That question drives this episode with Michael Graham and Keith Plummer. Michael is Program Director for The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, and Keith is Dean of the School of Divinity at Cairn University, where he teaches on technology and digital discipleship. Together, they bring theological depth and practical wisdom to one of the most urgent questions facing Christians today: how do we use AI helpfully without letting it erode the human relationships at the heart of Christian life?

In our conversation, Michael and Keith offer clear and penetrating frameworks for thinking about AI in the church. They warn against using AI as a relational substitute, reflect on the difference between toil and truly human labor, and argue that we should never outsource to machines what God made us to need other people for. We talk about sermon preparation, spiritual formation, pastoral ministry, and the subtle ways convenience can hollow out wisdom, patience, and trust. 

Michael and Keith joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to ask how Christians and churches can embrace helpful technologies while guarding the deeply human and spiritual realities those technologies can never replace.

Resources Mentioned:

• The Gospel Coalition’s AI Christian Benchmark project
• Why Pastors Should Question AI for the Sake of Their Souls by Daniel Nealon
• The Great Dechurching by Michael Graham

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This is a question that shapes this episode with Joshua Baru. Joshua is an AI researcher and data science lead in Nairobi, and he brings a perspective too often missing from Western AI conversations: the perspective of justice, labor, and the common good. In our conversation, he challenges the idea that AI is a neutral tool floating above human realities. Instead, he asks who designs these systems, who benefits from them, and who bears the cost when they go wrong.

We talk about AI in the courtroom, the importance of human accountability, and the hidden labor behind supposedly frictionless tools. Joshua also introduces the idea of digital colonialism: the extraction of data, land, and labor from the global majority for the benefit of powerful corporations elsewhere. It is one of the most illuminating and unsettling conversations in the series.

Again and again, Joshua brings the discussion back to distinctly Christian ground. Christ is sovereign over AI, our deepest problem is not technological but spiritual, and our calling is to love God and love our neighbor even here. Joshua joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to explore what AI reveals about justice, power, and human sin, and how Christians can pursue technological wisdom without losing sight of the people hidden beneath the system.

Resources Mentioned:

• The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis 
• The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis 
• Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman  
• AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan 
• Authority by Jonathan Leeman 
   

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That question opens this episode with Autumn Ridenour. We begin with the idea of a “granny bot”: a chatbot built from a dead relative’s messages, voice notes, and emails. It sounds comforting at first, but Autumn helps us see why such technologies do not really preserve communion. They risk replacing grief, memory, and creaturely acceptance with a digital imitation of presence.

Dr. Autumn Ridenour is a Christian ethicist at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and the author of books on Sabbath, aging, and the moral challenges of the digital world. She brings biblical depth and Augustinian insight to some of the hardest questions raised by AI. In our conversation, she argues that the digital age tempts us to resist human limits rather than receive them. But dependence, embodiment, and finitude are not defects to be engineered away. They are part of what it means to be creatures before God.

We also talk about Babel, transhumanism, aging, and the difference between simulation and real relationship. Again and again, Autumn points beyond Silicon Valley’s promises to the richer Christian hope of face-to-face communion with God and one another. She joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to explore what AI reveals about our deepest longings, and why no machine can finally satisfy them.

Resources Mentioned:

• Sabbath Rest as Vocation by Autumn Ridenour
• Restlessness and Belonging by Autumn Ridenour
• A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

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That question is no longer theoretical. We live in a world of AI companions, emotional chatbots, and wearable devices that promise to track our stress, improve our sleep, and help us manage our inner lives. Some of these tools can be genuinely useful. But the more persuasive they become, the more we need to ask: are they helping us flourish as human beings, or training us to settle for a simulation of care?

Few people are better equipped to help us think about that question than Rosalind Picard, a professor at MIT and founder of a research group at the MIT Media Lab that develops technologies designed to recognize and respond to human emotion. She has spent decades working at the cutting edge of affective computing, a discipline that she founded. But what makes this conversation especially compelling is that she is not dazzled by the rhetoric of AI, but clear-eyed about both its promise and its danger.

In this episode, Roz helps us think carefully about the difference between reading the outward signs of emotion and actually knowing a person’s inner life. She explains why AI can imitate empathy without feeling anything at all, why emotionally intelligent technologies can sometimes support human flourishing, and why companion chatbots in particular should raise alarm bells for Christians. Along the way, we talk about consciousness, embodiment, meaning, and the temptation to become, in C. S. Lewis’s phrase, “too easily pleased.”

Roz joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to ask what AI can really know about our emotions, what it can never know, and why the richest forms of love, care, and meaning can never be reduced to code.

Resource Mentioned: Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom

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That question sits at the heart of this episode with Brett McCracken. Brett is Senior Editor at The Gospel Coalition and a perceptive writer on faith, media, technology, and culture. In our conversation, he helps us see that AI threatens not only jobs or industries, but something deeper: our sense that the process of making, wrestling, waiting, and learning might actually matter. Great art, he argues, is never just about the polished final product. It is also about praise, patience, formation, and the personal gift one human being offers to another. 

We talk about why wisdom is more than information, why AI can imitate emotion without sharing in human suffering, and why boredom, solitude, and even daydreaming may be among the most important human habits to protect in an age of constant optimization. Brett also reflects on the attention economy and the subtle ways our desires are being shaped by technologies designed to keep us looking, clicking, and consuming. 

Brett joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to explore what AI is doing to art, attention, and discipleship, and why some of the most human things we do may also be the least efficient.

Resources Mentioned:

• The Wisdom Pyramid by Brett McCracken
• Scrolling Ourselves to Death by Brett McCracken and Collin Hansen
• Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
• The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
• Resonance by Hartmut Rosa
• The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen
• On The Death of Daydreaming by Christine Rosen
• The Wisdom of Sleep by Brett McCracken

PREORDER The AI Apocalypse: A Survival Guide for Humanity, featuring Ridenour, Watkin, Brett McCracken, and many others, such as Ben Sasse and Alan Noble.

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That question lies at the heart of this episode with Stephen Driscoll. As AI becomes more capable, many people feel a growing sense of anxiety about what human beings are for. If our value rests on intelligence, creativity, or productivity, then AI will always seem to threaten our worth. But Stephen argues that this fear reveals a deeper problem: we were never meant to ground our identity in performance in the first place.

Stephen is a Christian ministry worker in Australia and the author of Made in Our Image: God, Artificial Intelligence and You. In our conversation, he turns to Genesis 1 and 2 to show that human dignity is not something we achieve but something we receive. We are made in the image of God, and that means no machine can take away what God has given.

Stephen joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to explore why AI is forcing fresh questions about identity, and why the Christian answer offers a surer foundation for human worth than any technological vision ever could.

Resources Mentioned:

• Made in Our Image by Stephen Driscoll 
• Dominion by Tom Holland 
• The Experience Machine by Robert Nozick 
• Your Brain on ChatGPT by MIT Media Lab

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That question drives this episode with Michael Keller. Michael is lead pastor of Redeemer Lincoln Square in New York City, and he also brings a rare technical perspective to the conversation, having completed doctoral work in computational linguistics using early machine learning methods. In our discussion, he argues that AI can give us information, polish, and efficiency, but it cannot give us the one thing at the heart of Christian life: real relationship. It can help draft a prayer, but it cannot pray. It can mimic understanding, but it cannot know or love a person.

We talk about friction, formation, and the danger of outsourcing the very struggles through which God shapes us. Michael makes the striking point that AI offers the appearance of depth without the cost of it. That is true in ministry, in relationships, and even in our devotional lives. If prayer, preaching, and discipleship become frictionless, something essential is taken from us.

Again and again, Michael brings the conversation back to a richer Christian vision of the human person. We are more than our outputs. We are not defined by efficiency, performance, or the ability to process information. Michael joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to explore what AI can do for us, what it can never do, and why this cultural moment is forcing us to ask afresh what it really means to be human.

Resources Mentioned:

• Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin

PREORDER The AI Apocalypse: A Survival Guide for Humanity, featuring Ridenour, Watkin, Brett McCracken, and many others, such as Ben Sasse and Alan Noble.

JOIN the conversation on Discord, along with other Silicon Spiritualities listeners.

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That question runs through this episode with Rachel Gilson. Rachel is Director of Theological Development and Culture for Cru and the author of Born Again This Way and Parenting Without Panic in an LGBT-Affirming World. In our conversation, she brings unusual clarity to the question of work in the age of AI: not simply what these tools can do, but what they may be doing to our integrity, our vocation, and our sense of ourselves.

We talk about writing, voice, and the temptation to present work that is not really ours as though it were. AI may be able to write, but it cannot witness. It cannot speak from a life, a body, a history, or a situated perspective. That is why this episode is not a simple rejection of AI, but a careful exercise in discernment: learning where these tools may genuinely help, and where they risk hollowing out the very human work God has given us to do.

We also explore desire, embodiment, personhood, and the difference between using a tool and being quietly deformed by it. Rachel joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to ask how Christians can work faithfully in the age of AI, and how the Scriptures help us hold together honesty, community, embodiment, and hope.

Resources Mentioned:

• Born Again This Way by Rachel Gilson
• Parenting Without Panic in an LGBT-Affirming World by Rachel Gilson
• Biblical Critical Theory by Christopher Watkin
• Entering into Rest by Oliver O’Donovan
• The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis

PREORDER The AI Apocalypse: A Survival Guide for Humanity, featuring Ridenour, Watkin, Brett McCracken, and many others, such as Ben Sasse and Alan Noble.

JOIN the conversation on Discord, along with other Silicon Spiritualities listeners.

Help The Gospel Coalition renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel: Donate today.

Check out The Pour Over Podcast — politically neutral news for people who want the facts without the spin, and with a brief biblical perspective

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PREORDER The AI Apocalypse: A Survival Guide for Humanity, featuring Ridenour, Watkin, Brett McCracken, and many others, such as Ben Sasse and Alan Noble.

JOIN the conversation on Discord, along with other Silicon Spiritualities listeners.

Help The Gospel Coalition renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel: Donate today.

Check out The Pour Over Podcast — politically neutral news for people who want the facts without the spin, and with a brief biblical perspective

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.