Humanism

Don’t die. That’s the simple mission statement of Bryan Johnson, tech entrepreneur, who is on a mission to extend his life as long as possible. He is not alone in this quest. In fact, the preoccupation with longevity is everywhere. Entrepreneurs are using AI to crack the longevity code. Cities are vying to be the new “longevity hubs.”

Most of the longevity movement is not really about immortality but rather about extending life and limiting the damaging effects of aging. Of course, we all want longevity. The danger of Johnson’s obsessive approach is spending so much time trying to extend your life that you never quite get around to living it.

Indeed, keeping death close—even while pushing it as far into the future as we can—has many lessons to teach us about life…. Death can help us focus our attention on living our best life, because there’s nothing that can teach us more about how to live life than death. Death is the most universal experience, yet we will do anything and everything we can to curtain it off, to avoid dealing with the only plot twist that we know for sure will be in our story’s last act.

Here lies the crux of the error of those that see human beings solely as material beings, they have confused an immortal soul with an immortal body. As the philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

When we don’t allow death into our lives, we lose the clarity, perspective, and wisdom that only death can bring. That’s why psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross called death the key to the door of life: “It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you’ll live forever, it becomes too easy to postpone the things you know that you must do.”

In a 2024 interview the actress Julia Fox was asked, “Do you meditate or journal or otherwise practice mindfulness?” She replied:

I don’t, but I do pray. When I was little, I [prayed to] Jesus Christ. Now I pray to the universe, the collective consciousness, the karmic force behind everything. I used to pray for things that I really wanted. Now I pray to be guided, stay on the right path, for strength, for positivity. But then I also definitely do pray for things I want, too.

Anthony Levandowski makes an unlikely prophet. Dressed in Silicon Valley-casual jeans, the engineer known for self-driving cars, is laying the foundations for a new religion. Artificial intelligence has already inspired billion-dollar companies, far-reaching research programs, and scenarios of both transcendence and doom. Now Levandowski is creating its first church.

Levandowski created the first Church of Artificial Intelligence called Way of the Future. It was founded in 2015 but shut its doors a few years later. Now the recently rebooted church, which shares the original’s name, now has “a couple thousand people” coming together to build a spiritual connection between humans and AI, its founder said.

Papers filed with the Internal Revenue Service in May of 2015 name tech entrepreneur and self-driving car pioneer, Anthony Levandowski, as the leader of the new religion. The documents state that WOTF’s activities will focus on “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.”

“What is going to be created will effectively be a god,” Levandowski said in an interview with Wired magazine. “It’s not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?”

But WOTF differs in one key way to established churches, says Levandowski: “There are many ways people think of God, and thousands of flavors of Christianity, Judaism, Islam … but they’re always looking at something that’s not measurable or you can’t really see or control. This time it’s different. This time you will be able to talk to God, literally, and know that it’s listening.”

Levandowski said he’s rebooting his AI church in a renewed attempt at creating a religious movement focused on the worship and understanding of artificial intelligence.

He said that sophisticated AI systems could help guide humans on moral, ethical, or existential questions that are normally sought out in religions. “Here we're actually creating things that can see everything, be everywhere, know everything, and maybe help us and guide us in a way that normally you would call God,” he said.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This has always been the conceit of those who try to replace the true God with man-made “gods.” Humans wants a visible god, a god they can control, and a god that they can know is listening. True biblical religion is based on an eternal God who sees everything, is everywhere, knows everything, and who hears all of our prayers. But he can only be approached through faith in his Son (Heb. 11:6; John 14:6; Heb. 4:15-16) who provides access and fellowship with our Father (1 John 1:1-5).

In Buddhist Japan, they now have robot priests. Mindar is a robo-priest which has been working at a temple in Kyoto for the last few years, reciting Buddhist sutras with which it has been programmed. The next step, says monk Tensho Goto, an excitable champion of the digital dharma, is to fit it with an AI system so that it can have real conversations, and offer spiritual advice. Goto is especially excited about the fact that Mindar is “immortal.” This means, he says, that it will be able to pass on the tradition in the future better than him.

Meanwhile, over in China, Xian’er is a touchscreen “robo-monk” who works in a temple near Beijing, spreading “kindness, compassion and wisdom to others through the internet and new media.”

In India, the Hindus are joining in, handing over duties in one of their major ceremonies to a robot arm, which performs in place of a priest.

In a Catholic church in Warsaw, Poland, sits SanTO, an AI robot which looks like a statue of a saint, and is “designed to help people pray” by offering Bible quotes in response to questions.

Not to be outdone, a protestant church in Germany has developed a robot called BlessU-2. BlessU-2, which looks like a character designed by Aardman Animations, can “forgive your sins in five different languages,” which must be handy if they’re too embarrassing to confess to a human.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Computer scientists and programmers pursue their goal of creating their own god from AI. They seek wisdom and guidance apart from the true source. “For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.” (Jer. 2:13)

Formerly the Religion Editor for the Atlantic, Sigal Samuel now writes about the future of consciousness, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience, and their "staggering ethical implications." She describes much of the hope for artificial intelligence as mimicking what Christianity and other major religions have been espousing for centuries. She writes:

Suppose I told you that in 10 years … you will live in a sort of paradise. You won’t get sick, or age, or die. Eternal life will be yours! Even better, your mind will be blissfully free of uncertainty — you’ll have access to perfect knowledge. Oh, and you’ll no longer be stuck on Earth. Instead, you can live up in the heavens.

The more you listen to Silicon Valley’s discourse around AI, the more you hear echoes of religion. That’s because a lot of the excitement about building a superintelligent machine comes down to recycled religious ideas. Most secular technologists who are building AI just don’t recognize that.

These technologists propose cheating death by uploading our minds to the cloud, where we can live digitally for all eternity. They talk about AI as a decision-making agent that can judge with mathematical certainty what’s optimal and what’s not. (It is) an endeavor that guarantees human salvation if it goes well, even as it spells doom if it goes badly.

Jack Clark, co-founder of the AI safety company Anthropic, recently wrote: “Sometimes I think a lot of the breathless enthusiasm for AGI is misplaced religious impulses from people brought up in a secular culture.”

Sigal Samuel summarizes the beliefs in this nutshell: "When we put all these ideas together and boil them down, we get this basic proposition:

• We may not have much time until life as we know it is over.
• So, we need to place a bet on something that can save us.
• Since the stakes are so high, we should ante up and go all in on our bet.

Silicon Valley’s vision for AI? It’s religion, repackaged

Medical clinics are popping up across the country promising to help clients live longer and better—so long as they can pay. Longevity clinics aim to do everything from preventing chronic disease to healing tennis elbow, all with the goal of optimizing patients’ health for more years. Clients pay as much as $100,000 a year for sometimes-unproven treatments, including biological-age testing, early cancer screenings, stem-cell therapies, and hair rejuvenation.

The centers capitalize on Americans’ obsession with living longer. Many doctors caution that some clinics’ treatments lack robust scientific evidence or introduce health risks. One researcher said, “Anybody who is treating your toenails can say they’re contributing to longevity.”

People who visit these clinics are often wealthy people in their 40s to 60s who are seeing signs of aging. Several providers say they have noticed clientele trending as young as 20-somethings in recent years.

An article in Bloomberg Businessweek described the quest of multi-millionaire Bryan Johnson, a 45-year-old software entrepreneur, to turn back the clock. This year, he’s on track to spend at least $2 million on his body. He wants to have the brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, teeth, skin, and hair of an 18-year-old.

The effort has been named Project Blueprint, and Johnson’s doing it with the assistance of 30 doctors. They try the most intriguing new treatments on Johnson and obsessively track the results using everything from whole-body MRIs to blood draws. It's all on top of a rigorous framework of a 1,977-calorie vegan diet, and an extremely specific brushing and flossing routine. If you think he's crazy, “This is expected and fine,” he says. The crazy part is, it's working.

According to the article, "Johnson’s body is, as they measure it, getting medically younger," citing the biological age of his heart (37), skin (28), lung capacity (18), and gum inflammation (17). Each morning starting at 5 a.m., Johnson takes two dozen supplements and medicines. There’s a supplement for artery and skin health, another to prevent bowel polyps, others to reduce inflammation, and also his vegan diet. He follows a daily hourlong workout, consisting of 25 different exercises. Then there are weekly acid peels to counteract sun damage and sound therapy to better his hearing.

Kristin Dittmar, a cancer specialist, says, “I think what he’s doing is impressive, and he has personally challenged me to be better. What he does is also essentially a full-time job.” She also stresses that cancer has genetic components that no cutting-edge science, let alone juices or creams, can yet beat.

It’s also easy to imagine how a group of Johnson wannabes experimenting with ever-riskier procedures could go horribly wrong.

Paul Ford writes in an article on Wired, what happened when he switched his weight loss meds and found a miracle cure. Decades of struggle with an insatiable desire for food, gone in an instant. But his reflection on the experience is less of an advertisement as it is a probing of human nature amid advances in pharmacology. He writes:

This is a technology that will reorder society. I have been the living embodiment of the deadly sin of gluttony, judged as greedy and weak since I was 10 years old — and now the sin is washed away. Baptism by injection. But I have no more virtue than I did a few months ago. I just prefer broccoli to gloopy chicken. Is this who I am?

How long is it before there’s an injection for your appetites, your vices? Maybe they’re not as visible as mine. Would you self-administer a weekly anti-avarice shot? Can Big Pharma cure your sloth, lust, wrath, envy, pride?

On this front, the parallels between Ford’s weight loss drug and every other drug are almost obvious (whether they be coffee, THC, or any fill-in-the-blank name brand). The alluring promise that frailty is simply a matter of chemistry. More interesting is what happens to Ford himself after the one signal pathway is silenced — his brain averts its gaze elsewhere:

Where before my brain had been screaming, screaming, at air-raid volume — there was sudden silence. It was confusing. […] “I urgently need, I thought … Something to fill the silence where food used to be. Every night for weeks I spent four, five hours twisting Moog knobs. Not making music. Just droning, looping, and beep-booping. I needed something to obsess over, to watch YouTube videos about. I needed something to fail at every night to feel normal.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The flesh is never satisfied and cannot be conquered by human will or science. Impeding one of the desires of the flesh simply ignites another. The church of big pharma might provide a kind of cure, but there is no panacea for human nature, except “the washing of new birth and renewal by the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:5).

Only half of Americans now say they are sure God exists according to the General Social Survey, conducted by NORC, the research arm of the University of Chicago. Religious scholars consider NORC the gold standard of surveys on faith.

According to this 2022 survey, 50% of Americans say they’re unsure God is real; just under 50% say they’re positive God exists; and 34% say they never go to church—the highest level in 50 years. It’s still about a fifty-fifty world out there; but it’s tipping toward uncertainty.

If you look at years past, in comparison with years present, it seems America is hurtling toward secularism. In 2008, for example, 60% of those responding to this General Social Survey expressed certainty in the existence of God. At that rate—of 10% drops in belief in God every 15 years—all of America will be non-believing by the dawn of the next century.

Ryan Burge, is a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University who studies faith. He wrote that mainline Protestantism, the backbone of faith in many American communities, is “collapsing.” Since the 1970s, the share of Americans who identify with Protestant denominations has declined from nearly 1 in 3 to around 1 in 10.

The search for self-esteem through religion and moral virtue presents a greater problem. No matter how good we have been and what we have done for God and others, there is always somebody whose relative goodness makes us feel less than.

Consider the example of John and Libby Moritz who lost all three of their children in a car crash. In response to their grief, they founded a nonprofit for vulnerable children. They sponsored orphanages in Mexico and Grenada, provided scholarships in Kenya and India, alleviated hunger in the Philippines, and provided shoes in Guatemala. They bought a large farm and turned it into a foster home. In virtually everything, they became other-centered. They used their own money to fund the work. In the summers, John tended to his swimming pool business. During off months, they visited the orphanages and programs they sponsored.

Unsurprisingly, the article about the Moritz’s began, “Prepare to feel a little guilty. It’s not that John and Libby Moritz would want anybody to feel guilty. It’s just that if you want to compare good deeds checks list with them, yours will probably come up short.”

On August 27, 1883, a blast in Indonesia sent sound waves that ripped across the face of the earth. A volcanic explosion, 10,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb, tore apart the Indonesian island of Krakatoa. People heard the sound as far away as Bangkok, Manila, and Australia (2,000 miles distant). As the sky turned red and rained rock, church goers on nearby islands shuddered, fearing it was the end of days.

The blast killed over 36,000 people, destroying more than 3/4 of the island. The entire planet experienced a raft of environmental effects. Dramatic sunsets and strange phenomena in the sky took place for months. Fire brigades were called as far away as North America. The sky itself looked as if it was on fire.

As news of the explosion ricocheted across the planet, the global public was fascinated. The world was in the grip of the industrial revolution and the rapid growth of technology had elevated belief in human power and potential. For the first time in history, it felt as if nature was tamed. However, the scale of the eruption of Krakatoa awed the world. The modern age again became frightened, reminded of the limits of human ability and the terrifying potency of nature. In an instant, the island of Krakatoa was changed.

For many of us, that is what the world feels like now. The pandemic, cultural change, political polarization, and technological disruption have rapidly altered the world we live in at a breakneck speed. The sheer weight of change has left many of us disoriented. We, too, have realized that we are not as in control as we thought.

In a recent Q&A with CT magazine, veteran AI engineer Tom Kehler, talked about the limits of the popular ChatGPT, and the wonders of the human brain.

Kehler has worked in artificial intelligence for more than 40 years, as a coder and a CEO. He grew up a preacher’s kid and got into mathematical linguistics in high school. After earning a PhD in physics, he wanted to do linguistics with Wycliffe Bible Translators, but “God kept closing that door,” he says. Instead, he found himself working with natural language processing in computing.

He was asked “Why is there an obsession with sentient AI?” Kehler replied, “If you are a person of nonbelief, you want to create something that gives you hope in the future. On the AI side, we want something that will cause us to have eternal life—my consciousness is going to go into eternity because it’s in a machine.”

Kehler was also asked about Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer, who said in 2022 that his chatbot had become sentient and had a soul.

The way these systems work, we’ll say, “This is the number seven.” We keep reinforcing until the neural network can recognize that seven. That correlation of events is the core way AI works now.

However, the way kids acquire language is truly mind-blowing. And not just language, but even if you go open the cupboard door. Kids see something once, and they figure out how to do it. The system that this Google engineer was talking about … was given trillions of examples in order to get some sense of intelligence out of it. It consumed ridiculous amounts of energy, whereas a little kid’s brain requires the power of a flashlight, and it’s able to learn language. We’re not anywhere close to that kind of general AI.

(AI) is taking inputs to build its knowledge. It doesn’t check the truth value, or as it’s called, the data lineage. Where did this data come from? Do we know it’s true? It’s translating input text to output text based on some objective.

If you think about how scientific knowledge or medical knowledge was developed, it’s by peer review. We as a human race have considered that trustworthy. It’s not perfect. But that’s how we normally build trust. If you have 12 of the world’s best cardiac surgeons say a certain procedure is good, you’re going to say, “Yeah, that’s probably good.” If ChatGPT told you to do that procedure, you’d better have it reviewed by somebody, because it could be wrong.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God-designed the human brain to be a marvelous, compact, and vastly intricate organ. It has a conscience, the ability to empathize, to feel joy and regret, and to ultimately seek a higher purpose in life in fellowship with the Creator. The human-designed AI is an attempt to potentially create eternal life for humans, but without ethics, and without submission to the Almighty God.

Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is a research fellow at the Franklin Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany. Her YouTube channel has over 550,000 subscribers. She admits she cringes when scientists like the late Stephen Hawking, and many others, make numerous unsubstantiated pronouncements like “there is no possibility of a creator.” She is uncomfortable with “overconfident proclamations” like widely held beliefs on the origin of the universe, the existence of other universes, and other unverifiable beliefs.

Hossenfelder wants scientists to be:

… mindful of the limits of their discipline. Sometimes the only scientific answer we can give is “We don't know.” It therefore seems likely to me that, in our ongoing process of knowledge discovery, religion and science will continue to co-exist for a very long time. That's because science itself is limited, and where science ends, we seek other modes of explanation.

(Some) of these limits stem from the specific math we currently use (which, for example, requires initial conditions or indeterministic jumps), and they may be overcome as physics advances further. But some limits seem insurmountable to me. Eventually, I think, we will have to accept some facts about our universe without scientific explanation, if only because the scientific method can't justify itself. We may observe that the scientific method works, conclude that it's to our advantage to continue using it, but still never know why it works.

A video from content creators Aperture gives a brief overview of the basic questions people ask about personal morality: "If I steal from the rich and use it to feed the poor, is that good or is that bad? If I drive over the speed limit to get my sick child to the hospital, is that good or is that bad? What is good? And what is bad? What is morality, and do you, as a person, have morals?"

Morality is what society treats as right and acceptable. They’re the standards of thoughts and actions that everyone in a group agrees to follow so they can all live peacefully. Stealing is against the law. However, a lot of people would consider stealing a piece of bread to save a homeless person from dying of hunger, moral. Driving over the speed limit is a crime, but when it could help save the life of the child in the backseat of your car, it becomes the most noble of actions.

The authors of the video say,

As humans evolve and learn new things, our morals change. This is why morality isn’t stagnant. It evolves with time. Think about issues like pre-marital sex, same-sex relationships, abortion, marijuana use. These are all things that were considered immoral long ago. But today, society is beginning to accept all of these as moral. We’ve learned to be tolerant of people regardless of their personal beliefs or preferences. And while not everyone might agree to all of these things or practice it themselves, things seem to have flipped. ...

You can watch the video here.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Society is changing, but in the wrong direction. What was once immoral, is now considered moral as long “as no one is hurt.” But God’s law never changes because it is based on his holy nature. Society can attempt to redefine right and wrong, but that doesn’t change God’s law.

In 2013, Micah Redding founded the Christian Transhumanist Association, a group bringing faith and ethics into transhumanist conversations. Transhumanists believe that human capacities can be enhanced by science and technology.

Some are anti-aging researchers applying biomedicine to improve humanity. Aubrey de Grey studies preventative maintenance for the human body and believes the first human to live to 1,000 has already been born. Others look to computing advances; futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that by 2045 artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to “the singularity,” where everyone’s brain will be connected to “the cloud.”

These predictions may seem outlandish, but recent breakthroughs in the science of aging do make modest, if not radical, life extension a real possibility. Various studies on lab animals have extended lifespan by up to 30 percent.

At the same time, the church must continue to proclaim the basic reality of our existence, as summarized in the Ash Wednesday call, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.” Life is a gift.

Philosopher Diogenes Allen made the distinction between extended life and eternal life. Extended life is what we are trying to make for ourselves through scientific solutions. Eternal life, on the other hand, is “that which we can experience and have to a degree in this life but can have fully only after death.” Eternal life, in other words, is received.

To the extent that we receive this eternal, abundant life, Christians offer it to others—through loving our neighbors and building communities of mutual care and hospitality. This is our ultimate goal. Though caring for bodies may be part of this process, it is not everything.

For decades the media in all its forms have created celebrities that are framed, groomed, and packaged solely for the purpose of dissemination through mass media. Many people, some living frustrated lives, live vicariously through the allegedly exciting lives of these glamorous personalities, representing hopes and dreams personally unfulfilled.

The result is that we have created synthetic celebrities whom we worship, however briefly, because they vicariously act out our noblest or basest desires. For impressionable young people, “celebrity worship syndrome” has resulted in:

Symptoms of depression and anxiety. Lower levels of critical thinking and cognitive abilities Impaired social skills. Maladaptive daydreaming that interferes with work, school, or relationships. Desire for fame, which is often linked with a lack of self-acceptance. Compulsive buying and materialism. Difficulties with romantic relationships.

Author Meghan O'Gieblyn, explores meaning, morality, and faith. She recalls the role of thinking and reason during her days at Bible College:

When I was a Christian, I had a naive, unquestioning faith in the faculty of higher thought, in my ability to comprehend objective truths about the world. ... People often decry the thoughtlessness of religion, but when I think back on my time in Bible school, it occurs to me that there exist few communities where thought is taken so seriously. We spent hours arguing with each other—in the dining hall, in the campus plaza—over the finer points of predestination or the legitimacy of covenant theology.

Beliefs were real things that had life-or-death consequences. A person’s eternal fate depended on a willingness to accept or reject the truth—and we believed implicitly that logic was the means of determining those truths. Even when I began to harbor doubts…. I maintained an essential trust in the notion that reason would reveal to me the truth.

Today, no longer a believer, she has her doubts:

I no longer believe in God. I have not for some time. I now live with the rest of modernity in a world that is “disenchanted.” ... I live in a university town, a place that is populated by people who consider themselves called to a “life of the mind.” Yet my friends and I rarely talk about ideas or try to persuade one another of anything. It’s understood that people come to their convictions by elusive forces: some combination of hormones, evolutionary biases, and unconscious needs. Twice a week I attend a yoga class where I am instructed to “let go of the thinking mind.”

Physicist Alan Lightman is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for specializing in the intersection between science, philosophy, religion, and spirituality. He writes about a profound, transcendent experience in his life:

It was a moonless night, and quiet. The only sound I could hear was the soft churning of the engine of my boat. Far from the distracting lights of the mainland, the sky vibrated with stars. I turned off my running lights, and it got even darker. Then I turned off my engine. I lay down in the boat and looked up. A very dark night sky seen from the ocean is a mystical experience.

After a few minutes, my world had dissolved into that star-littered sky. The boat disappeared. My body disappeared. And I found myself falling into infinity. A feeling came over me I’d not experienced before. ... And the vast expanse of time — extending from the far distant past long before I was born and then into the far distant future long after I will die — seemed compressed to a dot. I felt connected not only to the stars but to all of nature, and to the entire cosmos. I felt a merging with something far larger than myself, a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute.

Lightman is in awe of nature but is unsure where that should lead him:

It is almost as if Nature in her glory wants us to believe in a heaven, something divine and immaterial beyond nature itself. In other words, Nature tempts us to believe in the supernatural. But then again, Nature has also given us big brains, allowing us to build microscopes and telescopes and ultimately, for some of us, to conclude that it’s all just atoms and molecules. It’s a paradox.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God offers unbelievers opportunities to consider the meaning of life, eternity, and their place in it. Some, like this professor will taste and then turn away (Heb. 6:4-10), while others will recognize the hand of Almighty God and bow before him (Ps. 8, Ps. 19).

Stephen Colbert, host of The Late Night Show, asked Ringo Starr, “What happens when you die?”

Starr replied, “I think we go to heaven.”

Colbert asked, “What’s heaven like?”

“Heaven’s great, but you don’t stay there very long; you just gotta get yourself together again and come deal with all that [stuff] you didn’t deal with last time you were here.”

Wellness preachers are wildly popular on Instagram. The New York Times calls them “quasi-spiritual influencers” and “Instavangelists” who have replaced the televangelist. They have online followers anywhere from 900,000 to 7.5 million (Gwyneth Paltrow). They are the “neo-religious leaders of our era.” Their online followers are composed largely of Millennials, and according to the Pew Research Center, 22% are not affiliated with any specific religion. The new belief system is “a blend of left-wing political orthodoxy, intersectional feminism, self-optimization, therapy, wellness, astrology and Dolly Parton.”

The article’s author, Leigh Stein, notes what is fundamentally missing:

Left-wing secular millennials may follow politics devoutly. But the women we’ve chosen as our moral leaders aren’t challenging us to ask the fundamental questions that leaders of faith have been wrestling with for thousands of years: Why are we here? Why do we suffer? What should we believe in beyond the limits of our puny selfhood?

Stein longs for

… role models my age who are not only righteous crusaders, but also humble and merciful, and that I’m not finding them where I live (online). ... There is a chasm between the vast scope of our needs and what influencers can provide. We’re looking for guidance in the wrong places. Maybe we actually need to go to something like church? ... I have hardly prayed to God since I was a teenager, but the pandemic has cracked open inside me a profound yearning for reverence, humility and awe. I have an overdraft on my outrage account. I want moral authority from someone who isn’t shilling a memoir or calling out her enemies on social media for clout.