I was honored to be invited to be one of the Episcopalians invited to this past week’s AI Future’s Conference that was held in Minnesota. It was a rich and ecumenical meeting, with papers delivered, working groups organized and lots of serendipitous conversation.
This piece by the Dean of Chapel at General Seminary in NYC provides both an overview and a suggestion of the most generative way people of faith can respond to rapid spread of all the various sorts of Artificial Intelligence: Sabbath.
[The] wealth produced by AI is already concentrating in the hands of a startlingly small cast of techno-elites. Many tech leaders are philanthropic, but their philanthropy does not erase the systems’ orientation toward growth, profit and shareholder return. In such a world, the problem is not only automation but the deeper vice of greed, which bends technological promise toward inequality rather than freedom.
The theological countervision is Sabbath. From Genesis onward, rest is not an afterthought, but the purpose of creation. Hebrews imagines an eternal Sabbath still to come, when rest is consummated in God. Leisure is not luxury. It is holy, eschatological and central to what it means to be human.
As the church continues to engage AI, we cannot stop at technical debates over bias, creativity or pastoral applications. We must also confront the deeper economic systems that shape these tools. Otherwise, our hopes for AI will always be hijacked by profit. At Faithful Futures, I was reminded that our most urgent task is not simply to guide AI, but to witness to another economy — the economy of Sabbath rest, worship and joy.
I’ve been thinking more and more about the necessity of the vision of Sabbath as the best response to the promise of increasing productivity and wealth extraction/generation that seems to be at the center of the AI revolution.
Maybe we need to bring back the Blue Laws?
I grew up with Blue Laws. The problem with bringing them back is imposing Law from the outside, rather than helping people open to Grace (and Sabbath) from the inside. God gives. Everything is gift. 😊
Bishop: Metaphorically, your calling upon the Sabbath skips a key step. Economics. Jesus was clear about values; why can’t the church be equally clear? Because it sold out to Caesar long ago. IF the church adopted the Marxian economics needed to counter the concentration of wealth, it (the church) could immediately rise to the inequality substantively. Think of Sanders and Mamdani. They’ve hit the nail on the proverbial head.
A Sunday Sabbath does not work well in a multi faith society, though I do miss the customer, I understand why it stopped was not just a retail issue, but a multi faith issue. Finding a better way would be worth the effort.