Category: Technology
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Let me tell you the story of a church. Not a megachurch, but not small either. Across two services on a given Sunday, 400-600 folks in the pews. Nothing fancy about the church. You’ve never heard of it. But a...
2022 Eliot Awards
I’m going to handle the Eliot Awards a little differently this year. I still am going to link to my favorite magazine writing of the year, but for a few reasons this year’s edition will not be as tightly organized...
My AI Spiritual Director
After years working as a doctor in a hospital, a friend shared the most frustrating part of her job: patients whose online, amateur medical research weighs more heavily in their decision making than her professional opinion. She ended with a...
Untangling Theology from Digital Technology
A few years ago I received an advance copy of a book on the end times by a well-loved and influential pastor. Most of the book was standard, biblically faithful reflections. The most interesting section, however, argued that the European...
Small and Afraid and Without Knowledge
On May 11, 1997, a computer program won a chess match against a world champion for the first time in history. The defeated Garry Kasparov said that after Game 5, “he had become so dispirited that he felt the match...
The Act of Love That Preserves All Other Acts of Love
We are told that shortly a great many jobs will cross the event horizon of the techno-singularity, and thus will, like a ship passing over the actual horizon, disappear — probably forever. Mostly we think about the jobs of burger...
After After Virtue
Jon Askonas’ Compact piece does not bury the lede. Conservatism has failed, in his view, and it has failed because it mistook the problem at hand. It mistook the seismic shift of technology for a simple lack. Askonas writes that...
Too Large for One Life: On Friction and Sustaining Tradition
There’s a tremendous gap between making an argument for tradition and inviting someone into a living tradition. In his Compact essay, “Why Conservatism Failed,” Jon Askonas argues that conservatives have retreated prematurely to the world of ideas and abandoned the...
What the Body Needs
For a tech-skeptic lover of Wendell Berry, Ivan Illich, and Neil Postman, as a family physician I sure picked the wrong job. Doctors have always used various technologies for treating patients, from the ancient Egyptian prescription to fumigate the womb...
Holographic Spurgeons and AI Sermons
At a fête for one of evangelicalism’s largest online media outfits, a colleague shared how he asked GPT-3, a language AI, what the Bible says about transgenderism. The AI produced a cogent theological explanation with Biblical citations. A senior editor...