr. Sylvi of St. Norbert Church recalls his characteristic reassurance: “Don’t worry, sister, everything will be alright” (p. 41), a phrase that functioned simultaneously as technical confidence and pastoral care.

VII. Patristic Precedents: From the Codex to the Cloud

The theological significance of Jerin’s practice cannot be fully grasped without attending to its Patristic antecedents. The Apostle Paul’s missionary strategy, as documented by Wayne Meeks in The First Urban Christians, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), was itself a form of networked evangelisation: Paul targeted metropolitan nodes of Roman trade infrastructure, and his letters functioned as circulating media designed for reading across multiple communities (cf. Colossians 4:16). Harry Gamble (Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) and Larry Hurtado (The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006) have demonstrated that the early Church’s adoption of the codex over the scroll was a deliberate technological choice driven by missionary consciousness. Hurtado shows that approximately ninety-five percent of early Christian copies of scriptural texts from the second and third centuries are codices, against the overwhelmingly scroll-based secular culture. This preference for the codex, which permitted rapid cross-referencing between passages and was more portable than the scroll, was a technological innovation motivated by the practical needs of evangelisation and liturgical reading. As Antonio Spadaro SJ argues in Cybertheology: Thinking Christianity in the Era of the Internet (trans. Maria Way, New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), the Church’s engagement with the digital environment continues the Patristic logic of incarnational adaptation: just as the early Christians adopted the technologically superior codex for missionary purposes, so contemporary believers adopt digital platforms for the same fundamental reason.

It is this ready adaptability to new technology for the sake of the Word of God that The Digital Evangelist documents in Jerin’s practice. The volume’s own characterisation makes the connection explicit:

Through his cutting-edge innovative digital media initiatives, Jerin passionately spread the Word of God, harnessing technology to reach souls far beyond the physical walls of his church. Nevertheless, his spirituality was not confined to grand gestures. It lived vividly in everyday acts – a compassionate word, a helping hand extended to those less fortunate, an unwavering presence among his brothers and sisters in faith. (pp. 20–21)

Two Patristic thinkers are particularly relevant to interpreting this integration of technological innovation and humble service. Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana (397/426 CE; trans. Edmund Hill, Teaching Christianity, Hyde Park: New City Press, 1996) established the principle that Christian preaching must appropriate the most effective rhetorical instruments available in its cultural moment: the preacher must teach (docere), delight (delectare), and persuade (movere). Augustine’s argument, developed in Book IV, is that Christians should not cede the arts of eloquence to their opponents but should master them for the service of truth. Jerin’s mastery of graphic design, video editing, and app development represents a contemporary instantiation of this Augustinian principle: the digital arts are appropriated not for personal aggrandisement but for the proclamation of the Gospel.

John Chrysostom’s concept of synkatabasis (divine condescension), a major theme across his homiletic corpus and articulated with particular force in his discussions of pastoral accommodation in On the Priesthood (De Sacerdotio; trans. Graham Neville, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), provides a complementary framework. For Chrysostom, God adapts truth to human capacity, and the preacher must do likewise. David Rylaarsdam’s comprehensive study, John Chrysostom on Divine Pedagogy: The Coherence of His Theology and Preaching (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), demonstrates that synkatabasis is not merely a rhetorical strategy but a theological principle grounded in the Incarnation itself: God’s self-communication is always accommodated to the receptor’s capacity. The kerygmatic mandate, as C.H. Dodd defined it in The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1936), is oriented toward proclamation; the keryx is a herald who claims public attention in whatever forum is available. Jerin’s digital platforms extended this ancient function into the spaces where, as Pope Francis observes in Christus Vivit (25 March 2019), young people actually live: “It is no longer merely a question of ‘using’ instruments of communication, but of living in a highly digitalized culture” (§86). The Patristic logic of adaptation and the papal recognition of digital culture as a lived environment together validate the form of ministry Vadakkethala documents.

VIII. St. Carlo Acutis and the Contours of Digital Sanctity

The book’s recurrent comparison of Jerin to St. Carlo Acutis (1991–2006), canonised on 7 September 2025 by Pope Leo XIV, requires analysis through the lens of canonisation theory. Kathleen Sprows Cummings’s A Saint of Our Own: How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019) provides an indispensable framework. Cummings’s central argument is that canonisation is never only about holiness but also about the social and cultural aspirations of the communities that promote candidates (p. 2). Saints function as what the historian Peter Burke has called “cultural indicators, a sort of historical litmus paper sensitive to connections between religion and society” (Burke, cited by Cummings, p. 4). In the American context, Cummings shows that saint-seekers nominated candidates based not only on their practised virtues but also on the national values they were understood to have epitomised (p. 2). Saints serve as mediators not only between heaven and earth but also between the faith they professed and the culture in which they lived (p. 2).

Transposing Cummings’s framework to the Indian Catholic context illuminates The Digital Evangelist in productive ways. Just as the American saint-seekers Cummings documents were driven by the need to validate their particular form of holiness before the Vatican, the Syro-Malabar community’s promotion of Jerin responds to a parallel imperative: to demonstrate that the Indian diaspora Church, far from its ancestral Kerala homeland, produces its own models of sanctity. The book makes this claim with striking explicitness. Vadakkethala introduces Jerin’s significance in terms that combine the technological and the theological:

He was not a leader by title, but by witness. His peers and mentors remember him not just for his achievements, but for the way he made them feel seen, heard, and valued. His legacy is not measured in awards or recognition, but in the countless lives he touched – through a kind word, a helping hand, or a simple act of generosity. (p. 191)

Bishop Adayanthrath’s statement that “In a way, Jerin embodied the spirit of St. Carlo Acutis within the Mandya Diocese” (p. 25) is precisely the kind of claim Cummings’s analysis teaches us to read doubly: it is at once a spiritual comparison and a bid for institutional recognition of a local community’s holiness. Cummings’s observation that canonisation, by definition, institutionalises a private devotion (p. 4) is directly pertinent. Vadakkethala’s volume is itself an instrument in this institutionalisation: it transforms private memories of a deceased young man into a public devotional archive, marshalling episcopal endorsements, clerical testimonies, and lay witness toward the same end. The Diocese of Mandya has already established the “Jerin Thobias Vakayil Karuthal Award” for lay Catholics serving on the peripheries.

Cummings further demonstrates that the canonisation process depends on a dynamic interplay between what she calls the “periphery” (the local community where devotion develops) and the “centre” (the Vatican, which ratifies sanctity). Viewed from the perspective of the centre, the criteria for holiness are presumed to exist apart from time and place; yet refracted through the lens of the periphery, sanctity appears much more fluid and historically contingent (pp. 6–7). In The Digital Evangelist, we see this periphery-centre dynamic in real time. The Jesus Youth International Coordinator, Dr. Midhun Paul, frames the parallel with Acutis in explicitly ecclesial terms: “In the spirit of St. Carlo Acutis’ recent canonization, Jerin’s life is a powerful reminder of the profound witness young people can offer Christ, especially in the digital era” (p. 101). A recent SSRN paper from Christ University, Bengaluru (Ranjit Singha and Surjit Singha, “The First Millennial Saint?” 2025, SSRN Abstract ID: 5409984) similarly argues that Carlo’s sanctity affirms digital spaces as instruments of faith. Liam Temple of Durham University (“Carlo Acutis: What the First ‘Millennial Saint’ Says About the Catholic Church’s Future,” The Conversation, 28 May 2024) reads the canonisation as a signifier of change and renewal within the Church.

Cummings’s epilogue offers a final insight that resonates with The Digital Evangelist. Reflecting on the proliferating causes for canonisation in the contemporary United States, she observes that the wide variety of prospective saints reflects the diversity of the Catholic experience, which could never be represented by any single holy hero (p. 241). She also insists that hagiography and historiography are closely entwined (p. 240). The same holds for the Indian Catholic context. A single figure like Carlo Acutis, however compelling, cannot represent the full diversity of digital Catholic practice in the Global South. Jerin’s story, rooted in the Syro-Malabar liturgical tradition, shaped by the Jesus Youth charismatic movement, and enacted within the specific migrant experience of Keralite Catholics in Karnataka, offers a corrective particularity that complements and extends the Carlo Acutis paradigm. As Cummings’s work teaches, the saints a community promotes reveal as much about the community’s own aspirations and anxieties as about the candidate’s virtues.

IX. Genre and Method: Testimonial Narrative as New Hagiography

The volume’s most consequential formal decision is its reliance on testimonial narrative. Rather than constructing a continuous biographical narrative in his own authorial voice, Vadakkethala curates and arranges the testimony of those who knew Jerin, allowing the community itself to construct the portrait. This method aligns with Kennedy’s “New Hagiography” and its “epistemological populism”: Kennedy argues that the most rigorous modern hagiographies are those that take seriously the testimony of ordinary believers as a form of evidence, resisting the temptation to impose either a sceptical academic framework or an uncritical devotional one (Kennedy, pp. 295–298). Alicia Spencer-Hall’s Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018) provides a complementary insight that bridges medieval and digital contexts: hagiography is itself a media form, and “we can never view the hagiographical subject ‘face to face.’ We set eyes only on the figuration provided by the biographer” (p. 23). Spencer-Hall’s argument, developed across a comparative study of medieval vitae and contemporary cinematic representations of sanctity, establishes that hagiography has always been a mediated genre; the digital context merely makes this mediation visible.

Cummings’s work enriches this point by demonstrating that canonisation narratives are always shaped by their promoters’ social and cultural priorities. She shows that when Cardinal Francis Spellman championed Elizabeth Ann Seton, he praised her above all for being “wholly American” (Cummings, p. 3). By analogy, Vadakkethala’s volume promotes Jerin as “wholly digital”: a young Indian Catholic who lived through apps, YouTube, and Instagram and served with the efficiency of a self-taught programmer. Benita’s testimony encapsulates this framing:

Jerin’s life closely parallels the path of the millennial St. Carlo Acutis, who warned that many lose their uniqueness by becoming “photocopies.” Jerin, she said, remained a vibrant original – a young man unafraid to swim against cultural currents, embracing life’s joys while fully committed to his faith and mission. To call Jerin the “Carlo Acutis of India” is thus rightly fitting. (pp. 140–141)

In both Spellman’s case and Vadakkethala’s, the biographer’s task is to demonstrate that the candidate’s sanctity is not despite but through the defining medium of their era.

The volume’s testimonial architecture is both its strength and its limitation. As a primary source for digital religion scholars, it is invaluable: here are the voices of over one hundred informants documenting a specific instance of technological adoption within a Syro-Malabar parish community. For researchers working within Stig Hjarvard’s mediatisation framework, which argues that media increasingly function as an independent institution whose logic permeates and reshapes other social institutions including religion (Stig Hjarvard, The Mediatization of Culture and Society, London: Routledge, 2013), the testimonies reveal how religious meaning is not merely communicated through media but constituted by media practices. The book is a curated archive of communal memory, and its value lies precisely in its proximity to the subject, a proximity that academic treatments of digital religion frequently lack.

X. The Indian Catholic Digital Landscape

The volume gains additional significance from its documentation of the Indian Catholic digital landscape, an area severely under-researched in the anglophone academy. Sahana Udupa and Max Kramer (“Multiple Interfaces,” American Ethnologist 50, no. 2 [2023]: 247–259, DOI: 10.1111/amet.13117) identify three clusters of digital religious practice in India: piety, surveillance, and fun. Jerin’s ministry falls within the “piety” cluster, but its institutional embeddedness within Jesus Youth distinguishes it from the individualistic devotional practices that Udupa and Kramer primarily document. The Syro-Malabar Church, the largest Eastern Catholic Church with over four and a half million faithful, has seen massive youth migration from Kerala to cities across India, creating a diaspora for which digital connectivity is a pastoral necessity. The volume’s own characterisation of the Diocese of Mandya makes this context explicit: the diocese encompasses Bengaluru’s civil districts, and its “Catholic population … are mainly migrants from different parts of Kerala. They came over here mainly in search of job opportunities, business and agriculture” (p. 19). For these migrant communities, the WhatsApp groups, YouTube channels, and mobile applications Jerin built were not luxuries but pastoral necessities.

Stewart Hoover and Nabil Echchaibi, eds., The Third Spaces of Digital Religion (London: Routledge, 2023), drawing on Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial hybridity theory and Ray Oldenburg’s concept of “third places” (The Great Good Place, New York: Paragon House, 1989), theorise digital religious spaces as hybrid zones where religious identity is negotiated between the fixed poles of institutional religion and secular digital culture. The digital platforms Jerin built constituted precisely such third spaces for the Syro-Malabar community in Karnataka. Fr. Subash Challamkattil’s testimony illuminates the sociological dimensions of this digital third space:

Unlike many of his age drawn to the city’s nightlife, Jerin was anchored by different passions: cherishing family time, spreading God’s Word, and engaging in creative technological endeavours in service of the Lord. His generosity was such that he kept no personal locks on his devices, symbolizing his openness and trust. (p. 36)

The detail about unlocked devices is sociologically significant: in a community where digital privacy is the norm, Jerin’s openness functioned as a visible sign of his integration of digital and devotional life, a refusal to partition the technological and the spiritual into separate domains.

XI. Conclusion: Towards a Digital Ecclesiology

Vadakkethala’s The Digital Evangelist arrives at a moment of convergence. Pope Benedict XVI’s characterisation of social networks as a new “agora” (Message for the 47th World Communications Day, 24 January 2013), Pope Francis’s insistence in Evangelii Gaudium (24 November 2013, §120) that “all the baptized… are agents of evangelization,” and the Vatican’s Jubilee of Digital Missionaries in July 2025, at which Pope Leo XIV addressed over one thousand participants from seventy nations, together signal that digital ministry is now central to the Church’s mission. Heidi Campbell and John Dyer, eds., Ecclesiology for a Digital Church: Theological Reflections on a New Normal (London: SCM Press, 2022) have begun to supply the theological scaffolding for understanding what an ecclesiology adequate to these developments might look like, proposing that the digital environment is not merely an instrument of the Church’s mission but a constitutive dimension of its life.

Jerin’s life and ministry offer empirical grounding for these theoretical developments. His story stands at the intersection of two ancient imperatives and one modern condition. The ancient imperatives are the kerygmatic mandate to proclaim using available means, from Paul’s letters to the codex, and the Incarnational principle, articulated by McLuhan, that medium and message must be unified in the act of communication. The modern condition is the network society in which, as Bruns demonstrates, the boundaries between production and consumption dissolve into produsage, creating communities of “produsers” whose collaborative, intercreative work generates not finished products but continuously evolving artefacts. Jerin’s Cloud Catholic app, his livestreaming infrastructure, and his Jaago Conference mobile application were precisely such artefacts: perpetually unfinished, perpetually evolving, perpetually serving the community that produced and used them simultaneously. The volume’s conclusion frames this in devotional terms that nonetheless carry analytical weight:

Jerin’s impact on the Catholic community, and especially on the youth, cannot be overstated. He was not a leader by title, but by witness … His legacy is not measured in awards or recognition, but in the countless lives he touched. (p. 191)

The volume is not without limitations. It would have benefited from engagement with the scholarly literature on digital religion and from the kind of critical apparatus that Cummings’s methodology models so effectively. Its hagiographic register, while appropriate to its devotional purpose, forecloses certain analytical possibilities. Nevertheless, as a primary source and as an artefact of digital hagiography in its own right, it makes a distinctive contribution to the emerging field. Cummings reminds us that canonisation narratives are always also cultural documents, revealing a community’s understanding of itself at a particular historical moment. Read in this light, The Digital Evangelist documents the Indian Catholic community’s recognition that sanctity in the twenty-first century can be lived through code, livestreams, and app development as legitimately as it was once lived through letters, codices, and Roman roads.

In the words of Fr. Jomon Joseph Kolenchery, the diocese’s chancellor:

As long as we remember, Jerin is not lost to us. He lives in the faith he fostered, in the friendships he sustained, in the digital and prayerful communities he built brick by quiet brick. (p. 164)

It is a claim that, read through the lenses of McLuhan, Castells, Jenkins, Bruns, Campbell, and Cummings, and in the long shadow of Augustine, Chrysostom, and Paul, carries more theoretical weight than its devotional register might initially suggest.

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Dr. Subhasis Chattopadhyay studied Patristics for his Ph. D. He is a Hindu who writes prolifically on Catholic theology, being in the Hindu ministry of dialogue with Catholicism. He is an ex-Judge of the Sahitya Akademi. He delivered the prestigious  de Nobili Endowment lecture in philosophy at the International Jesuit Centre for Philosophical Excellence, at Chennai in 2022.