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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

What Adler, McLuhan, and Merton would say about the machine we’ve built — and who it’s really for Artificial intelligence does not hurt everyone equally. Where it causes the most harm is in the systems that were already failing people — hiring, housing, policing, benefits, healthcare, surveillance. In each of these domains, AI has a... Continue Reading →

Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) doesn't come up much at the dinner table. He was a Hungarian-British polymath — a physical chemist who became a philosopher of science — and most people have never heard his name. But his work points to a thesis we need right now: AI may be useful, but it cannot replace the... Continue Reading →