“When spiritual formation is treated as a programmable system, AI appears not as a distortion but as the natural next instrument.”
Brandon Rickabaugh on AI companionship, depersonalization, and the misidentification of spiritual formation.
”Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease.“
L.M. Sacasas on AI as Christian heresy.
“Our future is intertwined. When we are struggling for freedom, it’s for our collective liberation—not just for the oppressed but also for the oppressor.”
“To truly witness the trauma of another is to engage with their narrative—and that’s something we’d often rather avoid. Conspiracy theories are most harmful when they rob certain populations of their essential humanity.”
“When worlds come to their endings, how do we account for and recalibrate what is regarded as strong and what is regarded as weak?”
“You don’t question because questioning authority—religious authority in particular—is a form of rebellion. And rebellion is a form of Satanism. Do what you are told. Think the way you are told to think.”
@revrobschenck.bsky.social on a new episode of Zealots at the Gate.
“It’s not hard to see the message that disability is a fate worse than death play out in our culture, not just in our movies or TV shows, or in offhand comments or glib jokes, but also deep within our own hearts.”
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“The recovery of prayer, personally and communally, conditions the human body and the church body to respond within the world while critically challenging the inevitability of dominant political presumptions.”
“This is precisely where non-violent resistance begins: choosing to open oneself to another person’s narrative and creating space for that narrative to exist alongside your own.”
Kate Schmidgall on searching for hope amid the rubble of the Gaza war.
“Whether we try to control and dominate with weapons or through words, as James’s epistle warns, each one of us is capable of setting worlds on fire.”
“To truly witness the trauma of another is to engage with their narrative—and that’s something we’d often rather avoid.”
Rabbi Philip Graubart on the price of willful cultural forgetting.
“Weapons of strength so quickly become objects of worship, deepening a drunken appetite for dominance and the addictive, binding pleasures of lethality itself.”
Laura Fabrycky on prayer and NATO.
“Most problematic theories in the human sciences tend to fragment and flatten, sometimes even dehumanize humanity. Some other accounts, however, vaunt humans to nearly godlike status.”
“Prediction is the weakest card in the hand of those studying human doings—our track record in forecasting the future is embarrassing. Complexity upends prediction.”
“Hindus appropriated many Christian and Western frames of thinking, because never before had their identity been articulated as a single, all-encompassing “ism”; they had not felt the need so far.”
Daniel Bezalel Richardsen and @waatcoconut.bsky.social on the emergence of modern Hindu identity.
“Human reality must govern the nature of its science, not be forced into some predetermined idea of what science is supposed to be.”
Christian Smith on the science of human life.
“Even when we do not or cannot recall who we are, God’s knowledge is greater than ours: We cannot outrun our humanity.”
“Whether looking to the future or the past, so often our vision of human flourishing is a narrow one—a vision whose basic premise is a rejection of “all this,” a rejection of all surprises in our future.”
“Research shows that patients—such as those who experience a traumatic injury causing a disability—generally do adjust and adapt, usually within six to twelve months, and go on to enjoy a meaningful life.”
What is the future of “wokeness”? Has it become a replacement for traditional faith communities? Or is something deeper and more personal going on?
Matthew Kaemingk and Shadi Hamid discuss whether modern progressivism has become its own kind of religion.
“The vision of flourishing we have for our children is a particular vision, not one in which the particular disappears into generic perfection.”
“There is an urgent need to improve and enhance the way our public institutions respond to suffering, not merely because their inadequacies in providing assistance in living may drive Canadians toward “assistance” in dying.”
“The attempt to “improve” the human is closer to a desperate escape from the human—a rejection of the unpredictable world of natality in favour of a uniform order.”
Hannah LaGrand on natality’s stand against ideology.
“Despite the medicalization of death and dying, there is no medicine or therapy that can fully control it. It is not a technical problem to solve with a technocratic solution.”
Rebecca Vachon on medical assistance in dying.
Is MAGA post-Christian? Matthew Kaemingk and Shadi Hamid examine its break from religious conservatism, explore its spiritual future, and what it means for the religious Right.
“Forgetting is our counter-apocalypse. We attempt to secure our eternal blessedness by evading the reality of who we are.”
“We give our children our deepest longings—the world as we wish it were, the world we cannot actualize.”
“We want to forget God’s gaze, God’s covenant, and the earth that communicates it to us. But forgetting is just another childish fantasy. Optimization is just amnesia.”
Rhody Walker-Lenow on why we keep rewriting the flood story.
