The greatest evil of our times is the lack of adult education in matters pertaining to religion.
Louis J. Putz, CSC (1909–1998)
Fr. Putz served as Notre Dame’s director of Catholic Action and president of Fides Press from 1940 to 1961, and rector of the Seminary at Holy Cross Notre Dame in the 1960s, making him one of the people who carried Joseph Cardijn’s See-Judge-Act method into American Catholic life, including the training of Holy Cross priests. On 24 May 1974 he founded the Forever Learning Institute in South Bend, where I still teach.
Everything on this page is free to download, copy, and hand out. That is the reason.
For Event Organizers
Take what you need. If you want something written specifically for your program or bulletin, ask, and I will write it.
For a Parish Bulletin or Library Calendar
About fifty words, written to be pasted straight in.
Richard Pütz spent thirty-five years building the technology he now asks questions about, finishing as a Chief Information Security Officer. He reads Thomas Merton as a first-hand witness to what a technological order does to a person, and puts one question to every machine we build: People, Planet, Purpose, Prosperity, for everyone or for a few?
Short Bio
Richard Pütz argues that the autonomous revolution has to answer four questions: People, Planet, Purpose, and Prosperity for everyone. He comes to that argument from thirty-five years in emerging technology at Coopers & Lybrand, Oracle, C-Bridge, and American National Insurance, where he finished as Executive Chief Information Security Officer. He now writes and speaks on what those systems are doing to the human person, drawing on Thomas Merton, Marshall McLuhan, and Catholic social teaching.
Longer Bio
Richard Pütz is a public thinker and technology futurist who argues that the autonomous revolution has to answer four questions before it answers any other: People, who does this make larger and at whose expense; Planet, what does it cost the ground we stand on; Purpose, does it enlarge what a person is for; and Prosperity, for everyone or for a few.
He is not a professional academic. He is a cultural historian who wandered into emerging technology and stayed for thirty-five years. He worked in emerging technology consulting at Coopers & Lybrand, built the industrial consulting and strategy practice at Oracle, served as Executive Vice President of Strategy and Marketing and Chief Revenue Officer at C-Bridge on the MIT campus in Cambridge, and finished his career as Executive Chief Information Security Officer at American National Insurance, which is where he learned how little stands between what an organization knows about a person and what it does with it.
He trained in European history and philosophy at Saint Meinrad College, where Sebastian Leonard, OSB, DPhil (Oxon), directed his thesis. He took seventy-eight graduate hours at Saint Meinrad School of Theology under Cyprian Davis, OSB, author of The History of Black Catholics in the United States, and did graduate work in comparative religion at Indiana University (IU).
He studied with Eliyahu Goldratt and holds the Goldratt Institute’s Jonah’s Jonah designation, the level qualified to teach and certify Jonahs. He also holds Expert certification from the Theory of Constraints International Certification Organization (TOC ICO), which he helped found.
He has delivered more than five hundred keynotes and workshops across Asia, Europe, North America, and Australia. He is a member of the International Thomas Merton Society, teaches adults through the Forever Learning Institute in South Bend, Indiana, and writes at allthingscyberspace.com.
Talk Titles for Your Program
One line each, free to reproduce. Full descriptions are on the talks and workshops page.
- People, Planet, Purpose, Prosperity. Four questions for the autonomous revolution.
- 1964: The Year Everyone Saw It Coming. McLuhan, Ellul, Marcuse, Illich, and the monk who read all of them.
- What Your Employer Can Already See. Notes from a former Chief Information Security Officer.
- The Algorithmic Self. Thomas Merton’s false self, industrialized.
- The Human Algorithm. Catholic Social Teaching and the ethics of artificial intelligence.
- The Finger and the Moon. Comparative religion and the question artificial intelligence cannot answer.
- Almost Nobody Who Killed Him Was Insane. Merton, the unspeakable, and the machinery of reasonable people.
- Four Months in 1954. How a Christian nation was manufactured, and who is manufacturing it now.
- Iron, Cotton, and Conscience. Technology, slavery, and the Black Catholic soul. A six-session course, or a one-hour lunch talk.
- Reading Merton in the Age of AI. A six-session book club, live or by Zoom.
Photographs
Right-click any of these to save the full-size file, or write to me and I will send them.
Headshot — 768 × 1024. Good for web and programs at small sizes.
Informal portrait — 1632 × 2076. The best file for print at any size.
Alternate headshot — 960 × 1280.
New photographs are being taken. If you need something specific, ask.
Practical Details
Travels from: Chicago, Illinois
Formats: Keynotes, lunch presentations, half-day and full-day workshops, retreats, multi-session book clubs. Live or by Zoom.
Rates: Parish, library, and nonprofit rates available.
Contact: richard@allthingscyberspace.com
Handouts
Materials from recent sessions. If you attended and want something that is not here, write to me.
May 2026
True Self, Contemplation, and Compassion Across Four Traditions
Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism on the deeper human center: how each tradition understands it, how each approaches contemplative practice, and where compassion comes from in each. Includes a comparative table and six discussion questions.
The Point That Belongs to God: Thomas Merton and the Universal Heart
Handout from the talk given on 30 May 2026.
Merton: Talk Slides
Slides from the session on 30 May 2026.
See-Judge-Act
The Cardijn method in brief: see what is actually happening, judge it against something that does not move, act at whatever scale you have.
Foundational
The Seminar and Oxford Learning Model
How I run a discussion group, and why the student, rather than the teacher, is the main agent in it.
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