My own pilgrimage began with the quiet unraveling of an inherited, rigid religious framework. Stepping away from fundamentalist certainty didn’t cost me my faith in God; instead, it opened the door to the rich, relational world of the Franciscan tradition. In a cultural moment where traditional religion often retreats into defensiveness, I write from an open, contemplative vantage point—one where doubt is not the enemy of faith, but the doorway to an authentic encounter with an unfinished, evolving creation.

My second major reckoning came with the sudden arrival of generative intelligence, which shattered my assumption that machines would forever remain passive, deterministic calculators. Having spent decades inside the infrastructure of the digital revolution—from financial markets as a Wall Street stockbroker to founding and leading an internet development firm at the dawn of the commercial web—I approach AI with a builder’s clarity rather than naive panic. I view machine cognition not as an alien threat, but as the culmination of an ancient human impulse to externalize the mind.

Bringing deep history and cognitive philosophy into dialogue with machine learning forms the core of my current writing and thought.

Alignment is not a technical problem. Figuring out how to train a large language model is far less of a challenge than deciding what that training should actually entail—and whose values it will reflect. Left to itself, unguided calculation defaults to our oldest evolutionary habits: total control, frictionless extraction, and efficiency prioritized over the human spirit.

The real contest is architectural and moral. It requires engaging the leading edge of policy and design with a steady conviction: that computational optimization must be deliberately subordinated to the living, relational needs of human dignity, character, and community.

Ideas mean little if they are not lived in particular places with particular people. Having fought my way out of fundamentalism, I watched how easy it is for deconstruction to end in a quiet, lonely drift away from community. But I knew faith couldn't survive in a vacuum. I have remained deeply committed to local church life, finding a home in a progressive Methodist congregation where the daily, messy friction of growing alongside others keeps faith honest, relational, and grounded.

My life outside the screen is anchored in Raleigh, North Carolina, alongside Judy, my wife of nearly 50 years, and four of our soon-to-be seven grandkids. Whether I am playing guitar, turning bowls on a lathe, riding my bike through the state forest, or getting locked in a standoff of wills with our four-year-old grandson, these earthly rhythms keep me from getting lost in the land of ideas.