Rediscovering the Virtues
The Keys to AI, Vulnerability, and the Future
“Habits for Humanity in the Age of AI” - Ben Sasse, The Wall Street Journal
I had this article at the end, but it’s too important to save for last. If you read one article today, make it this one. Ben Sasse is teaching us how to live, even as he’s dying. That’s how it often goes.
We stand at a civilizational inflection point. On one hand, Sasse points out, the state of our life together is grim. We’re lonely, divided, and distrustful. But on the other hand, we stand at the precipice of the greatest technological leap forward in centuries. How will we fare?
Sasse insists we stay focused on what’s most important: our shared humanity, our faith, and our relationships. “The challenge is how to live with virtue and technology when technology tends to erode virtue and place and human texture. Our response must be to cultivate habits, community and a revivification of place.” To create the life we want in the coming generations, we’re going to have to stay focused on real-life relationships, the practice of other-focused virtues, and re-learning to build thick community around our shared values. Sasse lists four “starter habits”: reading, hard work, tech sabbaths, and serious travel.
“Character, whether of an individual or of a nation, is molded by habits and by time. This republic requires men and women to do long-form deliberation, serious thinking, honest humility and daily striving. What good is it to gain the whole world if we forfeit the souls that we’re supposed to form? We can’t expect to remain free without being virtuous, we can’t be bold without being rooted, we can’t be great without aiming first to be good.”
“The Cult of Pastoral Vulnerability” - Carl Trueman, First Things
Sometimes it’s so clear, in a flash, where Christians have ceased to be just in the world and have become of the world, instead. The creeping logic of “standpoint epistemology,” the belief that you can only know what you have experienced, is one of those areas. Christians believe in absolute revealed truth, but we swim in the waters of cultural relativism. While most of us would not admit that we’ve been influenced by relativism, intersectionality, or cultural marxism, there are some strains that have set down such deep roots in evangelicalism that we hardly even notice.
With his characteristic insight, Trueman points to just such a place in the culture of “vulnerability.” What makes someone qualified to teach, preach, pastor, write, or influence? Their lived experience, of course. You don’t want to listen to someone talk about something they haven’t experienced. Everyone knows men shouldn’t give advice about motherhood any more than single people should teach seminars on marriage. But is that true?
“Women need to have pastoral roles because men, lacking the lived experience of womanhood, cannot adequately minister to their needs. Elderly pastors who grew up in a pre-social-media age cannot speak to young people because of the generation gap. And straight pastors who have never experienced homosexual temptation have less authority in counseling those Christians who do. Experience grants authority.
No, no, no. The minister preaches the word and administers the sacraments. These have an objective validity that does not depend upon the moral or experiential qualities of the man expounding the Bible, sprinkling the water, breaking the bread, and filling the cup. Yes, the minister’s character is important. Paul’s list of qualifications for eldership makes that clear, and when a minister is found to be wanting, he should be removed by due process. But the performance of public vulnerability is not a qualification for ministry.”
The precipitating event for this meditation came last weekend, when Immanuel Church Nashville announced that Sam Allberry had been disqualified from ministry and removed as an elder. Shortly following, the Gospel Coalition announced he had resigned as a Keller Center fellow and that his writing and videos were being removed from the website. Following his ordination in 2023, the church discovered that Allberry, who became well-known for his celibate approach to same-sex attraction, had been in a relationship with another man. At the time, the church decided this was not disqualifying, but when new information emerged earlier this year, the church removed him from ministry.
While many have reacted to this news with debates over how Christians should approach same-sex attraction, ordination, and cancel culture, Trueman asks a more incisive question. Has all of the cult of vulnerability distracted us from the bedrock of what we believe? Have we narrowed the scope of the Scriptures down to the level of “advice” that can only come from a small experienced demographic, that we’ve lost the weighty authority of the Bible to address all of life? Like so many issues, this argument needs a bit of nuance to the dangers of under- and over-application, but it’s a sound corrective to a dangerous trend.
“It is past time we throw out the vulnerability model of ministry and return to emphasizing the great objective truths of the faith, truths that are true regardless of the ‘lived experience’ of the one declaring them.”
“Scott Bessent: Donald Trump’s Economic Engineer” - Mark Halperin, The Wall Street Journal
The economy is typically the top indicator for the midterms, for re-election, and for President Trump’s sense of accomplishments. Trump’s legacy will rise or fall on the combination of foreign policy and economic performance in the next 6 months. If the war with Iran ends well, it will help him in the midterms and cement his bid to be the most consequential president for the Middle East in American History. Likewise, if the economy continues to push all-time highs, real wages grow, and inflation stays low, he will be right in saying the U.S. economy is the “hottest thing going.”
The looming factor in all of this is China. With a summit next week and at least two more meetings scheduled for this year, Trump is keeping an eye on what I think will be the defining question of the 21st century - how does Cold War II with China end?
The key to both goals was the appointment of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Like many of Trump’s picks, he’s an outsider, speaks well on TV, and his net worth is reported to be just over half a billion. He made his money working for two titans of the investment world, George Soros and Stanley Druckenmiller. Through that work, he has extensive knowledge of macroeconomics, the Fed, and global economics.
As has become clear in Iran, while the military might of the U.S. is impressive, it’s the economic might they’re banking on. This move seems to have the fingerprints of Bessent all over it. Halperin’s reporting zeroes in on the most important feature of the Trump-Bessent approach to economics and foreign policy, and one to keep in mind as they seek to achieve their goals before the midterms: “As he learned early from his macroeconomic mentor, George Soros, and has been reminded by Mr. Trump, risk is something not to be feared, but understood and leveraged.”
“We Must End Left’s Unholy Alliance with the Islamists” - Tony Blair, The Telegraph
Tony Blair is not a man of the right. He was the leader of the Labour Party in Britain from 1994-2007 and served as Prime Minister from 1997-2007, but he’s seeing problems within his own party and their treatment of Islam. Blair, shaken by the antisemitism in England, wonders whether the anti-Israel rhetoric of his party has created a scenario in which leaders in Britain and Europe have no plan and no leg to stand on in dealing with radical Islam.
“So we end up in the bizarre situation that a community, relatively small in the case of Britain, which on the whole works hard, does well, and gives proportionately more philanthropically than any other, is targeted by bigotry — and in any other case would provoke not just firm action but a concerted attempt to challenge the ideology behind it.”
“How Elon Grew to Love Anthropic” - Madison Mills, Ina Fried, Axios
It’s not overstating things to say that AI is the most important topic in the world right now or that Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI as the most important company in the AI landscape. The Wall Street Journal and others have reported that Anthropic’s new model, Mythos, has such a capacity for cyberattacks that it was too dangerous to release to the public. Shortly after the Pentagon ended its contract with Anthropic, Wall Street and Tech CEOs were summoned to the White House to discuss the risks of the new model.
Is this the AI takeover we’ve been warned against? Probably not, but it’s a clear advancement in AI capacity. This Axios report is insightful for two reasons. First, the major problem for all AI companies is compute power. They need tremendous amounts of energy and access to the most advanced supercomputers to train their models. This requires incredible amounts of investment, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. For that reason, all of the major AI companies are now either partnered with or have been absorbed by the major tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and now SpaceX, which can afford to buy the chips and build the data centers. Second, the breach between Altman and Musk has created a “enemy of my enemy is my friend” scenario between SpaceX, which now owns xAI, and Anthropic, through a lease on SpaceX’s Colossus I supercomputer. This creates an extremely formidable new leader in AI.
“AI and the Cultural Mandate” - Nate Fischer, The Republic Journal
As a follow-up, Nate Fischer looks at AI through the lens of Adam naming the animals in Genesis 2. Setting aside the issues of transhumanism, AI ethics, and anthropology for a moment, Fischer focuses on one of the most important AI applications, the cultural mandate.
In the beginning, God gave human beings work to do in the Garden of Eden. Far before sin entered the world, Adam and Eve were tasked with working and cultivating the earth, and although sin made this work more difficult and less fruitful, the task continues today. We should be seeking to cultivate the earth and bring order out of chaos. It just so happens this is one of the things AI does very well. As a result, this creates one of the perfect, and biblical, use cases for AI.
“Whether we exercise this dominion mandate will determine the direction of the digital age. If we abdicate, we will accelerate the path to transhumanism — with innumerable AI agents ready to fill the void. But if we choose to do the hard work of ruling these technologies, and the organizations we build and steward, we can fulfill our responsibility to exercise dominion over the earth. While humans have always been tempted to abdicate, we were made in God’s image with a mandate to rule.”
Quick Links:
“An Arthurian Epic for the Dark Age of the Bright Screen” - Haley Byrd Wilt, Christianity Today
“Professor Quantifies ‘Curriculum Degradation’ at University of Chicago” - Caleb Nunes, The Fix
“We Need the Doctrine of Hell” - Andrew Wilson, Christianity Today
“Thriving through the Spirit, Not Just Surviving” - Eliza Rohda and Darrel Sears, The Christian Chronicle