Silicon Spiritualities – Details, episodes & analysis

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Silicon Spiritualities

The Gospel Coalition

Religion & Spirituality

Technology

Frequency: 1 episode/8d. Total Eps: 7

Silicon Spiritualities is a podcast from The Gospel Coalition exploring the deeper questions artificial intelligence raises about work, worship, truth, power, and what it means to be human. Host Christopher Watkin helps thoughtful Christians move beyond hype and panic toward a wise, hopeful, and biblically grounded understanding of the technologies shaping our world.

Recent rankings

Latest chart positions across Apple Podcasts and Spotify rankings.

Apple Podcasts

🇬🇧 Great Britain - christianity
20/08/2026
#63
🇬🇧 Great Britain - christianity
19/08/2026
#52
🇬🇧 Great Britain - christianity
18/08/2026
#99
🇬🇧 Great Britain - christianity
13/08/2026
#99
🇬🇧 Great Britain - christianity
04/08/2026
#57
🇩🇪 Germany - christianity
31/07/2026
#85
🇬🇧 Great Britain - christianity
29/07/2026
#88
🇨🇦 Canada - christianity
28/07/2026
#93
🇬🇧 Great Britain - christianity
28/07/2026
#97
🇬🇧 Great Britain - christianity
27/07/2026
#50

Spotify

No recent rankings available

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https://pcm.adswizz.com
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https://www.tgc.org/together
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https://store.thegospelcoalition.org/product/9781956593211/the-ai-apocalypse-paperback
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RSS feed quality

Good

Score global : 73%

Publication history

Monthly episode publishing history over the past years.

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Latest published episodes

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AI and the Image of God: What Does it Mean to be Human? (with Stephen Driscoll)

Season 1 · Episode 3

Monday, July 27, 2026 • Duration 55:44

What if the rise of AI is exposing a crisis that was already there?

That question lies at the heart of this episode with Stephen Driscoll. As AI becomes more capable, many people feel a growing sense of anxiety about what human beings are for. If our value rests on intelligence, creativity, or productivity, then AI will always seem to threaten our worth. But Stephen argues that this fear reveals a deeper problem: we were never meant to ground our identity in performance in the first place.

Stephen is a Christian ministry worker in Australia and the author of Made in Our Image: God, Artificial Intelligence and You. In our conversation, he turns to Genesis 1 and 2 to show that human dignity is not something we achieve but something we receive. We are made in the image of God, and that means no machine can take away what God has given.

Stephen joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to explore why AI is forcing fresh questions about identity, and why the Christian answer offers a surer foundation for human worth than any technological vision ever could.

Resources Mentioned:

Made in Our Image by Stephen Driscoll
Dominion by Tom Holland
The Experience Machine by Robert Nozick
Your Brain on ChatGPT by MIT Media Lab

PREORDER The AI Apocalypse: A Survival Guide for Humanity, featuring Ridenour, Watkin, Brett McCracken, and many others, such as Ben Sasse and Alan Noble.

JOIN the conversation on Discord, along with other Silicon Spiritualities listeners.

Help The Gospel Coalition renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel: Donate today.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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AI and Formation: How does AI shape our loves? (with Michael Keller)

Season 1 · Episode 2

Monday, July 20, 2026 • Duration 01:07:49

What happens when AI becomes good enough to simulate spiritual depth?

That question drives this episode with Michael Keller. Michael is lead pastor of Redeemer Lincoln Square in New York City, and he also brings a rare technical perspective to the conversation, having completed doctoral work in computational linguistics using early machine learning methods. In our discussion, he argues that AI can give us information, polish, and efficiency, but it cannot give us the one thing at the heart of Christian life: real relationship. It can help draft a prayer, but it cannot pray. It can mimic understanding, but it cannot know or love a person.

We talk about friction, formation, and the danger of outsourcing the very struggles through which God shapes us. Michael makes the striking point that AI offers the appearance of depth without the cost of it. That is true in ministry, in relationships, and even in our devotional lives. If prayer, preaching, and discipleship become frictionless, something essential is taken from us.

Again and again, Michael brings the conversation back to a richer Christian vision of the human person. We are more than our outputs. We are not defined by efficiency, performance, or the ability to process information. Michael joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to explore what AI can do for us, what it can never do, and why this cultural moment is forcing us to ask afresh what it really means to be human.

Resources Mentioned:

Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin

PREORDER The AI Apocalypse: A Survival Guide for Humanity, featuring Ridenour, Watkin, Brett McCracken, and many others, such as Ben Sasse and Alan Noble.

JOIN the conversation on Discord, along with other Silicon Spiritualities listeners.

AI and Work: What happens when AI can do your job better? (with Rachel Gilson)

Season 1 · Episode 1

Monday, July 13, 2026 • Duration 01:05:59

What happens when AI promises not just to help us work, but to help us become the selves we most want to be?

That question runs through this episode with Rachel Gilson. Rachel is Director of Theological Development and Culture for Cru and the author of Born Again This Way and Parenting Without Panic in an LGBT-Affirming World. In our conversation, she brings unusual clarity to the question of work in the age of AI: not simply what these tools can do, but what they may be doing to our integrity, our vocation, and our sense of ourselves.

We talk about writing, voice, and the temptation to present work that is not really ours as though it were. AI may be able to write, but it cannot witness. It cannot speak from a life, a body, a history, or a situated perspective. That is why this episode is not a simple rejection of AI, but a careful exercise in discernment: learning where these tools may genuinely help, and where they risk hollowing out the very human work God has given us to do.

We also explore desire, embodiment, personhood, and the difference between using a tool and being quietly deformed by it. Rachel joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to ask how Christians can work faithfully in the age of AI, and how the Scriptures help us hold together honesty, community, embodiment, and hope.

Resources Mentioned:

Born Again This Way by Rachel Gilson
Parenting Without Panic in an LGBT-Affirming World by Rachel Gilson
by Christopher Watkin

Silicon Spiritualities | Official Trailer

Season 1

Tuesday, June 30, 2026 • Duration 02:35

PREORDER The AI Apocalypse: A Survival Guide for Humanity, featuring Ridenour, Watkin, Brett McCracken, and many others, such as Ben Sasse and Alan Noble.

JOIN the conversation on Discord, along with other Silicon Spiritualities listeners.

Help The Gospel Coalition renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel: Donate today.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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AI and Art: What is Creativity For? (with Brett McCracken)

Season 1 · Episode 4

Monday, August 3, 2026 • Duration 01:11:17

What is the point of making art when a machine can do in seconds what it takes a human years to learn?

That question sits at the heart of this episode with Brett McCracken. Brett is Senior Editor at The Gospel Coalition and a perceptive writer on faith, media, technology, and culture. In our conversation, he helps us see that AI threatens not only jobs or industries, but something deeper: our sense that the process of making, wrestling, waiting, and learning might actually matter. Great art, he argues, is never just about the polished final product. It is also about praise, patience, formation, and the personal gift one human being offers to another.

We talk about why wisdom is more than information, why AI can imitate emotion without sharing in human suffering, and why boredom, solitude, and even daydreaming may be among the most important human habits to protect in an age of constant optimization. Brett also reflects on the attention economy and the subtle ways our desires are being shaped by technologies designed to keep us looking, clicking, and consuming.

Brett joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to explore what AI is doing to art, attention, and discipleship, and why some of the most human things we do may also be the least efficient.

Resources Mentioned:

The Wisdom Pyramid by Brett McCracken
Scrolling Ourselves to Death by Brett McCracken and Collin Hansen
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
by Hartmut Rosa

AI and Aging: The Grace of Limits (with Autumn Ridenour)

Season 1 · Episode 6

Monday, August 17, 2026 • Duration 01:21:35

What happens when a machine offers to give you back someone you love?

That question opens this episode with Autumn Ridenour. We begin with the idea of a “granny bot”: a chatbot built from a dead relative’s messages, voice notes, and emails. It sounds comforting at first, but Autumn helps us see why such technologies do not really preserve communion. They risk replacing grief, memory, and creaturely acceptance with a digital imitation of presence.

Dr. Autumn Ridenour is a Christian ethicist at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and the author of books on Sabbath, aging, and the moral challenges of the digital world. She brings biblical depth and Augustinian insight to some of the hardest questions raised by AI. In our conversation, she argues that the digital age tempts us to resist human limits rather than receive them. But dependence, embodiment, and finitude are not defects to be engineered away. They are part of what it means to be creatures before God.

We also talk about Babel, transhumanism, aging, and the difference between simulation and real relationship. Again and again, Autumn points beyond Silicon Valley’s promises to the richer Christian hope of face-to-face communion with God and one another. She joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to explore what AI reveals about our deepest longings, and why no machine can finally satisfy them.

Resources Mentioned:

Sabbath Rest as Vocation by Autumn Ridenour
Restlessness and Belonging by Autumn Ridenour
A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

PREORDER The AI Apocalypse: A Survival Guide for Humanity, featuring Ridenour, Watkin, Brett McCracken, and many others, such as Ben Sasse and Alan Noble.

AI and Emotion: Can Machines Feel? (with Rosalind Picard)

Season 1 · Episode 5

Monday, August 10, 2026 • Duration 01:04:47

What does it mean when a machine says, “I understand how you feel”?

That question is no longer theoretical. We live in a world of AI companions, emotional chatbots, and wearable devices that promise to track our stress, improve our sleep, and help us manage our inner lives. Some of these tools can be genuinely useful. But the more persuasive they become, the more we need to ask: are they helping us flourish as human beings, or training us to settle for a simulation of care?

Few people are better equipped to help us think about that question than Rosalind Picard, a professor at MIT and founder of a research group at the MIT Media Lab that develops technologies designed to recognize and respond to human emotion. She has spent decades working at the cutting edge of affective computing, a discipline that she founded. But what makes this conversation especially compelling is that she is not dazzled by the rhetoric of AI, but clear-eyed about both its promise and its danger.

In this episode, Roz helps us think carefully about the difference between reading the outward signs of emotion and actually knowing a person’s inner life. She explains why AI can imitate empathy without feeling anything at all, why emotionally intelligent technologies can sometimes support human flourishing, and why companion chatbots in particular should raise alarm bells for Christians. Along the way, we talk about consciousness, embodiment, meaning, and the temptation to become, in C. S. Lewis’s phrase, “too easily pleased.”

Roz joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to ask what AI can really know about our emotions, what it can never know, and why the richest forms of love, care, and meaning can never be reduced to code.

Resource Mentioned: Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom

PREORDER The AI Apocalypse: A Survival Guide for Humanity, featuring Ridenour, Watkin, Brett McCracken, and many others, such as Ben Sasse and Alan Noble.

Silicon Spiritualities – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

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Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Silicon Spiritualities – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Other8

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Other8

Amazon22

Discord1