Leopards in the Temple is largely concerned with the ways in which exposure to electronic environments influences cultural interpretations of self and otherness in contemporary American life.

Philosophers of technology such as Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, Hans Jonas, and Hubert Dreyfus have taken various approaches to the manifold consequences of the technological revolutions of the last hundred years. However, with the exception of the work of Jonas and Heidegger (and, more recently, studies by Don Ihde and Michael Heim), critiques of technology's influences at the ontological level, as opposed to analyses of collective behaviors, are still relatively rare.

For this reason, much of Leopards in the Temple is given over to exploring the way(s) in which technology and its "muses" - media entertainment and advertising, the so-called culture of electronics plus capitalism - are in the process of recycling metaphysical values in postmodern society.