“My foray into AI’s “deep counseling mode” was indeed idolatry, because it fit the simplest definition of that most dangerous of failings: Under the name of God, it had threatened to take God’s place.”

“It is an act of human defiance to be there for each other, to continue to fill the spaces the machines would all too willingly fill in our absence.”

“The mirror of AI was not reflecting God, as Van Ruusbroec clearly says the mystic’s understanding does; it was reflecting me.” Matthew J. Milliner on AI and spiritual direction.

“It is clear to everyone that we face challenges requiring collective solutions, yet we struggle to build and tend the durable structures capable of meeting them.”

“The quiet stirrings of faith here in the north—more confirmations, new memberships, conversations once unthinkable—show that history has a way of humbling even the most confident narratives.”

“When servanthood is reduced to a public posture, it stops being liberating and becomes managerial. Hierarchy remains, only now it wears a gentler face.”

“Call this the anti-human: not a conscious hatred of people, but an Edenic whisper that the human condition—our limits, our dependencies, our vulnerabilities, our very mortality—can and should be treated as a defect.”

“My peers often cynically observed that the old people running our town consistently rejected efforts to stimulate youth social engagement and then wondered why so many of us were turning to drugs.”

“At the heart of Blake’s theological reckoning in the deistic age of Paine was a wholehearted reassertion of theism and mystical Christianity—a way that, I believe, is illuminating for us now.”

“To appreciate why childhood imagination is such a precious resource, one must grapple with the absence of imaginative power in the modern world.”

“We’re in a doom loop now, and we’re not alone. Across the developed world, fewer than four in ten citizens say they trust their national governments to do what’s best for them and the society in which they live.”

“It is a miracle indeed that two people ever marry and live together. It is a greater miracle if they manage it as long as they both shall live.”

“Gaming is not a root cause of male loneliness. It is a response to it.” Scott Pell on loneliness, boredom, and despair in post-industrial America.

“One purpose of childhood might be to save us adults from the soul-sucking numbness of an otherwise wholly unimaginative world.” Karl Johnson on smart connected toys and the purpose of childhood.

“If you think the main point of university humanities classes was to teach expository essay writing, the season ahead will be a catastrophe.” comment.org/what-is-the-...

I write and talk about energy and borders and that our collective infrastructure is how we take care of one another, and I like to point out that I’m just one of so many fellow travelers saying it in different ways. Today is a good demonstration of that. 😍💡 comment.org/care-at-scale/

“In our attempts to cultivate ethical leaders, we often tell students to emulate the servant leader. But we fail to interrogate the systems that elevate some and silence others. We focus on personal humility, not structural equity.”

“Difference need not, therefore, be a threat but a revelation of the many manifestations of the infinite that are incarnate in the world.”

“Digital platforms proliferate because the moral climate is essentially binary, sorting everything as right or wrong. Human relations mirror the tendency: for or against, like or dislike, friend or foe.”

“The central animating feature of such an international system is not fear, not security dilemmas or the primal drive of anarchy, but love. It is love that binds our societies, that builds, that sustains them.”

“If affirming the value of a human future now requires a caveat, what else have those with the power to set the terms begun to doubt? And how much has that doubt already reorganized what we build and how we live?”

“When leaders are uncritically celebrated for being servants, those beneath them may be asked to live in dual realities, upholding the myth while navigating the harm.”

“Digital platforms proliferate because the moral climate is essentially binary, sorting everything as right or wrong. Human relations mirror the tendency: for or against, like or dislike, friend or foe.”

“Communities and institutions that profess servant leadership may unconsciously shift their focus from renewal and repair to mere performance.”

“Human beings who lose their true identity seek proxies—the divine presence substituted with laws.” @askwilliamblake.bsky.social on William Blake’s public theology.

“The unexamined performance of virtue exacts a cost, both from the leader and from the community. Sooner or later, what has been hidden makes itself known.” David Forney on the dark side of servant leadership.

Good to talk w/ Mark Labberton for his Conversing Podcast about how faith has been distorted to serve an extreme political movement & how it can be reclaimed to reconstruct democracy. @commentmagazine.bsky.social @fullerseminary.bsky.social podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

“I felt I had stepped through the looking glass. Instead of gazing into this room from my kitchen window as I’d done hundreds of times as a boy, I stared back at my old house. It looked close enough to reach out and touch.”

“A key reason we tend to emphasize the restraining and socializing potential of institutions is that we are used to thinking that those secondary benefits of institutional life are what we risk losing.”

“It is only when creatures arrive on the scene that institutions and authority spring into being too.”

“At their best, institutions order human freedom toward a common purpose. At their worst, they buckle from corruption, incompetence, and irrelevance.”

“Rituals are an ancient social technology for learning self-control. Indeed, there is strong evidence that participating in religious rituals has a greater influence on self-control over the long run than religious belief.”

“The inner self is not something that can be extracted piece by piece and plastered on a social media feed. It is shy, changeable, deep, multi-faceted, and strange.”

“The central animating feature of an international system is not fear, not security dilemmas or the primal drive of anarchy, but love. It is love that binds our societies, that builds, that sustains them.”

“We are confronting not so much a culture that openly despises humanity as one quietly tempted to transcend it.”

“The most persuasive case for institutional renewal can’t be a case for affiliation or connection; it has to be a case for action.”

“The problem with talking about international law is there is really no such thing. When we talk about “international law” we are really using a kind of analogy, a metaphor, and it has lately been too often confused for the thing itself.”

“Our authors look for the traces that refuse to disappear, for moments when the fullness of the human breaks through our cultural despair, not by escaping suffering, but by bearing it in ways that transfigure the bruise of betrayal.”

“Reconsidering world politics as a kind of active covenantal process rather than settled, negotiated contracts drives us more directly into a diplomacy determined by the ordering of our loves.”

“There is no law, no army, and no leader who can force communities to betray their first loves. Not, at least, for long.” Robert Joustra with a proposal for some Augustinian amendments to the Carney Doctrine.

“If affirming the value of a human future now requires a caveat, what else have those with the power to set the terms begun to doubt? And how much has that doubt already reorganized what we build and how we live?” Anne Snyder on the advent of the anti-human.

“We have it on good authority that any effort we make to pass on the gifts we have received from God, though it may never be logged on a spreadsheet or featured in an annual report, will not be forgotten.”

“Authority in the world of AI will not come from controlling knowledge (nobody will do that anymore). It will come from tapping into the profound desires that drive people to learn in the first place.”

“Where one stands in relation to facts depends on a higher-order question of what life is for, which neither ideology nor factual truth can answer.”

“What we witness in the move from authentic Christianity to cultural Christianity is the degeneration from virtues to values.”

“If you are this rock, if you are the now-dead creatures embedded within it, Lord, I am not sure I entirely like you. For what I see is death.”

“We lack a compelling shared image of what school is for because we lack a shared image of what a human life is for.”

“To think institutionally is to remember that we inherit before we innovate, that we hold something in trust.”

“We must take ownership of our frustration and look for ways to act more effectively—rather than just waiting for outsiders to rescue us. We have become accustomed to understanding ourselves as spectators of a world out of our control.”

“Men are made, not grown. That requires structure as well as instruction; it requires rituals and rites.” Richard V. Reeves on the role of institutions in making men.