Book Reviews

Jacob Ward, an American journalist and technology correspondent for NBC News, reports on technology's social implications.  Unlike many "doom and gloom" perspectives of our technology future, which focus on Artificial General Intelligence and its eventual takeover in...

Today, we feature a review of Futures of Artificial Intelligence: Perspectives from India and the US, published by Oxford Univ Press in India with a US edition forthcoming, written by AI & Faith founding member and research fellow Robert Geraci and reviewed by...

Jason Thacker’s Following Jesus in a Digital Age (B&H Publishing, 2022) grapples with how our relationship with technology can influence our faith, and provides a framework for how Christians can engage with others online. For Christians who have not read The Age...

Harris Bor’s Staying Human: A Jewish Theology for the Age of Artificial Intelligence is a welcome addition to the burgeoning literature that reflects on our increasingly technologized world through a religious lens. Bor’s noteworthy contribution is to add a Jewish...

It was November of 2019 and I was in Colorado Springs for an event John Eldredge called “Homecoming”. He had a new book on the way and Homecoming was an early-access event. I’ve been following John Eldredge for many years now. Wild at Heart quite literally and...

The eminent 20th century German Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, was perhaps best known for his short treatise, I-Thou.  It amplified the study of dialogic relationships, designating more transactional, functional, objectified, and mundane bonds as I-It, and deeper,...

In her new book, “The Shame Machine,” the author and mathematician Cathy O'Neil (also the author of the wonderful “Weapons of Math Destruction”) discusses the “shame industry,” its creators and proponents, and what can be done about it. O'Neil argues that shame, once...

AI, Faith, and the Future (forthcoming late May) is a collection of scholarly essays authored by members of a multidisciplinary research group on ethical and theological reflections about Artificial Intelligence at Seattle Pacific University.  The intent of the...

Andy Crouch’s new book The Life We’re Looking For made me cry…twice. In the spirit of full disclosure it’s not uncommon for a movie, play, or even a novel to choke me up but for a non-fiction treatise to bring me to tears is indeed a rare thing. Add to this the fact...

Though Robert Putnam has served since 1979 as dean and then distinguished professor of political science at the Kennedy School at Harvard, most Americans—including me—only became aware of his keen analytical descriptions of U.S society in 2000, when he published...

When my oldest daughter was born prematurely, her life depended for a mercifully short but crucial time on a ventilator. Her lungs needed the help of automation if they ever were to have a chance to breathe on their own. It is a memory that has stayed with me...

Among both those who are giddiest and those who are most terrified about technological change, there’s this phrase that gets thrown around a lot: technological singularity. The singularity, they say, is a point in the future—perhaps the near future?—when global...

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World, by New York Times Technology Reporter Cade Metz is a highly entertaining and enjoyable account of the long back story behind the rise of modern deep learning approaches  (neural networks)...

Masters or Slaves? AI and The Future of Humanity asks a fundamental question in a crucial moment of human civilization. How will AI impact, and finally shape, humanity's future and, mainly, the humanity of the future? The author's background and experience in both...

John Lennox is an emeritus professor of mathematics at Oxford University, and often ventures into the intersection of faith and technology. In this book Lennox offers an overview of AI in order to establish a framework for discussion, then ventures into the promises...

First there was SUNY Professor and sociologist Virginia Eubanks’ 2018 ground-breaking book, Automating Inequality, which spotlighted how even well-intentioned technology solutions to complex social needs often only spawn new problems. Now Princeton sociologist Ruha...

How might Christians engage and bring hope to a world where we have a loneliness epidemic? Three Pieces of Glass addresses this as a crisis of belonging. As expressed in the iconic show Cheers, “you want to go where everybody knows your name.” The book is laid out in...

Everything happens for a reason, of course, but when humans look back on history, they tend to sort events into the inevitable and the arbitrary. It’s easier to fantasize about the latter, and the fantasies that last longest stem from the historical events that feel...

If you have ever wondered how to look at Artificial Intelligence (AI) from the perspective of Christian faith, The Age of AI is definitely a book you will want to read. AI and Faith Founding Member Jason Thacker takes the reader on a journey filled with Bible...

And the winner by acclamation in the nonfiction ‘Holy Crap! I May Never Be Able To Sleep Again!’ category is Sandworm by Andy Greenberg. And, yes, Greenberg’s tale of cyberwar over the past decade is absolutely that terrifying. Here’s how his book begins: On June 27,...