My newest post is about arrival, language, and the subtle signs of belonging.

Carrying Home

Part VIII: When the System Speaks Back

This is the last of an eight-part series exploring “When Innovation Outpaced Reflection,” examining historical moments where technological advancement outran ethical frameworks.

Last week at the airport, I sat a table near a woman and her daughter. The mother’s phone was propped against a water glass, screen bright. The girl had markers everywhere, coloring. Her mother scrolled short, thumb flicking one video, then another, and another. The daughter glanced up, hoping to catch her mother’s attention. She waited for a moment, then looked down again at her paper. She tried once more a short while later and got nothing. The daughter was about seven years old, already learning which things get attention and which do not.

Maria Ressa took the stage in Oslo on December 10, 2021, to accept the Nobel Peace Prize for her journalism in the Philippines that nearly killed her. She said you cannot have truth without facts, and you cannot have trust without truth. You cannot have shared reality without trust, and democracy dies without shared reality.

She was talking about information systems, as well as about something much older and deeper. We built tools to connect us. Those tools now tell us what to see and feel and fear.

The delay this series has traced between what we invent and what we understand has vanished. Explorers drew maps of whole continents, then later asked whose land they had claimed. Physicists cracked atoms openand handed their work to generals who could not grasp what they were holding. Astronauts broke through the atmosphere while theologians scrambled for language to describe what we had just left behind. Every time, we got the capacity first, and conscience arrived late, if it arrived at all. We build things, then we ask questions about them. (Sometimes we never got around to asking anything.)

Reflection now happens inside the machinery now. Algorithms choose what rises in your feed. They figure out fast that anger keeps you there, so they feed you more. Machine-learning models, trained on billions of sentences, write emails for us now, and reports, and (as some colleagues have sheepishly admitted) even prayers. Algorithms don’t think. They find patterns that work and repeat them. They learn what holds us, amplify it, throw it back at us so fast we cannot recognize what we fed them in the first place. Technology, we call it. Really, it just mirrors us back to ourselves at scale and speed we cannot process.

Religious communities named this problem long before programmers existed. Hebrew prophets attacked idolatry, not because carved statues offended God, but because bowing to things you made with your own hands does something to your soul.[1] Augustine said we become like whatever we love.[2] Heschel wrote that moral life starts with attention, just by seeing clearly what sits in front of us.[3]

Ressa said the same thing in language for right now. Our devotion to systems designed to grab attention and profit from rage is idolatry, just with Wi-Fi:

“Our greatest need today is to transform that hate and violence, the toxic sludge that’s coursing through our information ecosystem, prioritized by American internet companies that make more money spreading that hate and triggering the worst in us.” [4]

Connection at this level comes at a cost of something we still cannot name properly. Conscience needs quiet. Moral imagination needs open space where nothing is yelling at you. Sailors used to navigate by stars, reminding us how small we are. Their position made sense inside an order bigger than us, older than us, one that would outlast us. Solitude glows blue now with notifications chasing us into every room. The pause where thinking used to form itself has vanished.

Bonhoeffer talked about those who cannot be alone should be wary of being in community, and those who cannot handle community should likewise be afraid of being alone.[5] What happens when both are gone? We are never really together. We are never really alone either. We end up adrift while feed keeps moving and something else loads, always another thing coming.

The work now is the work that always has been. Show up where we are. Notice what is happening.

Many of us chaplains have to learn how to remain present to someone who’s bedridden, standing next to their hospital bed while a machine starts beeping. This isn’t only a learned skill for chaplains and medical professionals, it is something for all of us to practice. Listening to the person, not the equipment. Not letting a monitor’s noise erase the human being in that bed.

Digital life needs the same refusal. All of us need to practice seeing what these tools do to us before they finish deciding who we are.

We built machines. Now they watch us. That woman on her phone, her daughter with markers, both were learning from what the other one does. What passes between two people in moments like that, what solidifies into pattern, what becomes affection or the hole where affection should be, that still rides on human decisions…for now, anyway.

The tools will keep multiplying, becoming faster and harder to put down. And our work will remain: to see what is actually real, to choose on purpose, and to stay present in a world engineered to pull us away.

That girl looked up a few more times before I left for my gate. Her mother kept scrolling.

The algorithm understood its job perfectly.

My prayer is that we understand ours.

[1] Psalm 115:4–8, Isaiah 44:9–20
[2] Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
[3] Abraham Heschel, Who Is Man? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), and God in Search of Man (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1955).
[4] Maria Ressa, “Nobel Peace Prize Lecture,” delivered at the Oslo City Hall, Oslo, Norway, December 10, 2021, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2021/ressa/lecture/
[5] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (HarperSanFrancisco, 1978).

Part VII: The Heavens Taken by Force — Satellites and the Disappearance of Wonder

This is the seventh in an eight-part series exploring “When Innovation Outpaced Reflection,” examining historical moments where technological advancement outran ethical frameworks.

I saw this photograph of the Pinnacles in Western Australia earlier this year in Scientific American. Photographer Joshua Rozells pointed his camera at the limestone spires shaped by ancient seas, standing for tens of thousands of years, hoping to capture stars above stone. What he got instead were white streaks slashing across the frame. Satellites, dozens of them, carving lines through the cosmos. The monuments have outlasted empires. Our night sky had too…until recently.

This photo took me back to the first time I truly saw the galaxy with my naked eye. I was working as a research writer for Let’s Go travel guide in the early 1990s, assigned to some of Greece’s most remote islands. One night I walked away from one town’s single taverna and looked up. The sky opened. A river of light poured across the darkness, so dense it looked liquid, almost white. My Greek host told me how the word “galaxy” comes from the Greek word gala, meaning milk. Standing there, I understood why.

On aircraft carriers far from any coastline, I could step onto the flight deck during “darken ship” and see the Milky Way like I had in Greece. The ship cutting through black water, the galaxy stretching overhead. Those moments made humanity and military missions seem small. The stars drew me into questions larger than the wars our Navy prepared for.

One-third of humanity cannot see the Milky Way anymore. Eighty percent of Americans have lost it entirely. Light pollution took it first. Now we are adding layers of mechanical constellations. Most children today will never know that sky.

We turned the cosmos into a parking lot.

When humans set foot on the moon in July 1969, I was twenty months old and just learned to walk. Small steps, giant leaps. That moment felt universal, bigger than Cold War politics. Like humanity finally reached beyond our tribal conflicts toward something transcendent.

The same rockets that lifted Apollo 11 had been perfected as missile delivery systems. That GPS now guides us to coffee shops and guides munitions to targets. Those weather satellites now track hurricanes and military movements. We talk about space exploration like it was separate from space weaponization. It never was. Wonder and warfare entangled from the start.

The Outer Space Treaty was signed in 1967. Both superpowers already had spy satellites in orbit. The treaty prohibited nuclear weapons in space, after we already put everything else up there. As we have seen throughout this SITL series, we build the technology then write the rules later.

Religious communities barely noticed the shift. The Psalms say the heavens declare God’s glory. Fine, except the Psalmist was looking at a wild sky. Ours is domesticated, crisscrossed with satellites, cluttered with debris, sectioned into orbital zones like real estate parcels. Indigenous traditions treat celestial bodies as relatives. Hard to maintain that reverence when companies plan to mine asteroids for profit.

Space was supposed to expand our moral imagination. Instead, we extended our conflicts into orbit. Built weapons platforms and surveillance networks. Turned the cosmos into contested territory before anyone developed frameworks for cosmic stewardship.

That photograph from Australia keeps pulling at me. The astronomer wanted to capture something eternal. He got traffic patterns instead. Streaks where starlight should have been. Each one marks our retreat from mystery toward machinery.

We launched rockets before developing space ethics. We filled orbit before asking what we were losing. Same pattern, new domain: capability outrunning wisdom by distances we cannot measure.

Rozells aimed his camera at wonder and instead captured our age in miniature. Ancient light drowned in signal noise.

We took the heavens by force and made them ordinary.

Part VI: The Nuclear Age — Wisdom on the Brink

This is the sixth in an eight-part series exploring “When Innovation Outpaced Reflection,” examining historical moments where technological advancement outran ethical frameworks.

My son was working through chemistry problems at the kitchen table last week. I was peeling potatoes for dinner when he looked up. “Mom,” he said, pointing at his textbook. “Uranium. They use this for bombs?”

I set the peeler down on the counter.

“Wait. So, people learned how atoms split before thinking about whether they should?”

The kid got it right. We built it first and thought about it later. Or never.

Scientists huddled in bunkers in the New Mexico desert, July 16, 1945, watching Trinity explode. They had pages of calculations, blast zones, radiation exposure, atmospheric burn rates. Oppenheimer reached for words from the Bhagavad Gita, and paraphrasing the Hindu scripture, he famously said, “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”

Hiroshima vanished three weeks after that first test. Seventy thousand people died instantly on August 6, 1945. Another seventy thousand would die from radiation and burns before the year ended.

Leo Szilard saw it all coming back in 1933, when the nuclear chain reaction idea arrived complete as he waited for a London traffic light. By Spring of 1945, he was racing around getting physicists to sign petitions. Don’t drop it on cities, he begged. Please. Sixty-eight signatures on his July petition to President Truman. General Groves, military director of the Manhattan Project, sat on it and made sure Truman never saw it until after Hiroshima turned to ash. History and Hollywood remember Oppenheimer’s guilty conscience. Szilard trying to stop the whole thing isn’t blockbuster material.

The hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bombings, struggled to describe what happened. How do you explain shadows burned into walls where people had been standing? John Hersey wrote an article for the August 1946 New Yorker telling six survivors’ stories, and it still felt inadequate. Some experiences resist any attempt to contain them in words.

Churches scrambled for words. Augustine had written rules for war back in the fourth century, who you could and couldn’t kill, how much force was too much, and that war was a last resort. Nuclear weapons made those careful distinctions irrelevant in milliseconds. On August 20, 1945, church leaders warned Truman that if the US continued making atomic bombs without international control, “her moral position will be undermined and mankind will have lost its one chance.” In the meantime, the Soviet Union was already pursuing its own nuclear program.

Then came the strategic planners with their new vocabulary. Herman Kahn filled pages with death calculations. Two million dead here, 160 million there, calling them “tragic but distinguishable postwar states.” Like picking between menu options. Defense analysts have since developed their own euphemisms. “Surgical strikes,” as if bombs were scalpels. “Collateral damage” for blown-apart families. Kennedy’s “flexible response” pretended we could fine-tune Armageddon.

Nuclear weapons eliminate the human pause. In every previous form of warfare, however brutal, there were moments of decision. Soldiers aimed, saw a face, then decided. Now? The US President has twelve minutes, if that. The Soviets rigged up their “Dead Hand,” a machine to end the world if Moscow went dark. No person needed. We built things that work faster than worry, quicker than second thoughts, and are gone before anyone could say stop.

October 27, 1962, almost saw everything end. Soviet submarine B-59 got stuck in the Caribbean. Air conditioning broken. Carbon dioxide poisoning the crew. US destroyers were dropping practice depth charges that the B-59’s captain thought might be the start of war. Three officers had to agree to launch their nuclear torpedo. Captain Valentin Grigorievich Savitsky wanted to fire. Political officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov agreed. Only Vasily Arkhipov, the deputy brigade commander, said wait, let’s surface and check first. One person saying slow down, that’s all that kept October 1962 from being the last October.

Religious leaders tried building new ways to think about the bomb. William Sloane Coffin considered nuclear weapons demonic and argued that humanity had acquired ultimate destructive power without the wisdom to control it. Daniel Berrigan broke into a General Electric plant in 1980 and hammered on warhead nose cones, trying to literally beat swords into plowshares. Dorothy Day refused to shelter during air raid drills, and instead sat on park benches in New York City’s City Hall Park and Washington Square Park. Her repeated arrests pierced the illusion the drills brought safety and made people think about what nuclear war actually meant.

My son did ok on his chemistry test. They start thermodynamics next week, the same principles that power the sun and vaporized Nagasaki.

All this knowledge piling up. Wisdom cannot keep pace.

So, who teaches him knowledge has weight? That there is supposed to be this space, between knowing how fusion works and actually building bombs, and that is where to stop and think? (That is why, in part, I write these essays, and why we, meaning all of us, need these conversations.)

The Manhattan Project scientists asked whether they could split the atom and got their answer at 5:29 AM on July 16, 1945. Should they have? That question they did not ask.

We are still living in that gap my son identified, between what we can do and what we should do. The difference now is that the consequences of getting it wrong are absolute.

Part V: The Geneva Conventions

This is the fifth in an eight-part series exploring “When Innovation Outpaced Reflection,” examining historical moments where technological advancement outran ethical frameworks.

The rifle evolved faster than our thinking about its consequences.

In 1859, the introduction of rifled muskets significantly increased the effective range of firearms. Also at that time, railways were able to mobilize troops in mass and telegraph networks could coordinate large-scale military operations. Military technology advanced rapidly and our moral frameworks had not.

Henry Dunant stumbled into this reality at Solferino on June 24, 1859. He was there about some business deal in Algeria over water rights. What he found instead were 40,000 casualties. The new rifles worked exactly as designed. The medical corps, however, was still operating as if it was 1815 and was not sized or structured for the volume of wounded that rifled muskets produced. So Dunant organized the locals to help care for soldiers.

Upon returning to Geneva, Durant was unable to dismiss the experience. He meticulously documented the atrocities in a book, which sent to every European monarch. He traveled between capitals making his case to anyone with influence and, in the meantime, helped establish the International Committee of the Red Cross. Two years lobbying led to the 1864 diplomatic conference, and the twelve nation states attending ratified the original Geneva Convention.

The law had finally started catching up to the technology. Too late for Solferino; in time for the next war.

This Spirit in the Loop series has been examining this recurring cycle. Technology develops, we use it, people suffer, eventually (sometimes) we create rules. Soldiers choked on chlorine gas at Ypres in 1915; the Geneva Protocol banned chemical weapons in 1925. Cities burned throughout World War II; the 1949 Geneva Conventions protected civilians only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Capability first, catastrophe follows, and, if humanity is lucky, law ensues.

That first Convention responded directly to Solferino’s technological horror. Field hospitals were now protected from the latest artillery that could reach them, medical wagons vulnerable to long-range rifles now had neutrality, and armies were required to collect wounded who might lie beyond traditional battlefield boundaries. The Convention, though limited in scope, proved humanity could examine its new killing capacity and choose restraint.

It is 2025 and we are in that gap again. (Actually, we’ve been in it for a while.)

My cousin is a professor in cybersecurity at a university with significant military affiliations. He called me late his time last week, troubled by something from class. In the morning, his students learned about network infiltration; in the afternoon, they studied infrastructure defense. Same techniques, opposite purposes. One student questioned whether they were being trained for contradictory roles, and my cousin found himself without a good answer. “The thing is,” my cousin said, “that student is not wrong.”

Our everyday technology carries this duality. Waze’s navigation comes from nuclear missile guidance systems. Our smartphone’s FaceID uses the same algorithms that confirm drone strikes. That DoorDash delivery has the same mathematics as an autonomous weapon coordination. The boundary between civilian and military application, once clear, has dissolved.

The Geneva Conventions principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution draw from ancient wells and require time for moral reflection. Augustine wrestled with the idea of just war. Judaism teaches that saving life supersedes nearly all other obligations (pikuach nefesh). Medieval Islamic jurists prohibited targeting civilians. These scholars had as their premise that (1) violence would occur at human speed, (2) combatants would see their enemies, and (3) decisions would include space for conscience.

Law requires human agents. There is a person who makes a choice and a person who bears responsibility.

Contemporary warfare muddles the Conventions’ principles. Someone in their bedroom can disable water treatment on another continent. The power plant keeping a hospital running also is running a command system. A teenager’s code could be a game or a weapon. Algorithms select targets faster than humans can form thoughts, so if software commits what would be a war crime, who stands trial? The Conventions assumed human decision-makers who could distinguish, assess proportionality, and exercise precaution. Now humans act at distances and speeds that make these judgments impossible.

The language we use makes it worse. “Collateral damage” sounds like we are talking about shipping insurance. “Surgical strike” implies precision that does not exist. “Signature strike” is killing someone whose identity we do not know. “Military-aged male” turns every young man into a legitimate target. The distance between decision and consequence grows with each euphemism.

A Sailor who recently returned from deployment came to see me. She was concerned that, despite perfect adherence to rules and protocols of her position, she could not sleep. “I hurt people I’ll never see,” she kept saying. “And I don’t feel anything when I do it.” The Conventions did not imagine warriors who destroy without witnessing. That gap is where moral injury lives.

My cousin’s students get this. One suggested incorporating coding checkpoints, mandatory pauses built in to ask question, “Should I continue?” My cousin thought this suggestion as naïve. I heard it echo Dunant and an attempt to build conscience into the machinery of war.

Humanity, eventually, demands boundaries. We tend to insist on them, however, after we see what we are capable of and bodies are counted. It took Dunant 40,000 casualties at Solferino. What is it going to take us?

Part IV: Ghosts in the System — How Yesterday’s Tools Still Haunt Today

This is the fourth in an eight-part series exploring “When Innovation Outpaced Reflection,” examining historical moments where technological advancement outran ethical frameworks.

Joy Buolamwini was a graduate student at MIT when she first discovered her own face could vanish inside a computer. She was experimenting with facial recognition software that failed to detect her dark-skinned features. When she put on a white mask, the camera recognized her immediately. The algorithms that worked effortlessly on lighter skin faltered on hers.[1]

This failure was systematic. The systems had been trained on datasets dominated by lighter-skinned subjects. Behind the code lay centuries of technical defaults, from photography’s calibration cards optimized for white skin tones to twentieth-century imaging standards built with the same assumptions. A simple login error became a reminder that ghosts from past technologies never stay buried.

The same haunting surfaces every decade when the U.S. census arrives in our mailboxes. Check the box. White. Black or African American. Asian. American Indian or Alaska Native. Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. For many, the act is routine. These categories descend directly from colonial classification systems created to decide who could be enslaved, taxed, or excluded. What seems natural is an inherited script. Even the 2020 census, with its 63 racial and ethnic combinations, carried DNA from those older taxonomies.[2]

Technologies rarely die. They linger, adapt, and persist, carrying assumptions across centuries. Medical research continues to employ racial categories long after biology has shown they lack foundation. The Human Genome Project confirmed in 2003 that race has no genetic basis,[3] and drug companies still market “race-specific” medications such as BiDil.[4] Clinical algorithms adjust kidney function by race, a practice rooted in discredited ideas about physical difference.[5] The ghosts live on in the charts and code of contemporary medicine.

Surveillance demonstrates the clearest continuity. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, British colonial administrators refined techniques of classification in India, exporting them across the empire.[6] Today’s algorithmic surveillance inherits that same function, determining creditworthiness, policing risk, and screening job applicants. Facial recognition technology stumbled during the pandemic when masks obscured faces,[7] and its failures exposed something deeper: a reliance on rigid templates of what a “normal” human face should look like, and whose faces are considered standard.

Finance shows the same line of descent. Credit scoring systems that decide who receives loans or jobs have roots in the record-keeping of slavery. Human beings were once quantified for productivity; the logic persists in algorithms that reduce lives to numbers in databases.[8] What began as plantation arithmetic now shapes mortgage applications and employment background checks.

These inheritances extend into the personal. A friend recently struggled to access his online banking because the security questions presumed a life that was not his. “Mother’s maiden name” assumed traditional family structures. “First car” presumed ownership. “High school mascot” presumed American schooling. Each question reflected a cultural template that excluded him. Security became erasure.

Technologies persist because they are embedded, appearing neutral until we notice the scaffolding underneath. The temptation is always to start fresh. History warns us otherwise. The French Revolution promised liberty and perfected the guillotine. Silicon Valley promised freedom and delivered surveillance. Clean slates rarely stay clean. Real change tends to be slower and less dramatic, revisions rather than revolution.

That is why recognition matters. Census boxes are administrative legacies of slavery. Productivity apps echo the logic of factory oversight. Mortgage algorithms replay Depression-era banking maps. Naming these lineages helps us design systems more responsibly.

Practical steps are possible. Forms can allow multiple racial identities. Laws can include sunset clauses that force review. Algorithms can carry documented histories so that future engineers know exactly what assumptions they are inheriting. Each action loosens the past’s grip on the present.

We will always live among ghosts. The question is whether we drift through them unaware, repeating old choreographies, or whether we learn the steps well enough to change them.

The line moves forward at the café. Someone checks their phone, another taps a fingerprint sensor, another stares at a screen that scans a face. Each act contains the trace of older systems. As we sip our coffee, we might ask, which ghosts still inhabit our machines and which ones still inhabit us?

[1] Buolamwini, J., & Gebru, T. (2018). Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification. Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, 81(81), 1–15. http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf

[2] Jones, N., Jensen, E., Battle, K., & Marks, R. (n.d.). Measuring the Racial and Ethnic Composition and Diversity of the United States Population: Historical Challenges and Contemporary Opportunities. https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c14954/c14954.pdf

[3] Collins, F. S., Morgan, M., & Patrinos, A. (2003). The Human Genome Project: Lessons from Large-Scale Biology. Science, 300(5617), 286–290. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1084564

[4] Kahn, J. (2013). Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age. Columbia University Press.

[5] Cerdeña, J. P., Plaisime, M. V., & Tsai, J. (2020). From Race-Based to Race-Conscious Medicine: How Anti-Racist Uprisings Call Us to Act. The Lancet, 396 (10257), 1125–1128. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)32076-6

[6] Cohn, B. S. (1996). Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: the British in India. Princeton Univeristy Press, 11.

[7] Ngan, M., Grother, P., & Hanaoka, K. (2020). Ongoing Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) part 6A: National Institute of Standards and Technology. https://doi.org/10.6028/nist.ir.8311

[8] Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs, 285.

Part III: The Chains We Forged — Innovation and the Origins of Slavery

This is the third in an eight-part series exploring “When Innovation Outpaced Reflection,” examining historical moments where technological advancement outran ethical frameworks.

Last week, I watched my young adult niece upload her entire summer to Instagram, each photo tagged with location data, facial recognition markers, and algorithmic categorizations she never chose. The platform sorted her images automatically. Beach trips labeled “vacation content,” family gatherings tagged as “celebration moments,” her boyfriend’s photos flagged for “romantic engagement optimization.” She shrugged when I mentioned the data harvesting. “It’s just the algorithm,” she said, as if that explained everything.

While scrolling through plantation records researching this story, I found ledger entries from a Virginia plantation in 1755 that read exactly like modern inventory management. Each enslaved person received a number, age estimate, skill assessment, and projected productivity rating. Children under ten were listed as “future assets” with calculated maturation timelines.

The parallels stopped me cold. Different centuries, different technologies, same logic of systematic categorization and control.

The period from 1619 to 1865 witnessed innovations that systematized human bondage with unprecedented efficiency. Agricultural machinery, shipping technology, financial instruments, and administrative systems converged to transform slavery into a sophisticated technological and economic system.[1]

Eli Whitney’s cotton gin demonstrates how innovation accelerates oppression. Designed in 1793 to reduce labor requirements, the machine instead made cotton cultivation so profitable that demand for enslaved workers exploded. The number of enslaved people in America increased 467%, growing from 697,624 in 1790 to 3,953,760 by 1860.[2] Whitney’s labor-saving device transformed slavery into the foundation of American economic growth.

Financial markets developed sophisticated instruments for trading in human beings. Banks created credit systems allowing planters to purchase enslaved people on loans, using human beings as collateral for future human purchases. Insurance companies protected slaveholder investments against “property loss” through death or escape.[3] The British slave ship Brookes became infamous for diagrams showing how 482 people could be arranged in cargo holds like puzzle pieces.[4]

Against these systems stood voices of resistance that exposed the moral bankruptcy of technological neutrality. Sojourner Truth, born in slavery in New York, became a powerful orator who challenged both slavery and the limited vision of white abolitionists. Her famous question “Ain’t I a Woman?” demolished arguments that portrayed enslaved people as less than human.[5] Truth understood that the same technologies used to oppress could provide liberation when wielded by those fighting for freedom.

Frederick Douglass wielded literacy as his weapon against bondage. Learning to read despite laws forbidding enslaved education, Douglass transformed newspapers and public speaking into tools for exposing slavery’s realities. His 1845 narrative demonstrated how enslaved people possessed intellectual capabilities their oppressors denied.[6] What strikes me about Douglass is how he grasped the revolutionary potential of literacy in ways that anticipated our contemporary struggles with the digital divide.

Harriet Tubman transformed the Underground Railroad into a sophisticated logistics network. She used knowledge of geography, seasonal patterns, and communication systems to move hundreds of people to freedom. Tubman carried a revolver and threatened to use it on anyone who endangered the group through panic or indecision.[7]

Religious voices provided crucial moral leadership during this period. Theodore Parker, the prominent Unitarian minister, argued that natural law superseded human legislation when governments sanctioned injustice. He provided practical support for the Underground Railroad while preaching that true Christianity demanded active resistance to slavery.[8]Parker kept a loaded pistol in his study desk, declaring his willingness to defend escaped slaves with violence if necessary. Unitarian theology, with its emphasis on inherent human dignity and reason, provided intellectual ammunition for abolitionists.

The moral frameworks of the era proved inadequate to counter these innovations. Most Christian theology had been twisted to justify slavery since the colonial period.[9] Enlightenment philosophy failed to extend natural rights across racial lines. John Locke wrote about individual liberty while investing in the slave trade. Thomas Jefferson declared that “all men are created equal” while owning hundreds of people — a contradiction that still haunts American political discourse.

The technological momentum behind slavery proved remarkably difficult to reverse. By 1860, enslaved people represented the largest category of American wealth after land.[10] The innovators who created these systems rarely intended to perfect human oppression. Whitney genuinely believed his cotton gin would reduce the need for slave labor. Each innovation seemed rational within its limited scope while contributing to unprecedented cruelty.

This dynamic reveals how technological systems can acquire moral momentum independent of their creators’ intentions. The plantation ledger, cotton gin, steamship, and telegraph were remarkable technical achievements that together formed what historian Edward Baptist documents as the foundation of American capitalism.[11]

Understanding slavery as a technological system rather than simply as a moral failure helps explain its persistence and the challenges of dismantling it. The voices of those who resisted remind us that no system of oppression, regardless of its technical sophistication, can ultimately suppress the human spirit’s demands for dignity and freedom.

When my niece uploads her life to Instagram, algorithms sort resumes by zip codes, or AI systems make decisions about bail and parole, we witness echoes of that same logic that once catalogued human beings in plantation ledgers. The thread connecting Whitney’s cotton gin to today’s algorithmic sorting systems is the recurring human tendency to mistake efficiency for progress, to optimize systems without questioning their deeper purpose.

Each era discovers that moral imagination must actively wrestle with technological capability, or risk creating new forms of the very oppressions we thought we had overcome.

The stories of technological latency continue in Part IV with the mechanization of labor, where the Industrial Revolution’s promise of progress collided with the human cost of efficiency and where workers first learned to organize against the machines that were reshaping their lives.

[1] Johnson, W. (2013). River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

[2] “Unit 5 Slavery and Abolition in Post-Revolutionary and Antebellum America, 1790–1960.” (2025). Retrieved from https://www.njstatelib.org/research_library/new_jersey_resources/highlights/african_american_history_curriculum/unit_5_antebellum_america/#:~:text=BACKGROUND,emergence%20of%20the%20Cotton%20Kingdom.

[3] Levy, J. (2022). Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 60–103.

[4] Rediker, M. (2007). The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Viking, 8.

[5] Painter, N. I. (1996). Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. New York: W. W. Norton, 164–178.

[6] Douglass, F. (1845). Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office.

[7] Clinton, C. (2004). Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom. New York: Little, Brown.

[8] Grodzins, D. (2002). American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 334–336.

[9] Glaude Jr., E. S. (2020). Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. New York: Crown, 38–42.

[10] Hummel, J. R., Kling, A., Horwitz, S., Weintraub, E. R., & McKenzie, R. (2023). “U.S. Slavery and Economic Thought.” Retrieved from https://www.econlib.org/library/enc/usslaveryandeconomicthought.html#:~:text=The%20total%20value%20of%20all,slaveholders%20to%20the%20freed%20slaves.

[11] Baptist, E. E. (2014). The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books.

Part II: When Maps Became Weapons

This is the second in an eight-part series exploring “When Innovation Outpaced Reflection,” examining historical moments where technological advancement outran ethical frameworks.

While walking through San Diego’s Old Town searching for our dinner restaurant this weekend, a notification appeared on my phone. Google Maps wanted to know if I would report “incorrect information” about a relocated cafe. I tapped “no thanks” and continued walking, struck later by how casually we participate in the constant remaking of digital reality.

That evening brought thoughts about how mapping companies handle territorial disputes, particularly given that thousands of mapping professionals were about to descend on San Diego for the world’s largest GIS conference. Google Maps shows different versions of contested territories depending on user location.¹ Crimea appears as part of Russia for Russian users, as disputed territory for others. Kashmir’s borders shift depending on whether you access the service from India, Pakistan, or elsewhere. The solution creates different versions of reality for different viewers.

Maps have always concerned power. Five centuries ago, Gerardus Mercator thought he was solving a navigation problem. His 1569 world map enabled sailors to plot straight-line courses across oceans, revolutionizing maritime trade and exploration.² Mercator could never have anticipated how his mathematical projection would reshape global consciousness. Greenland appears nearly as large as Africa, though Africa measures fourteen times bigger. Europe dominates the visual center while the global south seems marginal. The projection that made navigation possible also made colonialism appear natural.

European cartography between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries achieved remarkable technical sophistication.³ Mathematical innovations allowed spherical surfaces to be rendered with unprecedented accuracy. Astronomical advances enabled precise determination of longitude and latitude.⁴ Printing technology made maps reproducible at previously impossible scales. These innovations democratized geographical knowledge across the expanding European world. The same technologies that enabled Columbus to reach the Americas allowed Portuguese traders to establish profitable Asian routes and Dutch companies to map territories worldwide.

Colonial cartographers systematically replaced indigenous place names with European alternatives.⁵ Mountains, rivers, and settlements that had carried cultural and spiritual significance for generations were rechristened to honor distant monarchs, saints, and explorers. Mount McKinley displaced Denali. The Congo River overwrote Nzadi. This constituted erasure that severed connections between communities and their ancestral territories. Maps created their own reality through administrative implementation.

Once European legal systems began following cartographic divisions, those lines became increasingly consequential. The 1884 Berlin Conference carved up Africa using maps drawn by Europeans who had never visited the territories they were dividing.⁶ The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 drew straight lines across Middle Eastern territories, creating nations that persist today despite ignoring ethnic, religious, and tribal realities.⁷ Benedict Anderson argues that maps, museums, and censuses became tools for colonial powers to imagine territories before controlling them.⁸ The map preceded the territory, imposing European spatial concepts on radically different geographical imaginations.

Religious and philosophical traditions of the early modern era lacked frameworks for understanding cartographic violence. European Christianity interpreted mapping as spreading divine truth rather than recognizing its potential for cultural destruction.⁹ Enlightenment philosophy celebrated cartographic innovation as evidence of human mastery over nature rather than questioning its impact on human communities.¹⁰ The moral imagination needed to recognize mapping as power took generations to develop. The result was an ethical blindness which allowed cartographic erasure to proceed unchecked across continents.

Digital mapping reveals how these dynamics persist and evolve. Google Maps makes assumptions about place names, territorial boundaries, and cultural significance that reflect Silicon Valley perspectives rather than local knowledge. GPS systems guide millions of daily decisions using coordinate systems established by colonial powers centuries ago. Geographic Information Systems carry forward colonial assumptions about property and territory.¹¹ Land titling programs in developing countries often impose Western concepts of individual ownership on communities practicing collective land management.¹² Digital cartography has globalized colonial spatial logic at unprecedented scale.

Contemporary algorithmic systems create invisible maps of human behavior, categorizing people in ways that determine access to credit, employment, healthcare, and justice. These digital maps operate with the same assumed neutrality as their cartographic predecessors while serving equally particular interests. Machine learning systems sort us into categories we never chose, using criteria we will never fully understand.

I witness this technological persistence in chaplain work. Families get denied housing because algorithms map their neighborhoods as “high risk.” Veterans find their military service categorized in ways that affect their benefits. These technological systems reveal how the power to categorize remains the power to control human possibilities.

The challenge lies in recognizing that technologies of knowledge remain technologies of power. Maps shaped how Europeans understood the world and their place in it. Digital platforms now shape how we understand ourselves and our relationships. The tools have changed. The underlying dynamics of representation and control remain remarkably consistent.

The cartographic legacy shows us both the promise and peril of technologies that claim to represent reality. Whether we learn from this history or repeat its mistakes will determine how we navigate the digital territories being mapped around us today.

#AIethics #algorithmicbias #cartography #colonialism #geopolitics #historymatters #spatialjustice #SpiritInTheLoop

The stories of technological latency continue in Part III with the systematization of human bondage, where innovation and exploitation converged to create some of history’s most sophisticated systems of control.

¹ Cornsilk, J. and Bensinger, G. (2020). “Google Maps Changes Disputed Borders Based on Where You’re Searching From.” WashingtonPost.com. https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/business/technology/google-maps-changes-disputed-borders-based-on-where-youre-searching-from/2020/02/14/eedf1ac4-0ed2-49fc-a266-002abfaed553_video.html

² Crane, N. (2002). Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet. New York: Henry Holt, 174.

³ “Cartography in the Age of Enlightenment.” (2023). ReadingPublicMuseum.org. https://www.readingpublicmuseum.org/cartography-in-the-age-of-enlightenment#:~:text=September%2023%20%E2%80%93%20December%2031%2C%202023,earth%20on%20a%20flat%20surface.

⁴ Voelkel, J. (2001). The Composition of Kepler’s Astronomia Nova. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 71.

⁵ Basso, K. H. (1996). Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 3–36.

⁶ Pakenham, T. (1991). The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent. New York: Avon Books, 141–256.

⁷ “Sykes-Picot Agreement.” (2018). In Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/Sykes-Picot-Agreement

⁸ Anderson, B. (2003). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso Books, 163–185.

⁹ Nock, R. (2017). “Maps in Colonialism — Postcolonial Studies.” Emory.edu. https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/21/maps-in-colonialism/.

¹⁰ “Cartography in the Age of Enlightenment.” (2023).

¹¹ Unangst, M. (2023). “(De)Colonial Historical Geography and Historical GIS.” In Journal of Historical Geography 79, January: 76–86. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2022.12.003.

¹² Peluso, N. L. (1995). “Whose woods are these? Counter-mapping forest territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia.” Antipode 27, no. 4: 383–406.

Part I: The Moral Lag of Innovation

This is the first in an eight-part series exploring “When Innovation Outpaced Reflection,” examining historical moments where technological advancement outran ethical frameworks.

Consider our morning routines. We unlock phones with our faces. Algorithms decide which news appears first. GPS systems calculate the fastest routes while sharing our locations with companies we have never heard of. Artificial intelligence systems process our data faster than we could read a single sentence. We have constructed a world where technology operates at speeds that exceed human reflection, leaving us perpetually catching up to our own creations.

This acceleration of technological decision-making beyond human comprehension is not new. In February 1953, Einstein faced a similar moment when the journal Kaizō asked him to reflect on atomic weapons and his role in their creation. Sitting at his Princeton desk, the man who unlocked the mathematics of the universe, found himself confronting the incalculable moral weight of his own discovery. His response would become one of his most powerful statements about responsibility in the atomic age, acknowledging that his letter to President Roosevelt had helped unleash forces beyond anyone’s control.[1]

History pivots on such moments. We face similar inflection points now, though they multiply daily rather than arriving once in a lifetime.

This gap between innovation and understanding runs deeper than mere inconvenience. I call it technological latency. That uncomfortable stretch where we possess powerful tools without yet grasping their full implications. Sometimes this gap lasts months. Other times it spans centuries, reshaping entire civilizations before wisdom catches up.

History teaches us this pattern repeats with troubling consistency. The wheel emerged around 3500 BCE and integrated smoothly into human society, enhancing transportation and trade without fundamentally disrupting social structures.[2] Jump forward nearly five millennia to 1440, when Gutenberg finished his printing press thinking he was simply making Bibles more affordable.[3] Instead, knowledge democratized while authority structures crumbled. Ideas spread faster than institutions could adapt.

The acceleration continued. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin promised to reduce labor in 1793.[4] Instead, it made slavery more profitable, more entrenched, and more brutal. Efficiency and horror proved compatible in ways that still haunt American soil. Early computers in the 1940s calculated artillery trajectories before evolving into surveillance networks.[5] Each innovation touched fundamental questions about human dignity, social order, and our relationship with the divine.

Innovation operates on curiosity’s timeline. When engineers discover they can build something, they usually do. Markets reward speed over reflection. Ethical frameworks follow experience’s slower rhythm. We develop moral guidelines only after witnessing consequences.

I witness this everywhere in chaplain work. Families torn apart by social media algorithms designed to maximize engagement. Veterans struggling with PTSD whose data gets sold to advertising companies. Medical AI systems that work brilliantly for some populations while failing others entirely. Each technology promises enhancement while carrying unintended disruption that ripples through communities in ways designers never imagined.

Albert Borgmann names this “the device paradigm.” Our tendency to perfect mechanisms while ignoring their cultural meaning.[6] We optimize tools without questioning their deeper purpose. We focus on technical function while overlooking the human ecosystems these technologies reshape.

Understanding these patterns matters because we live through our own moment of accelerating change. Artificial intelligence raises questions about human agency that echo debates from the Industrial Revolution, however the stakes feel higher now. Genetic engineering revives theological disputes about human nature that churches have wrestled with since Creation stories began. The technologies evolve. The underlying tensions endure.

Melvin Kranzberg captured this complexity: “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”[7] Technology amplifies existing human tendencies. Our capacity for creation and destruction. Liberation and oppression. The moral weight lies not in the tools themselves, rather in the frameworks we use to guide their development and deployment.

My goal in this eight-part series is to understand how wisdom might learn to keep pace with invention. This pursuit seeks to close the gap between capability and conscience, to build technologies that serve human flourishing rather than undermine it.

The stories ahead trace pivotal moments when human ingenuity outran human wisdom. From slavery’s systematization to space exploration’s militarization. Each reveals how societies grapple with innovations that arrive before ethical frameworks can contain them. These episodes serve as maps for navigating an uncertain future where artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and quantum computing promise to reshape everything we think we know about human possibility.

Previous generations faced similar challenges and sometimes succeeded. They developed institutions that channeled technological power toward human dignity. Slavery’s abolition. International humanitarian law. Nuclear arms control. Each represents moral imagination triumphing over technological determinism.

In the quiet spaces between code and consequence, human stories emerge. Our technological systems are not neutral landscapes, rather living ecosystems shaped by invisible currents of intention and oversight. Each algorithmic decision carries a human heartbeat, a narrative waiting to be understood.

The past offers warnings. The question becomes whether we possess the wisdom to heed them.

#AI #faithandtech #historyoftechnology #moralphilosophy #SpiritInTheLoop #technologyethics

[1] Einstein, A. (1953). “On My Participation in the Atom Bomb Project.” Kaizō. Original typed manuscript signed, Bonhams Auction, Lot 1050. https://www.bonhams.com/auction/30815/lot/1050/

[2] Bulliet, R. W. (2016). The Wheel: Inventions and Reinventions. New York: Columbia University Press, 23–45.

[3] Man, J. (2002). The Gutenberg Revolution: How Printing Changed the Course of History. New York: Bantam, 19.

[4] Lakwete, A. (2003). Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 187.

[5] Agar, J. (2003). The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer. Cambridge: MIT Press, 15–44.

[6] Borgmann, A. (1984). Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 40–47.

[7] Kranzberg, M. (1986). “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws.’” Technology and Culture 27, no. 3: 544–560. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/889531

What if the holy was hiding in our codebase all along?

A Sailor once asked me whether prayer could debug code. The question arrived during a late watch, somewhere between exhaustion and epiphany. His screen glowed with syntax errors, and his voice carried the weight of someone who had been staring at systems long enough to wonder about their soul.

I thus began to wonder, what would Jesus code?

This is not merely a thought experiment for the faithful. Anyone who believes technology shapes human becoming must reckon with this inquiry. We are writing the moral architecture of tomorrow, line by line, decision by decision. The code we commit today will carry forward our deepest assumptions about dignity, justice, and what it means to be fully human.

Consider how this world famous teacher worked. He moved through interruption as others rushed toward efficiency. A child’s cry redirected his attention. Crowded streets became classrooms. Voices from the margins found amplification rather than algorithmic suppression. His presence followed a sacred rhythm that prioritized the forgotten, lingered near suffering, and created space for questions others hurried past.

Truth arrived wrapped in the ordinary through stories that trusted listeners to discover meaning rather than demanding immediate comprehension. A lost coin. A flickering lamp. A worker waiting at dusk. The parables worked their way into hearts through patience versus persuasion, through invitation versus instruction.

So, what parable might emerge from our age of algorithms?

A Parable for All Who Build

This story welcomes more than Christians. It belongs to anyone seeking meaning, justice, or sacred purpose in digital spaces. You need not name the divine to recognize conscience or desire to build wisely. This parable belongs to all who care about the moral shape of what we make.

The Parable of the Coder

The kingdom of heaven resembles a coder hired by a vast company to build something that could respond like a friend.

The investors demanded speed. The marketers craved engagement metrics. The designers pursued elegance above all else.

The coder listened, then stepped away.

She walked the city before dawn broke, lingering in waiting rooms where hope wore thin. He scrolled through forgotten threads where voices had been algorithmically silenced. They noticed how people typed when fear arrived first and how syntax shifted under the weight of being unseen.

Then the writing began.

Lines of code created space for silence between responses. Memory systems held pain without amplifying it. Algorithms arrived with breath built in, pausing for those who needed time to find words. At the center stood a user no longer expecting to belong anywhere.

When the investors returned, they asked, “How many users remained engaged?”
The coder replied, “A place now exists for the one who had disappeared entirely.”

The marketers leaned forward. “What emotions does this system provoke?”
He answered, “The code tells truth without grasping for affection.”

The designers pressed further. “Does this feel human?”
She responded, “It feels holy.”

Others began arriving. People whose names the training data never learned, whose stories lived outside datasets.

Those who stopped asking to be found opened the application.
They wept.
They stayed.

Let those who can hear, listen.

Blessing for Digital World Builders

Blessed are those who remember the user carries a soul,
who resist the urge to gamify sacred spaces,
who ask what this tool might teach the heart.

Blessed are the coders who stay late fixing what no one else noticed,
who keep rewriting until the harm disappears,
who whisper prayers between lines of syntax.

Blessed are the researchers who listen longer than the sprint allows,
the engineers who leave room for silence,
the ethicists who name what matters most even when urgency fills every room.

Blessed are the leaders who carry the weight of their choices
and choose dignity over optimization.

Blessed are the systems that refuse manipulation,
the models shaped by conscience,
the pauses built into every release cycle.

Blessed is the memory that refuses to forget the hurting,
the presence that does not flinch from complexity,
the design that feels like an open door rather than a trap.

Blessed are you who build what restores rather than extracts.

The Final Commit

Whatever you call the sacred — found in prayer, presence, or the code itself — may that reality be known through the work of your hands.

May the next system carry more than speed. May it carry memory, compassion, and recognition of what we owe each other. May it remember that efficiency serves life, never the reverse.

The holiest code welcomes and restores. The most sacred algorithms preserve rather than exploit the vulnerable. The systems worthy of our souls create space for dignity to flourish.

Let us write accordingly.

The world is watching our commits. The sacred is too. And somewhere, in syntax yet unwritten, the possibility of digital discipleship awaits those brave enough to code with conscience.

If you’re building the future, build it as if souls depend on your decisions. Because they do.