There is a temptation, when we study history, to place ourselves safely on the correct side of it. We read about slavery and think: I would never have done that. I would have known better. But history does not offer us that comfort so easily. The dynamics that shaped American slavery — the way technology concentrated wealth... Continue Reading →
Crossing Thresholds: Living Faithfully Through an AI Phase Change
I keep coming back to one phrase: phase change. Not just innovation, not just disruption — a genuine shift in the state of things, like water suddenly becoming steam. That’s what we’re living through right now: an AI phase change. And like any phase change, it’s not just about what’s being built. It’s about what we’re... Continue Reading →
When You Study Someone Else’s God, You Start Asking Different Questions About Your Government
Here's a question worth sitting with: Does learning about religions other than your own actually change how you think about politics? The short answer is yes — though not always in the way you'd expect. When people dig into traditions outside their own, something interesting tends to happen: political questions about justice, authority, rights, and... Continue Reading →
Cathonomics, Merton, and the Cappadocians: A See–Judge–Act Reflection
What would a genuinely Christian vision of economic life look like today? Cathonomics, by Anthony Annett, offers one answer, drawing on Catholic social teaching to rethink how we work, trade, and hold wealth. But the book opens up even more when you read it alongside two older, very different voices: the contemplative monk Thomas Merton and the fourth-century... Continue Reading →
Would the Buddha Use ChatGPT? Thomas Merton, Zen, and the Soul of AI
Here is a video: https://youtu.be/zqEZyHkXgh0?si=DGS4Sw5X3d12n-jE Picture this: a monk in a hermitage in Kentucky, decades before anyone had heard of a large language model, somehow has something useful to say about Satya Nadella’s AI discussion. That strange thought experiment points to the real question here: what would contemplative traditions make of AI? What Merton Might... Continue Reading →
Two Western Minds, One Eastern Path: Merton and Thurman on Buddhism
Thomas Merton and Robert Thurman never set out to do the same thing with Buddhism — but they both took it dead seriously. Neither treated it as an exotic curiosity to be studied from a safe academic distance. Both believed it had something real to offer a Western world they saw as spiritually distracted and... Continue Reading →
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