For Your Consideration

On April 13th, the Christian Study Center was pleased to host a public lecture by Andy Crouch titled “Beyond Boring Robots: Find the Path to Flourishing in a Technological World.” The talk drew on and developed themes from Crouch’s most recent book, The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World. Every new advance in technology — this spring the headlines are about ChatGPT — is heralded as a magical new dawn in the human story. Yet more than one hundred years into the modern technological era, in spite of our unprecedented affluence and control over the natural world, we find a surprising amount of distress and dis-ease. As currently designed, technology will continue to both initially amaze us and ultimately disappoint us — delivering, at best, a world of more and more “boring robots.” But a different design is possible. This talk will explore how individuals, families, and communities — as well as professions, corporations, and nations — can pursue a better path.Andy Crouch is partner for theology and culture at Praxis, an organization that works as a creative engine for redemptive entrepreneurship. His writing explores faith, culture, and the image of God in the domains of technology, power, leadership, and the arts. He is the author of five books (plus another with his daughter, Amy Crouch), most recently The Life We're Looking For. His work and writing have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time.The Christian Study Center is donor supported. Learn more about how you can help sustain our work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

With ChatGPT, and AI more generally, very much in the news, our director Michael Sacasas talked with Dr. Scott Hawley about recent trends in generative AI and its possible consequences across a variety of domains. Dr. Scott Hawley is Professor of Physics at Belmont University and Technical Fellow at Harmonai. He has worked extensively on machine learning in the field of audio engineering, and also writes on the intersection of ethics, faith, and AI. You can also listen to Dr. Hawley’s March 2022 lecture at the Study Center here: “Curves and Categories: Machine Learning, AI, and the Nature of Classification.” The Christian Study Center is donor supported. Learn more about how you can help sustain our work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this episode, our director, Michael Sacasas, talks with Dr. Benjamin Lipscomb about the work of the 20th-century philosopher and novelist, Iris Murdoch. During the Fall 2022 semester, the Study Center hosted a reading group on The Sovereignty of Good, a collection of three lectures by Murdoch. In this conversation, Sacasas and Lipscomb walk through the major themes of that work with a focus on what we can learn from Murdoch about moral formation. Dr. Lipscomb is Professor of Philosophy at Houghton University and the author of The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics. That book was the subject of Dr. Lipscomb’s previous conversation on the podcast, which you can listen to by clicking the link below. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

Welcome to “For Your Consideration,” a podcast of the Christian Study Center. The podcast features audio from our events as well as occasional interviews with scholars and writers.This episode features a lecture delivered by Christine Emba at the Study Center on October 13th. Ms. Emba is a columnist for The Washington Post writing about ideas and society. Prior, she was the Hilton Kramer Fellow in Criticism at the New Criterion and a deputy editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit, focusing on technology and innovation.Emba is also the author of Rethinking Sex: A Provocation, which was the subject of her talk at the Center. Reaching back to the wisdom of thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Andrea Dworkin, and drawing from sociological studies, interviews with college students, and poignant examples from her own life, Emba calls for a more humane philosophy, one that starts with consent but accounts for the very real emotional, mental, social, and political implications of sex—even, she argues, if it means saying no to certain sexual practices or challenging societal expectations altogether.We trust you’ll enjoy the talk and hope you will share it with others. The Christian Study Center is donor supported. Learn more about how you can help sustain our work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

Welcome to “For Your Consideration,” a podcast of the Christian Study Center. The podcast features audio from our events as well as occasional interviews with scholars and writers.In this episode, you can listen to a talk by Dr. Michael Allen presented at the Study Center on September 19th. Dr. Allen is Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary. He is presently writing a four-volume systematic theology to be published with Baker Academic. He is also preparing a new edition of the Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine. With Dr. Scott Swain, he serves as general editor of the T & T Clark International Theological Commentary series and the New Studies in Dogmatics series for Zondervan Academic.Dr. Allen’s lecture was titled “Lessons from Hippo: Reading Augustine’s City of God in a Time of Crises” and explored how Augustine’s work can guide our thought and action through our own period of crisis and upheaval. Finally, you can also subscribe to this podcast feed on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Please feel free to share this episode with others.The Christian Study Center is donor supported. Learn more about how you can help sustain our work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

Welcome to “For Your Consideration,” a podcast of the Christian Study Center. The podcast features audio from our events as well as occasional interviews with scholars and writers. For this episode, our director, Michael Sacasas, had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Stephanie Bennett. Dr. Bennett is Professor of Communication and Media Ecology at Palm Beach Atlantic University in South Florida, where for nearly 20 years she has been teaching, writing, and mentoring undergraduate students. There she also directs Wordship, an initiative that seeks to set the pace for healing a polarized public, facilitating events and conversations that advance the importance and practice of dialogue, and creating an environment conducive to authentic relationship. Dr. Bennett is the author, most recently, of Silence, Civility, and Sanity: Hope for Humanity in a Digital Aged. Based on 25 years of research at the intersection of technology and interpersonal relationships, the book is geared toward a mainstream audience and grapples with ways to cope with the state of dysfunction in our current public discourse.This conversation focuses on her article “Space for God to Speak: Using Silence to Address Media Glut From the Inside Out.” We are pleased to be welcoming Dr. Bennett to the Study Center on Thursday evening, November 3rd. If you are in town, join us for a reception at 6:30 and Dr. Bennett’s lecture at 7:00. The lecture is titled “Re-visiting Digital Efficacy: Redeeming Public Discourse in an Age of Expedience.”Forthcoming episodes of the podcast will feature recent lectures at the Center by theologian Dr. Michael Allen and Washington Post columnist Christine Emba. Finally, you can also subscribe to this podcast feed on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And please feel free to share this episode with others. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this episode of our podcast, we are pleased to bring you audio of a lecture delivered on Tuesday, April 12th by our director, Dr. Richard Horner. Here is how Dr. Horner described the talk:Perhaps no book in the Hebrew Bible has been more difficult to interpret and translate than the book of Ecclesiastes. To what reality does the famous opening phrase point? Exactly what question is the author trying to address? What answers does he give? What wisdom does this book have to offer to us today for how to live well in a broken and troubled but wondrous world?This was no ordinary talk at the Study Center. It was Dr. Horner’s final lecture after more than twenty years as the Center’s executive director. The evening began with a full house for reception honoring Dr. Horner. Also, as you will hear in the recording, Dr. Horner’s lecture was preceded by some brief remarks from Dr. Jay Lynch, the founder, along with his wife Laura, of the center and the president of the Center’s board, paying tribute to Dr. Horner’s service and God’s faithfulness.You can download a PDF of Dr. Horner’s handout for the talk here: “Reading Ecclesiastes.” Please feel free to share this talk or any other of our other podcast episodes with anyone you think would be interested.During the summer months, the podcast will be mostly on hiatus, but we will resume in the fall with more interviews and audio from study center events. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this episode of our podcast, we are pleased to bring you audio of a lecture delivered on Tuesday, March 29th by our director, Dr. Richard Horner. Here is how Dr. Horner described the talk: Why does Matthew tell the story of Jesus differently from Mark and Luke? Perhaps he is confused or mistaken, but if not, then what is he doing? Come join us for a brief exploration of this problem, for a glimpse of how the four gospels relate to each other, and for a taste of what we’ve been offering in “Reading the Gospels” over the past twenty years.Next week, you can look for audio of Dr. Horner’s final lecture as executive director, “The Wisdom of Qoheleth: Ecclesiastes as a Meditation on Life in a Troubled World.”Please feel free to share this talk or any other of our other podcast episodes with anyone you think would be interested. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

On March 17th, we had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Scott Hawley of Belmont University at the Study Center for a second talk titled “Taming Chaos: Generative Modeling As a Foil to Human Creativity.”Dr. Hawley is a Professor of Physics at Belmont, and his research interests include machine learning, neural networks, and the ethics of A.I. Last week, we posted his talk on machine learning and classification. Today, we are glad to post his reflections on generative models and creativity. Here is how Dr. Hawley described the talk: “We did it. We finally killed art.” This tweet in the summer of 2021 by Ryan Murdock summarized the feeding frenzy of worldwide activity in generative ‘A.I.’-based artwork since he first paired text prompts with image-generating software last January. The hard-won styles of seasoned masters could be appropriated with little more than a suffix of “in the style of [....].”  Sophisticated generative models of visual art have become increasingly common, with ever-higher qualities of output and speed of execution. Yet these exist along the continuum of the timeline of generative art stretching back centuries. The interplay between randomness and the intentionality of the artist is at the heart of disputes over whether such products constitute artwork and to what extent computational methods mimic or diverge from human creativity. In this talk, we provide a survey of historical and cutting-edge generative art methods, conversations, and opportunities presented by generative models used by humans in the creation of visual, textual, and auditory artistic artifacts.During the talk, Dr. Hawley made extensive use of slides and you can view those here while you listen. You can also follow Dr. Hawley on Twitter @drscotthawley.And finally, here is a link to a recent short essay by Dr. Hawley at A.I. Theology, “Human Mercy Is The Antidote To AI-Driven Bureaucracy.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

On March 17th, we had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Scott Hawley of Belmont University at the Study Center for a talk titled “Curves and Categories: Machine Learning, AI, and the Nature of Classification.” Dr. Hawley is a Professor of Physics at Belmont, and his research interests include machine learning, neural networks, and the ethics of A.I. He joined us to explore the fascinating and complex nature of classification and what it reveals about intelligence, human and machine. “Machine learning classification techniques,” Dr. Hawley explained, are increasingly applied to fields as diverse as biology, astronomy, the humanities, law, medicine, the entertainment industry, criminal justice, library science, aesthetics, robotics, and more, in an effort to automate human decision-making on massive scales. The problematic socio-political ramifications of this enterprise are becoming increasingly evident, and merit a closer examination of the philosophies and methods of classification from their origins in antiquity up to present large-scale A.I. systems.During the talk, Dr. Hawley made extensive use of slides and you can view those here while you listen. You can also follow Dr. Hawley on Twitter @drscotthawley. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com