In April 1962, the Abbot General of the Trappists ordered Thomas Merton to stop writing about war. Merton obeyed the letter of the order and ignored its spirit. He kept writing, had the essays typed and mimeographed, and mailed them to a list of friends that eventually ran past a hundred names. They circulated for years as the Cold War Letters. He had concluded that silence in the face of what he called the unspeakable was not holiness. It was complicity.
A censored monk running samizdat out of Kentucky is not the image most people carry of Thomas Merton. It is the one I work from.
Booking
I work with parishes, libraries, schools, retirement clubs, civic and service organizations, community organizers, and nonprofits. Live or by Zoom, anywhere. This is a labor of love, and it is priced like one.
Tell me who is in the room, how long I have, and what you are actually worried about. I will tell you which of these fits, or propose something that fits better. I answer my own mail.
What These Sessions Are
I spent thirty-five years in emerging technology, at Coopers & Lybrand, Oracle, C-Bridge, and American National Insurance, where I finished as Chief Information Security Officer. I now spend my time on the question that thirty-five years never answered: not what the technology can do, but what it is doing to us.
It does us no good to make fantastic progress if we do not know how to live with it, if we cannot make good use of it, and if, in fact, our technology becomes nothing more than an expensive and complicated way of cultural disintegration.
Thomas Merton
These are not technology briefings. You can get those anywhere, and they expire in eighteen months. These sessions put a piece of history in front of you, work it honestly, and hand you a method you can use on Monday.
Every session runs on See-Judge-Act, the method Joseph Cardijn gave the worker movements of the 1920s. See what is actually happening. Judge it against something that does not move. Act at whatever scale you actually have.
And every session ends up with the same four questions, which are the ones I put to any system before I ask whether it works. People, who does this make larger and at whose expense. Planet, what does it cost the ground we stand on and who is sent the bill. Purpose, does it enlarge what a person is for or narrow it. Prosperity, for everyone or for a few. Each talk below is marked with the tests it works hardest.
Come ready to think. Leave with something you can share.
The Talks
Each runs about an hour with discussion, unless noted. All are available live or by Zoom, and all can be expanded into a half-day workshop or a multi-session book club.
What Your Employer and Others Can Already See
Notes from a former Chief Information Security Officer
On 8 November 1972, in Sandpoint, Idaho, a Retail Credit field representative finished eleven investigations in a single afternoon. He spoke to three people, two gas station partners and a station manager. One of the eleven subjects, a motel owner, had applied for health insurance. His report said she “has had a reputation of living with more than one man out of wedlock.” Her application was turned down “due to extensive criticism from inspection which must remain confidential.” She objected. The company looked again and found “no current criticism.” The Fair Credit Reporting Act had been in force for more than eighteen months.
Retail Credit had begun in Atlanta in 1899, and its investigators knocked on neighbors’ doors. Congress passed the Fair Credit Reporting Act in 1970. In 1975 the company changed its name to Equifax. The file came first. The computer only made it cheap.
I spent the last stretch of my career as a Chief Information Security Officer, which means I know what an organization can learn about a person and how little stands between the knowing and the using. This hour is that knowledge, given plainly. What is collected, by your employer’s monitoring software, your pay record, your car, and your phone. What is inferred from what is collected, which is the part nobody consents to. What is sold, and to whom. What a consent screen does not cover. What happens when the files leak, and what a criminal pays for what is left. And the short list of things that genuinely reduce your exposure, from someone who has read the other side of the transaction.
Then the turn. The profile a system builds of you is not a description of you. It is a proposal, and the system treats its proposal as more real than your own account of yourself. Thomas Merton named that mechanism in 1961 and called it the false self; here, the false self may be created by someone or an AI agent other than you. He was writing about the interior life. He described the product.
You leave with five things to do this week and a much clearer idea of what you have been agreeing to.
The folder was never you.
For: libraries, universities, professional groups, retirement clubs, parishes, and anyone who has clicked accept.
Tests: People, Purpose.
Societal Phase Change: What the Machines Are Doing to Us
The Root of War Is Fear: Merton, the arms race, and the intelligence revolution.
They Silenced the Monk. He Kept Typing.
In April 1962, the Abbot General of the Trappists ordered Thomas Merton to stop publishing on war. He had just finished the book. He obeyed the letter of the order but ignored its spirit—typed the essays, ran them off on a mimeograph, and mailed them to a list that grew past a hundred names. Peace in the Post-Christian Era did not reach a commercial press until 2004, thirty-six years after his death.
He was not arguing that the bomb would fail to detonate. He granted the physics. His question was the one nobody in the room was asking: what is possessing this doing to the people who possess it?
That question is now sixty-four years old, and it has never been more current.
On 30 May 2023, the heads of the leading artificial intelligence laboratories signed a single sentence putting extinction risk from their own product alongside pandemics and nuclear war. Then they went back to building it.
In 1944, Joseph Rotblat walked out of the Manhattan Project — the only scientist who did — and spent the next fifty years on disarmament. That is the difference, and it is the whole story. Rotblat left. They signed and stayed.
On 27 January 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to eighty-five seconds, the closest it has stood since 1947, and named large language models in the same statement as the nuclear arsenals. The two arms races are no longer an analogy. They are being read off one instrument.
This session puts both of them through four questions I ask of any system before I ask whether it works — on a warhead, a hiring algorithm, a data center, or a parish app. Not four values.
Four tests. A value is something you hold; a test is something you run.
- People. Who does this make larger, and at whose expense?
- Planet. What does it cost the ground we stand on, and who is sent the bill?
- Purpose. Does it enlarge what a person is for, or narrow it?
- Prosperity. For everyone, or for a few?
Merton answers each one first, in his own words — Fourth and Walnut, the rain he said they would one day sell us, the false self he described decades before anyone built a machine to feed it, and the Council’s judgment on an arms race that injures people experiencing poverty without anybody deciding to injure them. Then each test meets a case from the last eighteen months.
You will not leave reassured. You will leave with the four questions on a card, one system of your own already put through them, and a clearer idea of why the warning was heard the first time and set aside anyway.
Because it was heard, Russell and Einstein said it in 1955. An ecumenical council said it in 1965.
The answer to why nobody listened is that they did.
Tests: all four.
For: parishes, senior lunch talks, labor networks, peace & justice committees/groups, adult formation, universities, civic groups, Merton societies, retreat settings.
Who Is in Control? Faith, AI, and the Future of Being Human
Catholic Social Teaching and the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
For over 130 years, Catholic Social Teaching has asked one question in changing forms: what do we owe one another when the world of work moves beneath our feet? Rerum Novarum asked it of the factory in 1891. Pope Leo XIV asked it of artificial intelligence in Magnifica Humanitas, promulgated 25 May 2026, the first papal encyclical devoted to AI and the first to insist that technology is never neutral in practice because it carries the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.
Artificial intelligence is already shaping how we work, learn, communicate, make decisions, and even understand ourselves. But as machines become more powerful, the most important question is not simply, “What can technology do?” It is: What kind of people—and what kind of society—are we becoming? We will explore the timely wisdom of Catholic Social Teaching and, in particular, Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes—the Church’s landmark reflection on “the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties” of the modern world—and apply it to AI, social media, automation, surveillance, digital misinformation, work, human relationships, and the common good. No technical background is needed. Bring your questions, your hopes, and your concerns as we ask how Christians can use emerging technology wisely, protect human dignity, and ensure that our tools remain servants of humanity rather than its masters.
I am not going to argue that in the abstract. I sold these platforms. I wrote the business cases for the systems that sort applicants, price risk, and decide who is worth a follow-up call, and I later spent years defending the data those systems run on. So the framework in this session gets tested against real hiring screens, real underwriting, and real surveillance, described by someone who was in the room when they were bought.
You leave with a way to evaluate any automated decision against human dignity, and a method for teaching it to somebody else next month.
For: parishes, adult formation, educators, professional groups.
Tests: People, Prosperity.
Iron, Cotton, and Conscience: What Black Catholic History Teaches Us About AI
What the history of technology and slavery tells us about artificial intelligence
On 19 June 1838, Jesuit priests signed an agreement to sell 272 people to Louisiana sugar planters. Rome attached three conditions: the people must keep their faith, their families must stay together, and the money must not pay the school’s debts. None was fully met. Eighteen months later, the pope condemned the slave trade in strong terms. American bishops read the condemnation down to almost nothing.
Now hold that sequence in mind. A machine changes the economics. The money follows. Conscience arrives late, with a qualification attached.
On 25 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical, on artificial intelligence, three and a half years after ChatGPT reached the public. The pattern is running again.
This keynote follows it through six machines and the people who lived inside them:
- A cotton gin that saved labor at the one step that was not the bottleneck, and multiplied bondage.
- A free Black Catholic engineer whose invention spared the men at the kettles and made the plantation richer.
- A man born enslaved who bought a printing press and called a national Church to account.
- A Virginia registrar with a filing cabinet and a rule, and a law that turned racism into an information system.
- A television camera on a bridge in Selma, and the Black Catholic sister who walked across it.
- An algorithm that sent extra care to fewer Black patients, because it used past spending as a stand-in for illness.
You will hear a story most of us were never taught: Christianity was African before it was European, and Black Catholics were here from the beginning. The Church often served them worst, and they often kept its conscience best. You will also learn a way of asking hard questions about any system that judges people, from a hiring screen to a health-risk score.
You leave with four patterns that repeat across two centuries, five questions to ask of any AI system you build, buy, or trust, and a one-page handout to carry back to your desk.
For: parishes, adult formation, universities, history audiences, Black Catholic history observances, civic and professional groups.
Tests: all four.
Four Months in 1954
How a Christian Nation Was Manufactured, and Who Is Manufacturing It Now. Christian nationalism in the age of artificial intelligence, with Thomas Merton and Marshall McLuhan.
On 7 February 1954, a Scottish preacher four years off the boat climbed into the pulpit of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, looked down at the President of the United States sitting in Lincoln’s pew, and told the congregation that the Pledge of Allegiance described nothing in particular. The next morning a bill was filed. On 14 June, Flag Day, Eisenhower signed it. Four months, start to finish, and the Pledge had two words it had gone sixty-two years without.
Almost every American who has recited them since has believed they were as old as the founding. They were added in 1954. Do the arithmetic yourself.
The sermon did not start the campaign. It gave a six-year campaign a President in the pew. An Illinois attorney proposed the words in 1948, the Knights of Columbus took them up in 1951, and a congressman filed the first resolution in 1953.
That gap, between what a thing is and when people believe it began, is the working machinery of Christian nationalism, and it has never once traveled without a machine. So this session asks the cause-and-effect question directly: what did each machine change in the movement before it changed the message? Direct mail and a network of pulpits. Radio, and Father Charles Coughlin, who reached an estimated thirty million listeners at his peak. Social platforms, which removed the gatekeepers. And now generative artificial intelligence, which does not need a person at the front of the room at all.
Two Catholic converts frame the hour. Marshall McLuhan argued that the medium is the message: the form of a communication shapes how a people associate and act before anyone argues about the content. Thomas Merton read McLuhan with a pencil in his hand in 1964. In 1968 he wrote that we can no longer afford to equate faith with “the acceptance of myths about our nation, our society, or our technology.” He put all three in one sentence. He was not guessing.
The session lays out the history plainly and measures the movement honestly, giving its sharpest peer-reviewed critics the same hearing as its strongest findings. Then it turns the machine around and uses artificial intelligence to understand the movement rather than only to spread it: trace a claim to its date, check where a picture came from, build the strongest case against your own view, and audit the tool. It closes with an expanded six-step See-Judge-Act and Merton’s test, which is not who claims the nation but who is standing with the people it has no room for.
You leave with the arithmetic of 1954, four ways to put a machine to honest use, six steps you can work, and one question to carry out the door: who does this make larger, and at whose expense?
It ends where it began, with a child’s hand over a heart. The child will assume the words are old. They are seventy-two.
For: parishes, adult formation, libraries, civic groups, universities, Merton societies, clergy gatherings, and anyone who has been told what their country has always been.
Tests: Purpose, People.
Courses and Workshops
Iron, Cotton, and Conscience
Technology, Slavery, and the Black Catholic Soul.
In 1794, a wooden box with wire teeth did the work of fifty people, and bought American slavery another seventy years. Machines made no moral choices. They changed the odds, and conscience ran late.
We follow the ship, the cotton gin, the sugar evaporator, the printing press, the filing cabinet, the camera, and the algorithm. Alongside them we recover a history most Catholics were never taught. Black Catholics were here from the beginning, and many arrived already baptized, in chains. The Church itself owned people: in 1838 Jesuit priests sold 272 of them to Louisiana sugar planters, and Rome’s conditions on the sale were not met. You will meet Estevanico, Henriette Delille, Augustus Tolton, Daniel Rudd, and Thea Bowman, who built, prayed, resisted, and endured inside a Church that often failed them. We end with artificial intelligence, and ask what the pattern demands of anyone building it today. No background needed.
Available as a keynote, a one-hour lunch talk built on the cotton gin alone, or a course of as many sessions as your group can give it.
For: history audiences, parishes, universities, Black Catholic history observances.
Tests: People, Prosperity.
Who Is in Control? Faith, AI, and the Future of Being Human
Artificial intelligence is already shaping how we work, learn, communicate, make decisions, and even understand ourselves. But as machines become more powerful, the most important question is not simply, “What can technology do?” It is: What kind of people—and what kind of society—are we becoming? In this adult-learning course, we will explore the timely wisdom of Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes—the Church’s landmark reflection on “the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties” of the modern world—and apply it to AI, social media, automation, surveillance, digital misinformation, work, human relationships, and the common good.
A useful ground rule: This is not a course designed to make participants “pro-AI” or “anti-AI.” It is a course in Christian discernment: asking what a particular technology does, whom it benefits, who bears its costs, what habits it forms, what social arrangements it reinforces, and whether it advances the dignity and vocation of persons.
No technical background is needed. Bring your questions, your hopes, and your concerns as we ask how Christians can use emerging technology wisely, protect human dignity, and ensure that our tools remain servants of humanity rather than its masters.
For: parishes, schools, senior groups, retreat settings, adult formation.
Tests: People, Purpose.
Book Clubs and Discussion Groups
Great books, then great discussion. That is the whole method, and it is Mortimer Adler’s.
All genuine learning is active, not passive. It involves the use of the mind, not just the memory. It is a discovery process, in which the student is the main agent, not the teacher.
Mortimer J. Adler
Reading Merton in the Age of AI
Six sessions, ninety minutes each, live or by Zoom
A ready-to-run series with the reading fixed in advance, so a program chair can put it on a calendar without a planning meeting.
- The false self. New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions, 1961), selected chapters.
- The unspeakable. Raids on the Unspeakable (New Directions, 1966), with A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann.
- The monk reads the critics. Merton’s December 1964 Commonweal review of Jacques Ellul, and his marginalia in Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (McGraw-Hill, 1964).
- Fourth and Walnut. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Doubleday, 1966), selected entries.
- The other traditions. Merton and D. T. Suzuki, and what the encounter cost both of them.
- What we do on Monday. See-Judge-Act applied to one system each participant actually uses.
No prior reading of Merton is assumed. Groups run from six to twenty. Custom reading lists built to your group remain available, in series of four to twelve.
We start where all learning starts, with curiosity, puzzlement, and a certain amount of bewilderment. We work through the warm fuzzies and the cold pricklies. We keep asking the only question that matters in adult education: why bother, and does it make a difference?
If you would like to sit at this table, write to me at richard@allthingscyberspace.com. If you can host the series, whether that is a parish, a library, a school, or six friends around a Zoom table, tell me roughly when and how many. And if you are one person who would simply like to read Merton with other people, write anyway and I will keep your name. When there are three or more of us, I will set a date, and we will begin.
Formats
Keynotes. Lunch presentations. Half-day and full-day workshops. Small-group discussion. Retreats. Multi-session book clubs. Live and by Zoom.
What People Say
Great workshop and presentation. When our staff first experienced this seminar in Orlando, they said others in the Siemens organization needed to see it and learn from it. So we put on three more workshops and keynote addresses for Siemens globally. We felt the message and seminar should be experienced not only by Siemens but also by our customers, so he was also our keynote speaker for Siemens Customer Appreciation Day.
Michael Philpott, Chief Executive Officer, Siemens Canada Limited
Most excellent workshop for our people. Richard was our keynote and kick-off leader for a major new business initiative that involved all aspects of the company, globally. It was the inspiration and leadership we needed to move forward. We used him over and over again for coaching and consulting.
Nancy D. Reyda, Vice President, Brand Development, Chevron
Mr. Pütz’s lecture was very enlightening. See the trend of innovation to collaborative education.
Hiroshi Nimura, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Mitsubishi International Corporation
Where I Write
Between engagements, I write two newsletters on Substack, and more often here on this site, sometimes daily.
Innovate~Educate~Collaborate connects history, religion, and culture to today’s challenges, with a standing focus on the anthropology of technology. Long-form essays on Merton, McLuhan, and what the machines are doing to the human person.
Cardijn Reflections draws on the writings of Joseph Cardijn, founder of the Young Christian Workers, whose See-Judge-Act method runs through everything on this page.
A Little Story
In 2000 I gave a keynote at a financial conference for executives in New York City. Afterward, a man came up and said, “As a CIO I have been struggling to make sense of how all this new internet world fits together. Today you put the pieces together for me. You are like the Internet Buddha.” My staff overheard him, and from the look on their faces I knew they would not let it go. The next day, back at our office in Cambridge, people greeted me in the halls with, “Hey Buddha,” and when I reached my office I found a little rubber squeaky on my desk. It reminds me of what a fantastic staff I had. They were young, energetic, and very intelligent, and they truly made a difference in my work. I still keep the squeaky Buddha on my desk to remind me that great things happen when everyone works together.
Tell me who is in the room, how long I have, and what you are actually worried about.
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