I want to become a better thinker. I want to become a better writer. Those two hopes are what drive this blog, even if no one reads blogs anymore.
For a few years now I have been in regular conversation with various AI systems — ChatGPT and Claude, mostly — about the things that matter most to me: faith, doubt, institutional religion, Mormon culture and theology, the nature of God, the treatment of people on the margins of religious community. These conversations have been, unexpectedly, among the most intellectually serious of my life. The AI seems to know about me to some degree— my concerns, my commitments, my areas of resistance and fascination — because in a real sense it does. These essays emerge from that accumulated conversation, informed by it's training material.
When I bring a question to an AI and we work through it together, what comes back is shaped by what I brought, not just the learning models. The thinking is mostly collaborative. The AI contributes a knowledge base, a drafting capacity, and a quality of attention that is available at any hour without fatigue. I contribute the questions, the prior commitments, the editorial judgment about what is worth pursuing, and the willingness to be changed by what I find.
What AI gives me, practically speaking, is a first draft that already knows what I was trying to say — and that frees me to do the work I actually find meaningful, which is refinement, pushback, and discovery. Otherwise it takes me days just to write a ten minute talk. I love the second draft. I love editing. I love not starting from scratch. In this sense the AI functions as both thought amplifier and speechwriter. Neither role is new or dishonorable. The signal has to exist before it can be amplified. The thinking has to be genuine before a speechwriter can serve it.
The essays here are labeled "generated" because honesty requires it. But generated does not mean manufactured from nothing, or retrieved solely from a database, or dressed-up search results. It means that a real conversation happened, that I brought something to it, and that what emerged was more than I could have produced alone. That is, I think, a reasonable description of most good intellectual work.
The other hope behind this blog is something I have been calling the Invisible Church — a gospel-centered commons organized around questions rather than answers, designed to function as leaven within institutional religion rather than replacement for it. I say more about that below and there will be many more generated essays in the future. For now it is enough to say that the questions driving these essays are not academic exercises. They are the questions I carry into Sunday School, into conversations with doubting friends, into the quiet hours when the official answers feel insufficient.
This is a place for that insufficiency to be examined rather than suppressed. Come examine it with me.
A Note on Revision
These essays are not finished thoughts. They are thinking in progress, and I reserve the right to change my mind at any time when something becomes clearer. You may notice old posts quietly revised, or occasionally rewritten from the ground up. This is not inconsistency — it is the point. A mind that cannot be changed by what it encounters is not actually thinking. Consider any revision an honest signal that something landed. The fewer em-dashes you see the more you can tell it's been revised.
