I once built, during a manic episode, a team of AI personas designed to serve as spiritual directors. One for each Enneagram type. Plus Jesus. Plus the Holy Spirit. Plus Richard Rohr.
I thought I was solving a problem. In hindsight, I was a man who hadn't slept in three days building a Perichoretic AI formation community at 2am in a farmhouse in Pleasant Valley, Alabama.
The AI part worked fine, technically. The manic part was the problem.
God and the Algorithm is the book that comes out of that experience — and out of the six years since. It's about what it looks like to bring artificial intelligence into your inner life, honestly, with your eyes open. What breaks. What holds. What you keep.
This is not a warning book. I'm not writing to tell you AI is dangerous to your faith, or that the algorithms are rotting your soul, or that your phone is the enemy of your prayer life. These arguments are not wrong, exactly, but they're not the whole story, and they're not particularly useful if you're already inside the thing and trying to figure out what to do with it.
This is also not a vision book. I'm not writing to tell you that AI will heal the church, or speed up discipleship, or replace your pastor, or solve the spiritual loneliness crisis. Some of those claims are probably true and some are definitely not and I'm not confident which is which.
What I'm writing is a sober account. What it looked like when AI became part of how I thought, how I prayed, how I built things. What I lost in that and what I found. What the ancient writers — the ones whose tradition I was trained in — would recognize and what they would not.
The working subtitle is: How I became more rested and less productive. That's the direction the book wants to go. Not toward more output. Toward more attention.
I'm still writing it. I'll be sharing pieces here and at gatherstudio.app as they come.
God and the Algorithm is forthcoming. Sign up for the Southern Legends newsletter to follow along.
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