Earlier this week a friend shared a compelling article on AI and the way it will affect labor in the near future. It was so compelling that my stomach felt like it dropped from my body. What would my future look like? How would I provide for my family? What does the future of work look like? What does the future of democracy look like? All these questions raced through my head. And with them came anxiety. Anxiety about the future and its manifold uncertainty.

And if you have read any AI coverage, you are probably familiar with this experience. An AI CEO gives some gleeful interview and makes some bold prediction (to improve the value of his company) and yet the prediction usually looks like the desiccation of human life. And so we close the tab and walk away and do something else. We turn away. Because it’s all too much. And we can’t stop it. OpenAI and Antropic, and all the “smaller” AI models (which are still run by massive companies like Google and Meta and SpaceX) are running away with their agendas and there is nothing we can do about it—so it feels. We stand as atomized individuals before these companies (by design), so all we can do is whine about things on social media—which is also controlled by the same companies that build these AI models, so even our whining is scrapped to train AI models!

When you think about all this, it’s easy to spiral. It’s easy to get lost in AI news and feel like humanity is headed toward a cliff, like elite companies are driving us frantically toward an unknown future out of greed and scientific passion. And that by the time we figure out what the costs are, it will be far, far too late to do anything about them.

How are we to hope and not be overwhelmed by AI news? How do we avoid doomerism? How can we keep from despair and inhibition?

The most frightening thing about our AI future is that it is radically open. Despite all the “predictions” by experts, nobody knows what will happen tomorrow. We are treading new ground here. We have never had a technological innovation which will be so disruptive, so widely, and so fast. It’s that uncertainty about tomorrow, that wide open future that is so deeply unsettling to us. How will the government react, how will it shape human cognition, how will it affect the economy, how will it change the purpose people find in working, and so on—these questions haunt us.

For small uncertainties you only need little hope. But for vast uncertainties you need an expansive hope. Our times call for an expansive hope, and in our faith we have the resources to support this hope.

Hope is grounded in what God has promised us in Christ. And he has promised us that he will provide for us (Matthew 6:26), that he loves us (John 3:16), and that he will work our good (Romans 8:28). That is our reality. Everything must begin there. In times of uncertainty, we need to ground ourselves in those facts. Whatever the future may bring we can walk in confidence knowing that we will be provided for, loved, and that God will work our good.

Hope also allows us to break out of our atomization, to work in institutions to resist the effects of AI. I have argued before, and still believe, that AI is a choice that we are making, not a determined fact. But as for what we can do as people who don’t control AI companies, we can act together in communities to have shared values and virtues that buffer us from some of the negative effects of AI. What does this look like? This looks like churches that choose not to use AI for sermons, art, music, or videos and that encourage members to come to elders and pastors with theological questions rather than turning to AI models. This looks like colleges that ban or heavily restrict AI use in the classroom so that students don’t cognitively offload their thinking onto machines. I’ll have a lot more to say about how institutions can help us in my next book.

Hope begins with you and your neighbor, your family, your friends working to love one another, glorifying God in the here and now. Choose to read a poem. Go for a walk. Pray. Read the Word. Have coffee with a friend. Not in ignorance of the future, but choosing a good future in your sphere of influence. And what is beyond your influence, trusting that God will provide, even if you cannot imagine what that looks like. That’s okay. You don’t have to. Your imagination isn’t the one in charge.

As I mentioned last Monday, I’ve been reading this very dense but insightful book, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity by one of my favorite thinkers, Hartmut Rosa, as research for my new book. And in doing my reading I came across this passage on the way social acceleration has affected our understanding of different generations:

An institution that was self-evident for traditional societies, namely, that of “wise elders,” to whom outstanding status was attributed because they had “seen everything” and hence could no longer be surprised by any of the troubles of life, has practically disappeared in late modern society: instead the old are stigmatized by the fact that they no longer know their way around and can no longer keep up. (116)

I’ve long wrestled and worried about the crisis of mentorship in our society, the lack of cross-generational discipleship that is so desperately needed, particularly in a time of deep moral uncertainty. Rosa addresses one of my questions: Why is it that in the contemporary world generations do not pass on their wisdom to the succeeding generations? And the answer is because they have nothing to pass down. The world is moving so fast that the younger generations have more knowledge than the older generations. And so older people feel “useless” and young people feel like they have nothing to learn from the elderly (however you define that).

But what if we’re thinking about all this wrong? What if we’re valuing all the wrong things and so we’re afraid to share our gifts from one generation to another?

Read more

As I’ve said before in these “pages,” I don’t rest well. Or at least I didn’t. But God works on us, doesn’t he? He pursues us like a jealous lover who desires that we don’t stay in our sin and weakness but grow towards righteousness and virtue and Christlikeness. In November of 2024, I wrote these words:

But there are three related barriers to my being able to fully rest…

The first is my OCD. I don’t bring this up as an excuse, but as a matter of fact: what OCD does is send you intrusive, unwanted, anxiety-producing thoughts that capture and torment your mind. And when is the best time for OCD to send those thoughts? When you are sitting still and doing nothing in particular. Second, despite knowing the lies of the modern Total Work agenda, I still fall into it. I still feel like I need to be constantly doing to make my being valuable. And third, I have not taken the time to cultivate many interests outside of writing and research. So the idea of doing leisurely activities seems foreign to me.

Well, it’s July 2026 and while I won’t say I’ve mastered rest, I can say that these words are no longer completely true of me. And I want to share how things changed and what that looks like.

First, I sought and fought for good OCD treatment so that I could have the mental space to rest without intrusive thoughts invading every spare moment. That is not to say that I’m 100% free of doubts—no one is. But it is to say that I can be alone with my thoughts without anxiety welling up in me. What this taught me was that sometimes we need to take the time to address underlying causes of unrest.

We can’t wait until those causes are addressed before we pursue rest. We need to seek rest daily and weekly, trusting in the Lord for our provision. But if we struggle with distress, it may not be a lack of trust in God. It may be trauma, generalized anxiety, OCD, or other factors that can be treated.

Second, I practiced resting, particularly Sabbath resting. This was difficult for me because I teach on Mondays and I publish Substack articles on Mondays at 7am. So I have things to prepare for on Monday mornings. But my goal has been to shift all work off of Sundays—the Lord’s Day—onto Saturdays, so that I can be fully present and rest on Sundays. Some days there are extenuating circumstances, but I try my best to stick to that rule. I even plan to let my students know that I won’t be replying to emails on Sundays.

The most important part of this practice was practicing. At first it was difficult. I still felt my old guilt and shame for not being productive. For not submitting to what Josef Pieper calls “Total Work.” Shouldn’t I be writing? Shouldn’t I be researching? Shouldn’t I be reading for class? What if I’m falling behind, falling out of time, becoming desynchronized? Naps were difficult because of the racing thoughts. But the more I devoted myself to these practices, the easier they became.

Third, I focused on prodigal practices to replace the efficient practices that filled my week. The efficient practices were not evil, but they were generally focused on me providing for me and my family. For Sabbath rest, I wanted to do activities that focused on God providing for me and my family. For example, taking a nap is an act that trusts that God will provide for me, keep me and my family safe while I close my eyes. Reading poetry (I finished John Berryman’s collection of Dream Songs recently) is prodigal because it doesn’t provide anything. It’s done for simply for the beauty and goodness of reading poetry! Going on a walk with my wife is prodigal (if it’s not done for exercise, as C.S. Lewis notes in The Screwtape Letters) because I’m just delighting in her company and God’s creation. Playing a board game with my family or watching a movie is prodigal because it does not accomplish anything to provide or sustain my existence. God is doing everything. I’m just delighting in his great works. Eating a large cup of ice cream (my one cup per week—usually) is prodigal because it’s excessive. It’s pure joy.

Done rightly, this kind of rest is not just practiced on Sundays but throughout our week. We take little rests to delight in creation, to rest at night, to remember that we are not sovereign—God is. We do have obligations to work with excellence unto the Lord to care for ourselves and others, but it’s always God who is really providing. So we don’t have to be anxious anymore.

Once again, I’m grateful for all of you who took the time to fill out my reader survey. The most common response to the question of what has been keeping you from reading lately is “time.” Overwhelmingly, everyone is crunched for time. Which resonated with me because I’m in the middle of reading the book Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity by Harmut Rosa for my next book, Shoring Up the Ruins (tentative title). In it, he argues that one of the three main ways the modern world has been dramatically accelerated is the “pace of life.” Yes, there has been what he calls “technical acceleration,” by which he means things like computers, cars, the Internet, AI, and other machines that have spend our actions along. But also the pace of our lives have sped up. Instead of the dishwasher freeing up our time so that we can sit and read books, we end up spending that “free” time doing other chores or managing other technologies (the washing machine, our text messages, our AI agent, and so on). Our pace of life also speeds up because we tend to multitask now. Instead of just doing the dishes, we do the dishes and listen to a podcast on self-improvement. We dictate a text message while we drive. While we watch a movie, we scroll on our phones. There’s always something else happening. Because if we don’t multitask, we fear we’ll be desynchronized, that we’ll fall out of time with the rest of the world which is moving at a much faster pace than us. And that sounds terrifying. So what are we to do? What does it look like to live temperate lives at a human pace, and how do we deal with the guilt and shame of desynchronization?

Read more

We didn’t know what we were doing on Facebook in 2007 when we publicly posted pictures of our dogs, our children, and our vacations and shared opinions about movies and music and politics. But we were actually training an AI model. We didn’t know because nobody told us. I’m sure that technically there was some line in the user agreement (which we were pressured to rapidly scroll through) which gave Meta permission to use our content for whatever they wanted to for any reason ever, but that’s the pathetic exchange we’ve all been making for decades now on the Internet. We get to do things for free and in exchange we give away our data and privacy and content. Facebook and then, in 2010, Instagram sold us on this vision of human connection, and we bought it. But in reality, the long game was that we were bought, our words and our images were bought, only for them to be sold back to us in the form of AI.

And it’s not just Meta. Elon Musk’s Grok is trained on X by default. You have to opt-out through a maze of setting menus to avoid training Grok. ChatGPT is trained on Reddit. Anthropic (Claude) was illegally trained on my book (Disruptive Witness) among many others. The AI music “generator” Suno scraped YouTube and other music sites to build its model. Over and over again, AI companies scraped massive amounts of data to build AI models, regardless of whose data it was.

Much of this data scraping has been of publicly available content, not copyrighted content, things said out in the open for anyone to read or listen to or watch: a recommendation I left on Reddit, a picture of my kid sliding down a slide on Instagram, a political rant on Facebook. I shared these things in public, so anyone could “pass by” and “read” them and “learn” from them. That’s all AI is doing, what any human could do.

But is it? Is the totalizing scrape of an AI machine for the purposes of creating an artificial intelligence which is sold back to me or used against me through ads actually the same thing as someone stumbling across my old political rants on Facebook from 2007? I don’t think it is. Not remotely. Instead, I think we have allowed AI giants to pillage the commons. The commons are the publicly owned spaces in our society. In this case, we have the digital commons, like Reddit. Where we meet and exchange ideas. Technically, these spaces are owned by corporations, but the content, the words and pictures should be ours. They should be publicly protected goods.

In allowing AI companies to scrape our commons, our content, our labor, our creations, we are doing their work which they then turn into profits. And probably the most nefarious part of all this is that 99.9% of us had no clue this is where we were headed when we started sharing content in 2007 or 2010 or whenever it was. We were sold one vision of social media and the Internet, and then that content was used for another purpose and sold back to us.

Even worse, a segment of the content that has been scraped is explicitly copyrighted. Thankfully there have been and will be some lawsuits, but those are mostly slaps on the wrists for multi-billion dollar companies.

The logic behind all this scraping is that it is better to move fast and break things (including laws and morality) in order to help humanity come into a better future. But there are two alarming problems with this logic. First, the intentional suspension of morality and law for the “good” of humanity is Nietzschean. It is the logic of the Overman. Morality and law are there to keep our worst instincts in check. If technology needs to move so fast that it must break morality and the law, then maybe technology is disordered. Second, it gives power to an elite few who control AI models to decide how to use those models and what is in the “best interest” of humanity. We should not tie humanity’s future to the vision of a few techno-optimists.

What should we do moving forward? If you are on Meta products, you can switch your accounts to “private” to protect future posts, get off Meta products, or choose not to post anything you would be uncomfortable training AI with (don’t post pictures of your children, etc). On Twitter you can switch off training. But in general, we should all keep in mind that what we post publicly will be used publicly, is not safe publicly. Platforms change. Technologies change. Who knows to what use our content will be put tomorrow?

Remember your friends and loved ones. Remember to meet with them away from phones and data and recording. They can’t scrape that.

A special thanks to the paid subscribers who came to the live Q/A on Monday. I’ll be hosting one of those quarterly as a perk to paid subscribers. You can watch the video here (if you are a paid subscriber!). Also note, if you are a Founding Member, I will happily sign and send you one of my books as a one-time perk. Just DM or email me your choice and address.

Finally, another special thanks to all those who took the time to fill out the reader survey. So many of you did that and left me kind notes. I read them all. And I am taking all this feedback to heart. Thank you.

-Alan

Get more from O. Alan Noble in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Read more

Note: On Monday July 13th at 12pm CST I’ll be hosting a Live Q/A for Paid Subscribers here on Substack! Please join me and if you aren’t a paid subscriber, consider joining today!

Subscribe now

When a period of mental affliction hits you, your world shrinks down to controllable entities: what can I manage? What can I keep up with? Brushing my teeth? Bathing? Paying the mortgage? Going to work?—and one of the big questions for parents is, Can I continue to be a good parent? Even if I don’t feel like it, can I go through the motions and provide what my children need to survive and flourish. Can I get them to school, feed them, guide them, and even love them? Unfortunately, depending on your affliction, how much you are suffering, and how much support you have from your spouse (or friends and family if you are a single parent), these can be difficult questions to answer. Likewise, it can be difficult to answer the question, should I have children if I know I’m struggling with a mental health affliction? How will it affect my children? Many conditions are genetic, and even the ones that aren’t genetic, the environmental factors that children experience watching a parent suffer will affect them. Is that fair to put children through? If you already have kids, how do you deal with the fact that you may have unintentionally harmed your children through your affliction?

These are all heavy questions that can plague someone who is already insecure and self-critical and just trying to stay afloat. Parenting is one of the most important, beautiful, and rewarding acts one can do in life. But it is also a solemn responsibility. How do we carry that responsibility well while suffering? The answer lies not in avoiding the responsibility or giving in our insecurities, but walking in faith. Here’s what I mean.

Read more

Former Google employee and current neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff has published a chilling article at the New York Times on Google’s shift from giving links to search queries to offering AI summaries. You may not have thought much about this shift, but it’s radical and is changing how many people perceive the world. Google has 91% of the search market share. This is how people get their questions answered (although increasingly they will turn to AI—more on that in a minute). In the past, Google didn’t give you answers to your questions, they offered up links which may contain various possible answers. You may find several links to Reddit where people offer various answers. You may find a Wikipedia site. You may find scholarly sources. You may find government sources. You may find commercial sources. You may find all kinds of information. It was up to you to sift through the information, ascertain what was relevant, and apply it. This process was an exercise for your mind, gave you depth of context, and—most important to this article—sparked your curiosity. You discovered all kinds of related articles and information related to the topic that you were unaware of. You may have gone looking for when Hemingway wrote The Old Man and The Sea but you came away learning that some scholars believe that concussions he received from multiple planes crash contributed to his suicide. The world is stranger than you imagined. But what happens when AI summaries answer our questions directly, cutting out the path of exploration? Here’s what Le Cunff writes:

When an A.I. answers your search query in three seconds, the window closes before curiosity can deepen. You got what you came for, but you also lost what would have turned curiosity into learning: the adjacent article you might have read, the resulting tangent you might have followed, the connection between two ideas with no obvious relationship.

I worry about this, deeply. I worry about a culture that is illiterate, distracted, and incurious. As Christians, we have an obligation to attend to the wondrous world that God has created. Proverbs 25:2 says, “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.” God has concealed his glory in all of creation, in the works of humanity, in the faces of people, in the natural world. And it is our glory to search things out, to discover and to give him glory. This kind of curiosity should not be confused with curiositas, which I have written about before. I’m speaking about a healthy, God-honoring curiosity about what God has made and worked through humans.

When I was in graduate school and we were all relying on databases to find books and articles, I had a professor who urged us to go to the library and “dig through the stacks.” Their reasoning was that while the databases might be helpful for finding things we knew to look for (direct answers), our curiosity would allow us to discover interesting related sources if we dug around through physical books. They were right. And the same is true for online searches today. When Google chooses to spit out AI generated summaries, we aren’t getting to “dig through the stacks.” We are losing touch with information. We are one more step removed from information itself.

Le Cunff points out why this is a serious problem:

The loss is not serious in any single case. But fewer detours and fewer unexpected discoveries will have a cumulative effect. Over time, people trained this way become better at extracting ready-made conclusions than building connections of their own.

I fear that the result will be people who think they are curious (“What was the name of that actor?”) but who are only curious in the most shallow, factual sense. Their curiosity is only for the immediate question, not for the world of wonder surrounding their question that has led scientists, artists, poets, philosophers, and theologians to great works.

I also fear that this, combined with an illiterate culture, will make society incredibly susceptible to propaganda. Whoever controls the filters that produce the AI summaries controls the answers that people accept. We already see this happening with “Grok” on Twitter all the time. Someone will post something and a user will swoop in and ask Grok to fact check it live. And often Grok is wrong, but the user will believe the AI over reality. Why? Because AI seems objective and mathematical. As people grow more comfortable with AI, people will turn to Claude and ChatGPT with their search questions instead of Google, and we will have the same problem: answers instead of exploration. The implications for democracy are unsettling.

Subscribe now

Even more unsettling is the implications for our spiritual life. Serendipity is a gift from God. And we lose it when we try to efficiently answer all our questions rather than wrestling with words and meaning. In T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, he writes:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

But AI’s goal is to help us cease from our exploring. To allow the machine to explore for us. And the end of our exploring is not, in this case, to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time—a deeper awareness of our human dependence on God—but a deeper dependence upon the machine.

When David sat under the stars and marveled at all God had made and the psalms poured out of him, he was curious. He wondered about who this Creator might be who could make the mighty mountains and rain and provide for all creation. Do we have that kind of attention anymore? Do we have the space for those questions? And if we did ask those questions today, would we expect an AI summary and move on, or would our hearts be filled with God’s grandeur and break out in poetry?

These questions are not hypothetical. They have direct implications on how we treat one another. If we do not cultivate a healthy curiosity, a loving-wonder about other people then when we meet them we will treat them selfishly, instrumentally. We will look for what we can get out of them, how we can use them, and then move on. We will treat them as machines. If we attend to them with curiosity, acknowledging the wonder that they were created by God, then we will never cease in our exploring. We’ll always have interesting questions to ask them because they matter before God.

Google AI summaries are not the end of curiosity by themselves. But they are part of a larger trend in our society to circumvent our imaginative exploration and efficiently answer our questions so we can keep the world moving toward consumption and production. The question for us comes from Wendell Berry: “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” God calls us to live human lives, lives of curiosity about his creation. Let’s imagine.

Announcement: For Paid Subscribers, I’ve added a new perk. Every quarter I’m going to host a live video Q/A on Substack. The first one will be this Monday, July 13th at 12 CST. I’ll post a link soon. I hope you can join! And if you’re not a paid subscriber, now’s a great time to sign up!

Also, I’ve added a new perk for Founding Members: a one-time perk of a signed copy of one of my books. So if you are inspired to support me on that level, now is a great time for that.

What Christians need in a time of increasing artificiality (AI) is to lean into their humanity, into their distinctly human excellence. Human excellence, what I call magnanimity To Live Well, doesn’t mean perfectibility, but rather our innate capacity for greatness as God designed us, which shall be different based on each individual. But the remarkable thing is that every human being is created for their own kind of excellence, endowed by their Creator with gifts, skills, and talents to exercise for his glory and the good of their neighbor. We should strive to grow in these areas as well as in universal excellences like in kindness to others, in generosity, in grace, in peace, in the virtues, in the Fruits of the Spirit, all so that we can honor God and love our neighbor more. The goal is not to earn God’s favor or build an identity or become “good enough” for anything in particular, but to be faithful to God by living into what we were created to be: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). That’s all we are doing, walking in the good works which God created for us beforehand.

But this raises a number of challenges: How is this different from optimizing or hustle culture or lifehacking? How do we avoid works righteousness? And how does this account for our sin nature? In other words, can you have a distinctly Protestant Christian Humanism that acknowledges the role of sin and still calls us to pursue our human potential in Christ?

I believe the answer is yes. Here’s how.

Read more

Now that birthright citizenship has been settled by the Supreme Court, a number of high profile voices in the conservative and conservative evangelical world have been announcing that this means the end of America, that we will have no way of protecting our identity, population, and elections. Despite the fact that this means just keeping the status quo, people are now arguing that since the courts didn’t decide against birthright citizenship, we must take actions like “sterilizing” foreign visitors to protect our national sovereignty. In other words, this ruling is an existential threat to our nation. We will lose our very way of life because children born here will receive citizenship, as they have for the last 158 years. If all of this seems hyperbolic, that’s because it is. Hyperbole is a traditional language of politics. But it’s also destructive to healthy political discourse because it prevents different groups from meeting and “working through” differences. But there is a reality beneath this hyperbole.

The reality beneath is that America lacks a strong sense of identity as a nation. Even some individual states seem to lack a strong identity and culture (although they may have great branding). Or the culture we do share is a vapid one: consumerism, radical individualism, and the shrinking remnants of Christianity. Mass immigration (in its various forms) contributes to this identity crisis by infusing the nation with various differing cultures and ideologies. I’m not saying it makes our country “impure,” but it does make it harder for us to have shared values. That’s just a reality of society. Rather than a country committed to what James Davison Hunter described as the “Hybrid-Enlightenment”—a combination of rationalism and Protestant Christianity—we largely have a country committed to whatever seems right in each person’s eyes. That value-vacuum creates a powerful sense of anxiety, dread, and nihilism (as Hunter argues) in people who naturally desire a positive identity for the country. The question becomes, What does it look like to move forward? How does a nihilistic country, a country of people caught up in existential crises manage to “work through” (Hunter’s language) their differences to develop a shared positive identity?

Pseudo-existential threats are a staple of American politics, and they are not politically partisan. While some on the right may see foreigners as an existential threats to the “purity” of our country, some on the left see Trump voters as fascist existential threats to the purity and safety of our country. I’m not arguing that there is exact parity here—there isn’t. But I believe both are examples of pseudo-existential threats. Despite my criticisms of unchecked illegal immigration and the Trump administration and my acknowledgements of the real harms both have caused, and despite warnings about a looming civil war from some people, America has continued to exist. That’s a testament to the dedication of many men and women who sacrificed their lives to build a lasting institution! Praise God for that.

But being thankful that things haven’t entirely fallen apart isn’t enough. The center isn’t really holding. That much is evident to anyone paying attention. As I said earlier, we don’t have much of a shared national identity except for consumerism, radical individualism, and the shrinking remnants of Christianity. You can’t build a nation on those values. Reason, faith, and the liberty constrained by proper limits are necessary. And where are we to gain those values? Do we expect our AI overlords to build it into their systems? Do we expect our social media overlords to build it into their algorithms? Do we expect corporations to start advocating for limits against their own profits? Do we expect influencers and news personalities to rely on reason against their own interest in stirring division through irrationalism? Do we expect Christian political leaders to save us through political power even as our own homes sit divided and uncatechized? Where do we turn?

Central to James Davison Hunter’s latest book, Democracy and Solidarity is the argument that through our nation’s history we have “worked through” our differences in various ways, sometimes through violence (see: the Civil War and the response to the Civil Rights Movement), but we worked through our differences because we shared a basic belief in the “Hybrid-Enlightenment” values. Now, however, we have largely abandoned those beliefs and are nihilistic about “working through” anything with the “other side.” “They” are unworkable. They must be eliminated, not conversed with.

I don’t have a plan to return us to the “Hybrid-Enlightenment” values, however, I do think we can begin the process of “working through” and maybe move toward reason and faith by committing to mediating institutions and acting locally.

Currently, the modern State and its subsidiaries, the massive tech companies (which I call collectively the Worldly Powers), have atomized us down to radical individuals so that we all stand naked before these awesome powers with little between us and them. This is part of the reason we have no real meaningful shared values anymore, because the Worldly Powers dictate the values, and the only values they insist upon are consumerism and radical individualism—the very things that keep the powers running. What remains of Christianity exists as a vestigial value.

In other words, few of us belong to mediating institutions which shape our values in ways that align us nationally: families, churches, schools, clubs, or social organizations. But it is precisely these institutions that can stand between the individual and the Worldly Powers on a local level and remind us of what we were made for and how we ought to treat our neighbor and live together.

The great danger of mediating institutions in this regard is that they become silos for partisan thinking and action rather than collective thinking and action for the common good, a space for “working through” our problems together. You see this danger unfold all the time. In researching my next book, Shoring Up the Ruins (tentative title), which is all about institutions, I came across a fascinating article from a national organization about how the State and tech companies are working together in disturbing ways. The problem was that because the institution was aligned with a particular political side, they only gave examples of biases against them. Any reasonable reader would know that other examples of State-tech collusion exist, but this article chose to be blind to them for their partisan purposes. Healthy institutions will avoid this pitfall by devoting themselves to truth and to desiring to work with their neighbors for the flourishing of the city in justice.

It is my claim that we all need to be more involved in mediating institutions that form us on a local level to cultivate our affections toward the good. Rather than being formed by algorithms and AI and influencers and talk radio, by conflict entrepreneurs who want us to panic about everything, we need to be committed and active where we are with the people around us. Will this “save America”? I don’t know. I don’t know how to do that. I do know is that here is where we are and here is where we are called to be faithful.

I’ve been reading ’s Against The Machine as research for my next book, Shoring Up the Ruins (working title), focusing on language of the “Machine” and how it compares to my understanding of “Worldly Powers.” One point that Kingsnorth rightly makes is that the Machine (whatever it is) operates on growth, and therefore depends on us consuming more and more. In other words, we could not have the conditions Kingsnorth describes in his book (or I describe in You Are Not Your Own) unless we had a culture of mass consumption, where nearly everyone had been trained from a very young age to say “Yes!” to their desires. The puritan ethics of simplicity and frugality just would not allow for the kind of endless consumption and disposal of goods and services that feeds endless, directionless growth. Our natural human bent is to give into our desires, and people have always sought to profit off of tempting us into our desires, but never before have people have so systematically, scientifically, and thoroughly tempted us into our desires as a culture. This creates a plausibility structure for us where it feels plausible to give in to what feels right deep in your heart: buy that special cup of coffee (“You deserve it!”), pursue that inappropriate relationship (“You deserve them!”), or get into that debt for something fun (“You deserve this!”). So how does practicing the virtue of temperance help reorient us in this disorienting culture? As I’ve argued in To Live Well, temperance is not the same as balance or moderation; instead, it reflects the inner order of our lives. As we reorient our lives and our loves toward God, we find freedom from intemperate desires sold to us by the world.

Read more

Editorial Note: I am very grateful for all my subscribers, paid and free. But if you enjoy my free articles and are interested in my paid ones, please consider jumping in as a paid subscriber. It would mean the world to me! This is how I keep writing. -Alan

Our world is filled with people struggling with despair or presumption instead of walking in hope. The church fairs little better. Every day our feeds are filled with stories of doom: AI doom, environmental doom, bureaucratic incompetence, wars, waste, present crises and looming crises. Stories of pastoral failures, of politician scandals, of people we know who are suffering loss. Targeted news stories tell us how we are inadequate and in danger, how we are threatened and can only find safety in the products and services offered by the Worldly Powers. All of this puts many people into a kind of perpetual despair—a sense that there is no hope for redemption, no hope for healing, no hope for reconciliation, no hope for justice, only more and more crawling through the wilderness, waiting for the end to come. And so we cling to our pleasures and our numbness and distraction in despair.

For others, the Worldly Powers offer another narrative, one of arrival and consummation. You have already achieved peace, success, safety, and prosperity. And the notable thing is, the Worldly Powers are again the judges of this standard. If you trust in them and their standards of living, their conception of personal fulfillment, their hope in endless self-development (even if it means through AI and transhumanism), then you will arrive. You won’t need to hope. Because there will be nothing to hope for. We will conquer cancer, death, aging, memory, intelligence, unemployment, and poverty. And so we cling to our pleasures and our numbness and distraction in presumption.

But what does faithful hope look like? What does hope in Christ look like in a world dominated by despair and presumption? When wars and rumors of wars tempt us to despair and technological advances tempt us to the sin of presumption, what does it look like to walk in the virtue of hope?

Read more

A common experience as an elder millennial who grew up surrounded by fundamentalist Christian culture is watching your friends and family and people you grew up with or worked with slowly drift from orthodox views of sexuality toward progressive, more “inclusive” views. In a word, “deconstructing”; sometimes they stop at i…

Read more

I recently took a van full of teenage boys on an 11-hour drive to a church camp in Colorado. On the way home I passed an old, broken down sign on the side of the road that read “ADULT” in large red letters. And tucked into a turnout behind some trees was a very sad, dilapidated building with a few cars in front of it. I tried to imagine what kind of person, in the age of ubiquitous and virtually free pornography, still visits a roadside pornography store. I couldn’t. And then I thought about those large red letters and the word ADULT. I had spent a week with young men on the cusp of entering adulthood, discussing with them a theology of sanctification and sharing with them practical advice on growing in maturity. And here was a sign that took the good thing they were working toward (becoming an adult) and used it to represent the very opposite of adulthood: being controlled by your passions, lusts, and sins. And it seems to me that there is something very perverse about calling pornography “adult content.” It implies that adults are people who give in to their passions and indulge in their sins, which is true on some level because of our sin nature, but should not positively define adulthood. And it also perverse because we need adults to be mature, safe, self-controlled, responsible and godly. The word “Adult” shouldn’t have connotations with pornography. It should call to mind those higher qualities. Yes, I understand that we use the category of “Adult” to note that those under 18 shouldn’t have access to the material. But I’m merely pointing out the natural consequence of this use of language. The result is that this essential word in the English language becomes adulterated by a perverse meaning, a meaning that represents the very opposite of its intended meaning. And I do wonder if that has consequences on the way we view adults and adulthood in our culture.

Read more

To begin the process of healing and restoration, whatever that may look like for you, you must first come to terms with the struggle. And to some extent, that means being public about your struggle. The first time I truly tried to get help for my OCD, I made an appointment with my pastor to talk about my thoughts. A few days…

Read more

I have what I would call the Charlie Brown Problem. Very often, and I mean very often, when I’m supposed to feel some way for some special occasion, I feel the opposite.

If I visit an amusement park, I struggle to be present and enjoy myself. If it’s a birthday party or event in my honor, I feel anxious. And if I’m on a family vacation, I regularly have a hard time letting go, relaxing and just enjoying myself. I’m not a good vacation-taker. Is this pessimism? Negativity? A bad attitude? A problem with resting? Or is it the natural result of being a father who is one of the two main adults in charge of making sure everyone is safe, happy, fed, and not fighting during a vacation? Who knows?

But here’s what I do know: my duty on a family vacation is not primarily to have a good time or to relax or to have grand adventures. My duty is to be present with my family as best I can, to expose my children to God’s creation and the wider world, and to fellowship with others. If I can get some measure of joy or happiness out of that experience in the short term, all the better! But I know that when everything is unpacked and settled down, I will have the satisfaction of having fulfilled my duty as a father regardless of how I felt. And this is particularly important for me because sometimes my mental health throws an extra wrench in me enjoying time with my family. In these moments, it feels like I’m just going through the motions, just doing what I’m supposed to. And I guess what I want to say is, there’s something to be said for going through the motions. Because what you’ll find in retrospect is that the memories you create are the rest you were looking for.

Read more

I recently heard from someone who is reading To Live Well who expressed a concern that I don’t think I adequately addressed in the book: What if your problem is not so much that you struggle to pursue virtue, but that you think about being a virtuous person all the time? You are striving to be a virtuous person all the …

Read more

Standard conceptions of totalitarianism define it as control by an absolute State. That’s a very basic definition. And it’s a fine definition. But I want to consider moving beyond State totalitarianism to something broader. I know that’s controversial and probably unacceptable, but just let me run with this for a few minutes. This essay is an test, an attempt, a trying-out of an idea. And that idea is this: in the contemporary world, the threat of a totalitarian system is less from an absolute State like Communism or Fascism (as it was in the Twentieth Century) than from the union of the State and Industry, particularly Big Tech, into one omnicompetent system. In other words, it’s not that the State controls all your data and tells you where you can work and what to think. It’s that that State and tech companies control all your data and nudge you to work in certain places and pressure you to think certain things. It’s less 1984 and more Brave New World. Together, they create what I want to call the Worldly Powers. And what makes these powers particularly totalitarian is that they work to atomize us by wearing down thick mediating associations and institutions, which as Robert Nisbet and others have noted is a defining feature of totalitarian regimes. So what I am suggesting is that with the accelerating growth of Big Tech through things like AI, we are facing a looming threat of a kind of totalitarianism. One professor of politics, Sheldon Wolin, described this as “inverted totalitarianism.” I think there are many potential dangers here. I’d love you to read and help me with this argument.

Read more

One of my favorite cultural analysts, , published an article at yesterday titled “The Commodification of Christianity” which posits that the growing interest we’re seeing among Gen Z in Christianity reflects a thin, digitized, plastic, frictionless and faceless vision of faith: “The problem with religious apps is the sa…

Read more

One of the pieces of advice I try to give my classes early each semester is that I can’t facilitate their growth in learning unless they choose to have a posture of humility. This might sound a bit arrogant of me, a bit “sage on the stage” as opposed to the “fellow traveler” model of teaching, but after nearly 20 years of teaching, it’s a conclusion I can’t avoid. Humility is a necessary sub-virtue to all true forms of learning. Aquinas puts humility under the virtue of temperance and that seems right to me since you are rightly moderating your perception of yourself, but as with all the virtues, there is a mixture of other virtues: justice and love especially. It is an injustice to God, your neighbor, and yourself to perceive yourself wrongly because it is not giving those individuals their due regard. But it is also unloving because when you love someone’s existence, you naturally respect them and show them honor. So I see humility as touching temperance, justice, and love, but mostly temperance.

When a student enters my class convinced that they have already mastered the content, they are condemning themselves to learn nothing. When a student enters convinced that they lack knowledge, they open themselves up to the possibility of wisdom. And this necessarily means being humble before teachers, professors, elders, pastors, the wisdom of the past, and the subject. This is true for all of us, not just students. For all of us, the path to knowledge comes through humility.

Read more