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August 5, 2026

Hello, fellow wayfarers … How you can protect yourself from brain rot—and why it matters to the rest of us … Why Pete Wehner thinks The Odyssey shows us how far beyond paganism we’ve gone … What a reader wants to know about the best Johnny Cash prison concert … How Rainn Wilson from The Office helped me think about spirituality—even when we disagreed … A Tar Heel Desert Island Bookshelf … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.

How to Stop Technology from Rotting Your Brain

Nearly 20 years ago, the Pixar animated movie Wall-E pictured a future in which human beings lay in floating chairs, eating and consuming entertainment, their bodies atrophying from lack of use, while robots did everything for them. Some say we are now entering that future with the onset of artificial intelligence, not with our muscles but with our brains. That’s why I was fascinated to read an essay by my friend David Brooks in The Atlantic about who will thrive—and who won’t—in the AI era.

David said he rejects the utopian picture of the new tech age as pictured by some of the industry’s boosters, such as Elon Musk—a vision that, to me, sounds something like what Communist demagogues described as a utopia where laborers could put in a couple hours and then spend the rest of the day painting or writing poems. In fact, David argued, AI shortcuts to intellectual labor—whether for students or accountants or law firms—have ultimately sped up the harried pace of their lives. And what we don’t realize is what it costs: The brainpower that AI tools supposedly save for other things is surrendered, not conserved.

We’ve already had a test drive with how this works on our brains, David told me, with the last 15 years or so of GPS helping us navigate where we drive. Imagine if all that went away. How many of us would be able to use an actual map? Our brains have adapted, and most of us have lost that skill set. In the case of GPS, that’s probably a good trade. But David identifies study after study showing that people who use AI tools the way they’re often used will lose the ability to think clearly and creatively.

David is not a Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine sort who sees the technology itself as dystopian or even demonic. In fact, he uses a generative AI chatbot (Claude) as a kind of librarian recommending additional sources for him to read on a subject. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to him. As much as I’ve warned about the costs of not thinking ahead of time about the ethics of an AI era, I’m almost just as worried about the shallow and self-defeating tactics of some who would say they agree with me on that.

In fact, while some institutions in education, media, or ministry seem to ignore questions about AI altogether, with an almost-willed ignorance of the massive changes afoot, others seem intent on reassembling an intellectual equivalent of the "bootleggers and Baptists" phenomenon.

"Bootleggers and Baptists" refers to the almost-symbiotic relationship up to and after Prohibition between moral activists who wanted to stop the social deterioration that comes with liquor, and criminal syndicates that wanted to keep their corner on black-market sales. You can see this every once in a while when, for instance, a move to regulate casinos comes from two directions: anti-gambling religious conservatives, who don’t want the vice, and online betting-app developers, who don’t want the competition.

I remember seeing commercials years ago for some initiative to regulate the commercial truck-driving industry. The ad showed a mother watching 18-wheel trucks on either side of her on the highway, each veering close to her car while she gripped the wheel in terror. Turns out the ads were sponsored by the railroad industry.

If what we have to say about AI stems from that sort of motivation—protection for people’s jobs combined with a snobby dismissal that any machine could ever manage accounts payable or average end-of-semester grades or check for typos or whatever as well as we could—our words will not only fail to stop the reckless pull to AI slop; they will accelerate it.

The stakes are high for all of us as a society. David warns about what he calls a "cognitive underclass." The kinds of people who fall into that underclass will be those for whom AI makes writing, reading, and thinking easier in the short term. Long-term, he shows, those who use AI tools this way will surrender the very abilities they are trying to help.

The stakes are also high for the church. Most people don’t write for a living, but almost everyone does creative work of some kind. Maybe you journal to help your prayer life. Maybe you do personal Bible study. Maybe you teach children at your church or incarcerated people in a prison ministry or single moms in an afterschool program. Those gifts are not just about you. The rest of us need you to be able to do them.

The apostle Paul commanded us to present our bodies as "a living sacrifice" and then immediately called us to resist conformity to the age through "the renewal of your mind" (Rom. 12:1–2, ESV throughout). Mind here refers not merely to the intellect, although it does include that, but also to the imagination, intuition, affections, and attention. Paul made clear that this is not simply an individual admonition. He pivoted to a discussion of how each person—with all his or her gifts and capacities—is meant to serve the rest of the body since we, with differing gifts, are nonetheless "members one of another" (v. 5).

If you outsource your thinking to a machine—or if you atrophy gifts meant to be sharpened in practice and difficulty—you are not simply limiting your potential. You are neglecting something intended to build up in ways you do not now know and cannot even imagine.

That need for stewardship requires forcing yourself into some discomfort. If you sit down to study your Bible and you jump when you hear your phone buzz, just recognize how you are responding and verbalize it: "Lord, I do not want to read the Bible. I want to check my phone. Will you help me?" When you’re reading that text and you don’t understand how it applies to you, stop—before you search for an answer—and allow its perplexity to sit with you for a while. Look for patterns, for ways you’ve encountered similar mysteries before.

To sit with perplexity requires a strange combination of attention and lack of attention. It’s often not until someone asks me a question that I discover what I think. When I sit down and ask myself generally, "What do I think about this?" the managerial mind can take over. I become conscious of arranging, evaluating, anticipating objections, or trying to produce an answer. But when I answer someone’s particular question, part of my mind is occupied with responding. My attention moves outward toward the text, person, or problem.

One part of my brain has something to do, which allows me to bypass what C. S. Lewis called "watchful dragons." I am not very conscious of the fact that I am answering a question. I simply am. Then, afterward, I can hear what I have said and think, Ah. So that is what I think.

A certain kind of thinking requires a temporary loss of mastery. Momentary perplexity—say of an unexpected question or a previously unimagined viewpoint—pulls something out of us in a new way. This makes me think of Jesus telling his disciples that, when they are brought before authorities or expelled from their synagogues, they should not prepare their defense in advance, because the Spirit will give them words to say "in that hour" (Mark 13:11).

That does not mean the answer comes from nowhere. Jesus also repeatedly says, "Have you not read …?" calling forth knowledge of the Old Testament that his hearers had learned before. The answer a Christian gives "in that hour" draws upon something already present. God has made us with different gifts, interests, and abilities, to be sure, but that response is always somehow present in every one of us.

Technology gives us vast tools, part of human ingenuity that images God by harnessing creation. And as the Scripture tells us, "Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving" (1 Tim. 4:4). With technology, as with almost anything else, regulations of "Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch" can leave us with a legalism and asceticism that "are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh" (Col. 2:21, 23).

Yet technology will make it easier and easier for you to stop thinking, to stop paying attention, to stop the renewal of your mind. Part of what it means to love is to conserve your ability to think, feel, and create. That requires paying attention to where the present age is attempting to pull you, and to map out another, harder way.

Your brain does not belong to you. It was bought with a price. Guard that trust.

Odysseus Shows Us That Nietzsche Was Right (About At Least One Thing)

My friend Peter Wehner has an amazing essay on Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey up at The Atlantic. Many have pointed out the ways the film carries certain Christian assumptions (or their post-Christian residue)—such as the introspective conscience and a nontransactional sense of mercy and forgiveness that would be foreign to the Greek viewpoint of epic heroes. But Pete moves deeper and comes to a fascinating conclusion.

Several of us speak of the present moment as Nietzschean—meaning it has a kind of nihilism that replaces mercy, humility, love, and grace with the will to power. Over a decade ago, I critiqued a movement now mainstream among us as reflecting the sexual ethics "of a Bronze Age warlord." But Pete points out that the current moment goes well beyond Nietzsche.

Speaking of the Christian virtues, he writes,

Those virtues are now under assault. Movements and voices in our own country hold them in open contempt, treat mercy as weakness, and feed on vengeance and grievance. Theirs is a Nietzschean ethic, a "master morality," the code of the strong that Christianity overthrew when it took the side of the slave, the stranger, and the destitute.

But Nietzsche was at least honest about the cost of the revolution he heralded. With God dead, he warned, the morality built on God might collapse as well, and into the gap meaninglessness, fanaticism, and substitute faiths could rush in. Nietzsche declared, with some sorrow, the death of God. Many of his heirs gleefully practice their cruelty in God’s name.

This is a very perceptive point—and a word of warning. A pre-Christian morality was brutal. A post-Christian one may be far worse. As the song says, "There’s nothing cold as ashes / After the fire is gone."

A Reader Question About the Best Johnny Cash Prison Concert

Ben Anderson, a listener to the podcast, wrote in to say he had a "question of great importance." He asks, "Johnny Cash, Live at Folsom Prison or Live at San Quentin, and why?"

Ben, I love them both, but I haven’t known which I thought was better until you asked (a great illustration of what I write about above). Here’s what I’d say: Both are great concerts and albums. The setlists on both are perfect, and the performances are too. The difference is intangible, more of vibe than substance.

San Quentin feels more defiant, not just in Cash’s demeanor but also in the crowd’s response. Hearing it feels like hearing John the Baptist in Herod’s prison. The Folsom concert, on the other hand, feels a bit more subdued and haunted, more like the prison guard in Philippi crying out, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" (Acts 16:30). Sorrow and anger are in both, but I think Folsom has more of the former and San Quentin more of the latter. For that reason, I’d give the edge to Folsom.

But if you’re asking me which of the two venues I think is more important, I’d give the edge to San Quentin. That’s because of a concert Cash gave there on New Year’s Day in 1958.

Over a decade later on The Johnny Cash Show, Cash hosted singer-songwriter Merle Haggard, who mentioned, "The first time I ever saw you perform, it was at San Quentin." Cash said, "I don’t remember you being in that show, Merle." Haggard responded: "I was in the audience, Johnny."

Haggard had "turned 21 in prison," as he later sang, though he was not "doing life without parole" but doing 15 years on a burglary charge. Looking back, Haggard noted the defiance we would see later in the San Quentin album, but he framed it differently. He said the defiance was Cash’s way of identifying himself with the prisoners. It was "because he loved us," Haggard reflected. "When he walked away, everyone in that place had become a Johnny Cash fan."