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Fear, Faith, and the Future
Introducing a Series on Contradiction and Progress
Over the past year, I’ve noticed a pattern in nearly everything I read, write, or hear discussed on a podcast: progress always brings fear along for the ride. Whether it’s the calculator in a 1970s math classroom or artificial intelligence in today’s universities, each generation meets a new tool with suspicion before eventually absorbing it into normalcy. But the hesitation itself—the human reaction to change—reveals something important about who we are.
This new series, Fear, Faith, and the Future, will explore that uneasy space between innovation and belief. It’s about the contradictions that surface when our creations begin to unsettle us—when technology, religion, and human meaning all collide. Each essay will take a different angle on the same question: Why do we fear what we’ve built?
I’ll begin with The Moral Lag of Innovation, an examination of why the very architects of progress so often scramble to claim the moral high ground after the fact. From there, the series will move through cultural and personal territory—from Peter Thiel’s warnings about AI as “anti-Christ” to my own experiences as a student during the calculator revolution—to show how fear of change has always been part of our learning curve as a species.
The full series will include:
- Part I: The Moral Lag of Innovation
- Part II: The Anti-Christ and the Algorithm: When Faith Fears Its Own Reflection
- Part III: From Calculators to Chatbots: The Classroom as Laboratory of Fear
- Part IV: The Existential Turn: When Tools Look Back
- Part V: Absorbing the Future: Toward a New Normal
This series grows out of my June 19, 2025 essay, Why I Write: A Mind Trained for Contradictions. I return to that theme now with a wider lens—because contradiction isn’t just a personal thing, it’s a cultural condition. Each essay will look at how fear, faith, and progress intersect, and what those intersections might say about the road ahead.
If the past is any guide, we’ll eventually integrate AI and whatever follows it into the fabric of daily life—just as we did with calculators, computers, and the internet. The real question isn’t whether we’ll adapt, but whether we’ll understand ourselves any better once we do.
Stay tuned for Part I next week.
