AI & Spirituality

https://drewdickens.substack.com/

Is AI quietly offering what Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor promised: relief from the burden of choosing? Drew traces two ways to lose our freedom, handing it away or tailoring everything to ourselves, through Seville, Sinai, Judges, and his son Wes's homemade running app, toward the shared yoke Christ actually offers.

https://drewdickens.substack.com/

https://drewdickens.substack.com/

New AI agents like Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots keep working while you sleep, paying bills and even drafting your apologies. But what if the ordinary tasks they take over are where God forms us? Drawing on manna, Israel's king, and a monastery kitchen, Drew asks what we must never hand off.

https://drewdickens.substack.com/

https://drewdickens.substack.com/

What happens when AI reshapes work, and your church isn't ready to catch the people it lands on? Drawing on Carey Nieuwhof's AI and the Future Church, Drew speaks to the pulpit and the pew alike about storehouses, friendships, and reserves built in good years, so that no one faces the hard ones alone.

https://drewdickens.substack.com/

https://drewdickens.substack.com/

If the sermon is online by one o'clock, why get up at six? Drawing on Carey Nieuwhof's AI and the Future Church, Drew stands on both sides of the wall, pulpit and pew, to explore what no machine can reproduce: faces, tables, and being known by name.

https://drewdickens.substack.com/

https://drewdickens.substack.com/

A pastor fills a two-second silence with a comforting lie. A king cannot wait seven days. And in one extraordinary week, ten thousand AI agents show their work while the humans around them refuse to.

What do they all have in common? Everything that matters!

https://drewdickens.substack.com/

https://drewdickens.substack.com/

What if your congregation is further down the AI road than you are? New Barna research asked pastors and the people they lead the same questions. Fifty-four percent of practicing Christians would trust AI with their sense of purpose. Six percent of pastors would. Drew explores the gap nobody sees.

https://drewdickens.substack.com/

https://drewdickens.substack.com/

AI labs are hiring philosophers because their engineers hit questions code cannot close. One of them: where does purpose come from in a world without work? Drew explores what philosophy can defend, what only revelation can secure, and why the church may be misreading the most important assignment of the decade.

https://drewdickens.substack.com/

https://drewdickens.substack.com/

A German congregation watched an AI preach. A Swiss chapel put an AI Jesus in a confessional. Now every church must answer the question underneath: what is the church, actually? Drew explores how AI is reshaping preaching, pastoral care, and governance, and why the assembly itself can never be generated.

https://drewdickens.substack.com/

https://drewdickens.substack.com/

Silicon Valley says one person plus AI can now run a billion-dollar company. This spring, someone tried, and the unraveling stunned everyone. From Jethro's intervention to the circuit riders, Drew traces what shepherds can delegate, what must stay human, and why trust is ministry's whole product.

https://drewdickens.substack.com/

https://drewdickens.substack.com/

When a government directive switched off the world's most powerful AI for three weeks, millions felt something unexpected: withdrawal. Drew traces the fast nobody chose through wilderness manna, Egypt's horses, and silent medieval bells, asking what our scramble for substitutes reveals, and how interruption becomes introduction to the God who stays.

https://drewdickens.substack.com/