The Cross and the Machine

my nation was surviving on spiritual credit, and that it was coming close to running out. (View Highlight)

We would remake Earth, down to the last nanoparticle, to suit our desires, which we now called “needs.” Our new world would be globalized, uniform, interconnected, digitized, hyper-real, monitored, always-on. We were building a machine to replace God. (View Highlight)

Following the rabbit hole down, I realized that a crisis of limits is a crisis of culture, and a crisis of culture is a crisis of spirit. Every living culture in history, from the smallest tribe to the largest civilization, has been built around a spiritual core: a central claim about the relationship between human culture, nonhuman nature, and divinity. Every culture that lasts, I suspect, understands that living within limits—limits set by natural law, by cultural tradition, by ecological boundaries—is a cultural necessity and a spiritual imperative. (View Highlight)

The story I had heard a thousand times turned out to be a story I had never heard at all. (View Highlight)

I saw that the teachings of Christ were the most radical in history, and that no empire could be built by those who truly lived them. (View Highlight)

Home is beyond time (View Highlight)

the Cross or the machine (View Highlight)

Everything was unchanged, and everything was new, and I knew what had happened and who had done it, and I knew that it was too late. I had just become a Christian. (View Highlight)

I didn’t know back then that the Christian story is the story of our rebellion against God. I didn’t know that by taking part in that rebellion I had become part of the story, whether I liked it or not. I didn’t know, either, why Christians see pride as the greatest sin. (View Highlight)