Thomas Merton, the Medium, and the Cost of Conscience
Ten weeks · 70 minutes per session · 11 hours 40 minutes of contact time
In 313, an emperor ended the persecution of Christians. By 380, another had made Christianity the religion of the empire. A movement that had buried its martyrs now blessed its rulers. That bargain of protection for loyalty did not end with Rome. It returned in every century, and it has returned again.
This course holds three questions together, because each explains the others. How has Christian identity fused with national power across seventeen centuries? Why is Christian nationalism rising now? And what do social media and artificial intelligence (AI) do to that fusion, as cause and as effect? Platforms shape what a movement believes and how fast it spreads, and the movement in turn shapes what the platforms reward. A generating machine can now run that loop at almost no cost.
A Spoke in the Wheel is a ten-week adult-learning course on what Thomas Merton’s social conscience asks of anyone living inside that loop. In 1941 Merton entered a Kentucky monastery to leave the world behind. By 1966 he was writing to peace activists, civil rights leaders, and a Church that preferred he stay quiet. His question runs through every session: what is happening to the human person?
Three Guides, Three Strands
Merton diagnosed the false self beneath the faith, the constructed identity that needs a nation, an enemy, or a crowd to confirm it. Participants learn to see how a recommendation engine or a generative model can feed it.
Marshall McLuhan explains why the movement travels faster than any pulpit. A medium shapes a movement before anyone argues about its message. This is the course’s account of how social media and AI cause what they appear only to carry.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer shows what it cost one national church, and one pastor, to say no. In 1933 he warned that bandaging the victims under the wheel was not enough, and that the church might have to jam the wheel itself.
How the Course Moves
Every week runs on Joseph Cardijn’s See-Judge-Act method, which he gave the Young Christian Workers in Brussels in 1925. Each session pairs a 50-minute lecture with 20 minutes of facilitated discussion and closes with a three-step recap. Each of the four sections opens with a true, largely forgotten story told before the argument begins.
- See (Weeks 1–3). Merton’s two selves, the medium as message, and what the machine does to conscience.
- Judge: the history (Weeks 4–5). Toleration, then establishment, from Constantine forward, and Bonhoeffer against the German Christians.
- Judge: the present (Weeks 6–8). America’s own temptation, how scholars measure Christian nationalism and the strongest critiques of those measures, and the digital pulpit, including the physical costs of AI such as data centers.
- Act (Weeks 9–10). What has actually worked, and a closing covenant.
Fair to Every Side
The course names contested findings before anyone else does, and it gives the opposing case its full weight each week. Participants learn to speak of the movement without caricature, and to judge the role of technology without assuming it is either savior or villain.
What Participants Read
The course builds on Daniel P. Horan’s Engaging Thomas Merton: Spirituality, Justice, and Racism (Orbis Books, 2023), Merton’s social essays, and primary sources from each era. Recommended reading includes McLuhan’s Understanding Media, Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, Kevin Kruse’s One Nation Under God, and Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry’s Taking America Back for God. Catholic social teaching supplies the standard for judging automated systems.
How It Ends
There are no exams. Participants complete the course by attending, joining the discussion, and writing a one-page covenant in Week 10. Every commitment carries a name and a date, because a covenant without them is a sentiment. The covenants are shared in the final session, and a three-month follow-up asks who will check whether each commitment was kept.
No prior reading of Merton and no technical background is required.
Instructor
Richard C. Pütz is a public thinker and technology futurist who spent thirty-five years building the systems this course asks questions about. He finished his career as Executive Chief Information Security Officer at American National Insurance.