Knowing Versus Querying

The winter light in the café slanted across polished oak tables, illuminating half-drunk cappuccinos and the occasional smudge of children’s fingerprints on the window-panes. One man, lost in his own sacrament of earbuds and latte foam, lifted his wrist to activate a voice assistant. “Hey Siri,” he whispered, “what does God want me to do about my marriage?” The device chirped, thought for a beat, and then breathed out a string of verses from Ephesians, several bullet-point tips on communication, and a link to a Christian counseling blog. He nodded as if he had just received absolution, then closed his eyes in brief repose. Was that a prayer, or merely the outsourcing of discernment? In that tiny exchange, the tectonic plates of knowledge—covenantal wisdom on one side, algorithmic answer-delivery on the other—shifted audibly beneath our feet.

Christians have always sought counsel beyond the soundboard of their own thoughts. They have consulted prophets, confessors, psalters, dusty concordances, and late-night radio preachers who thundered across the AM dial. Yet something novel marks this moment: the speed, certainty, and impersonality of the response. A question that once lingered in the silence of prayer now boomerangs back as an instant, grammatically immaculate paragraph, delivered by a machine that cannot itself be in covenant with anyone. And so a deeper, older question surfaces: What does the Bible mean when it speaks of “knowing,” and how does that kind of knowing square—or fail to square—with the world of predictive algorithms?

From Data to Doxology

To peel back the layers of that question, we must begin in Eden. Genesis frames “knowledge” not as a mental ledger but as a posture of intimacy. “Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived,” the narrator tells us, folding procreation and covenant into a single Hebrew verb—yadaʿ.¹ That same verb surfaces when the LORD promises that Israel shall “know” Him, not merely as a distant deity but as the covenant partner who redeems them from slavery.² In the New Testament, Jesus defines eternal life not as a destination but as a relationship: “that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.”³ The Greek ginōskō echoes its Hebrew parents. Knowing, in Scripture, is a lived encounter laced with fidelity and affection.

Contrast that living knowledge with the way a large language model operates. The model devours oceans of text, transforms them into statistical patterns, and predicts which word is likely to follow the last. It can draft a sonnet about Psalm 23, outline Barth’s Kirchliche Dogmatik, or generate a wedding homily that quotes Bonhoeffer astutely. Yet the model cannot stand under the truth it utters; it cannot pledge its life, or repent, or love. Its “knowledge” is a haze of probabilistic proximity. Augustine glimpsed precisely this difference when he implored his congregation, crede ut intellegas—“believe so that you may understand.”⁴ Knowledge, for the bishop of Hippo, is birthed in fidelity, not simply fetched from a shelf. A century later, Anselm of Canterbury echoed Augustine’s insight in the opening of the Proslogion, arguing that faith seeks understanding because love longs to behold its beloved more clearly.⁵

In a digital age, such covenantal epistemology feels almost quaint. We pride ourselves on storing the world’s knowledge in our pockets, available at the whisper of a wake-word. Yet that very convenience tempts us to collapse wonder into information. The difference, though slender at first glance, becomes catastrophic in practice. Revelation is God’s self-gift; data is the sediment of past speech. The two can overlap, but they are never identical. Confusing them, the desert fathers warned, breeds presumption—the sin of assuming God’s mysteries can be pried open like an oyster with the right tool.⁶

Knowledge After the Fall

The serpent in Eden understood the allure of possession. With a few silky sentences he reframed knowledge as a commodity: “In the day you eat of it… you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”⁷ Autonomy would be just a bite away. No need to walk with the LORD in the cool of the day, no need to inquire or wait; wisdom would reside under their own skin, portable and self-authorizing. Modern epistemology, born of Enlightenment ambitions, still hums this serpent song. Descartes sought indubitable foundations. Kant quarantined the noumenal realm behind critical reason. Contemporary engineers encode human intuition into silicon. The danger is not reason per se—reason is God’s gift—but reason severed from trust, knowledge divorced from covenant.

Prophetic Israel never forgot that divorce. Jeremiah laments a generation skilled in deceit, “for they are foolish; they do not know me.”⁸ Here ignorance is not a lack of facts but a breach of loyalty. Paul, too, prays for the Colossians to be “filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom,” drenching cognitive insight in the Spirit’s animating presence.⁹ To know God truly is to participate in His life; anything less remains thoughtful but partial, clever but unconverted.

Artificial intelligence introduces a fresh twist to autonomy’s illusion. Philosopher Andrew Feenberg names the seduction “techno-determinism”: the notion that technical mastery will tame complexity, maybe even mortality.¹⁰ When a model predicts breast-cancer recurrence with uncanny accuracy or writes robust code in thirteen seconds, we are tempted to treat it as an oracle. But biblical oracles, whether at Delphi or in Saul’s clandestine visit to Endor, always extract payment. They demand allegiance, sacrifice, or the sublimation of discernment to a foreign power. Today’s oracles—cloud-hosted, subscription-based—demand our data and, increasingly, our habits of trust.

A Chorus of Witnesses

Church history offers a counter-chorus. Athanasius, writing in the throes of fourth-century Christological controversy, argued that the Logos assumed flesh so that humans might “learn” God, not through syllogism but by beholding the incarnate life.¹¹ Gregory of Nyssa, entranced by the infinity of divine beauty, insisted that the soul ascends from glory to glory, always knowing, never exhausting.¹² Thomas Aquinas later cautioned that beatific vision requires both cognitio—conceptual sight—and connexus—the union of love which no intellect alone can forge.¹³ John Calvin, hammering the human condition into prose as clear as Geneva water, dubbed Scripture “spectacles” that correct our blindness, yet reminded readers that only the Spirit can “seal” the vision on the tablet of the heart.¹⁴

If the modern West trimmed these witnesses into a footnote, Josef Pieper sounded the alarm. Technocratic culture, he argued, suffers from acedia, a sorrow at the very idea of spiritual depth, and thus loses the capacity for leisure—that contemplative openness in which real knowledge flowers.¹⁵ Into that impoverished terrain strides AI, promising an epistemic plenitude built on code. The promise is seductive precisely because it mimics omniscience while bypassing surrender. But the church knows another way, one in which surrender is not the enemy of wisdom but its midwife.

The Algorithmic Self

The psychologist Sherry Turkle spent decades interviewing people about their digital lives. She discovered that the more our devices offer to manage and narrate our emotions, the more we risk ceding the interior life to machines.¹⁶ The algorithmic self is quantified, optimized, perpetually nudged—but seldom known in the biblical sense. Attention, Simone Weil once wrote, “is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”¹⁷ Algorithms monetize that generosity, turning every click into a data-point. We become users, yes, but also unpaid content-creators in someone else’s liturgy of profit. The result, even for devout believers, is a slow habituation to fast counsel, a shrinking of the spacious chambers where patience once waited on revelation.

When a Sunday-school teacher encourages children to “Google that verse,” she does so with good intent. She wants them to find Scripture quickly. But habits have trajectories. Over time the children may internalize that the locus of authority is not the living Word mediated through prayerful wrestling but the top search result. The antidote is not technophobia but intentional liturgy: rhythms that retrain desire to dwell, to ponder, to be still and know.

Discerning the Spirits

The elder John—writing to communities rattled by proto-Gnostic speculations—exhorted his flock, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God.”¹⁸ The line reads like a first-century filter for misinformation. In an algorithmic age, the exhortation regains urgency. Testing an AI’s spirit may involve asking whether the output confesses Jesus as Lord, whether it resonates with the canon’s grand arc, whether it bears fruit in love, joy, peace, and whether the community of saints, living and dead, finds it trustworthy. When Egypt’s gold carried by the Israelites is melted into a tabernacle, it becomes an instrument of worship. When shaped into a calf, it becomes a parody of presence. The difference is orientation, not material.

The clatter of dishes in a parish hall after worship may seem worlds away from silicon circuitry, yet such ordinary fellowship is precisely where an alternative imagination is forged. What the café encounter above exposed—the subtle slide from covenantal attentiveness to algorithmic outsourcing—can be resisted only by patterns of life that sink deeper roots than speed or novelty. The church, thankfully, has a vast archive of such patterns. In what follows, we linger over three of them—lectio-centric tech use, confessional transparency, and covenantal co-learning—not as nostalgic curiosities but as living habits capable of training twenty-first-century disciples for holy knowing.

Lectio-Centric Tech Use

In Kentucky, you can find the Abbey of Gethsemani, the Trappist community once home to Thomas Merton. At vigils, the monks chant psalms that echoed off limestone walls hand-quarried by brothers long dead. After each vigil, the monks practice lectio divina in choir stalls. I have to admit that I have not consistently done that. If I’m honest, I too often practice lectio Google-ina.

The classical four stages of lectio—reading, ruminating, responding, resting—were first systematized by the twelfth-century Carthusian Guigo II.¹⁹ Guigo likened them to a ladder on which the monk’s heart climbs toward heaven: reading lays the foot on the first rung, meditation pulls upward, prayer seeks God’s face, and contemplation rests in the embrace found. The genius of the method is its slowness. A single verse may occupy an hour. The goal is not extraction of fact but transfiguration of the reader.

Transposed into the digital age, lectio-centric tech use erects a fence not around technology but around desire. A preacher might begin sermon preparation by hand-copying Luke 15 into a notebook, reading it aloud until certain phrases begin to shimmer. Only after that embodied wrestling does she open software—perhaps even an AI tool—to chase lexical nuances, patristic parallels, or contemporary applications. The order matters. When prayer precedes prompting, the heart remains interlocutor, not auditor. It is the difference between Jacob wrestling a stranger all night and Esau scrolling news headlines at dawn.

Communities can buttress this rhythm with shared practices. At St Stephen’s Episcopal in Houston, the Wednesday Bible study observes a “twenty-minute silence” before conversation begins. Phones stay face-down; a timer sits on the table. When the bell chimes, discussion starts, and only then may someone consult a digital resource. The rule feels monastic, yet parishioners testify that even tech-savvy teenagers begin to crave that thick quiet. The practice echoes chapter 48 of the Rule of Benedict: “Idleness is the enemy of the soul; therefore, the brothers… should have specified periods for manual labor as well as for holy reading.”²⁰ Benedict was no Luddite—he simply knew that souls require spaciousness.

Confessional Transparency

If lectio guards desire, confessional transparency guards truthfulness. Martin Luther—himself a master of ink-and-press technology—filled his German Bible with marginal citations. He wanted readers to see the scaffolding beneath the edifice. In a similar spirit, nineteenth-century Charles Spurgeon marked borrowed anecdotes with phrases like “It has been well said,” signaling that the pulpit is not the place for coy appropriation.

Generative AI raises the ethical stakes. A pastor could paste sermon notes into a model, request a punchier illustration, and receive a polished paragraph. Congregations, none the wiser, might assume it sprang from their shepherd’s prayer closet. But what happens to trust when a teenage congregant recognizes the phrasing from an online forum—or worse, when the model hallucinates statistics that later prove false? Paul’s words to the Corinthians resonate: “We have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways… by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves.”²¹ Openness is not optional; it is apostolic.

Practically, confessional transparency can take humble forms. The preacher might add a footnote in the printed bulletin: “Portions of this sermon’s historical background were generated with assistance from a large-language model; all material has been verified against primary sources.” The youth director who uses ChatGPT to craft small-group questions can post the raw prompt and output on the church intranet, inviting comment. Such gestures demystify technology, teach critical literacy, and remind the community that all authority is mediated—and therefore accountable.

Some worry that disclosure will erode pastoral gravitas. Yet gravitas in Scripture is never about omniscience. Moses stuttered; Jeremiah wept; even Jesus asked questions he surely knew the answers to, drawing disciples into dialogue. Gravitas arises from integrity and presence, not from rhetorical polish. When leaders model honest dependence on tools—and honest limits of those tools—they shepherd souls into the spacious freedom of truth.

Covenantal Co-Learning

If lectio centers desire and transparency secures integrity, covenantal co-learning sustains humility. Knowledge in Scripture is never hoarded; it is sung, shared, argued over, broken like bread. After the resurrection, Jesus opened the Scriptures in community on the road to Emmaus, not in a private tutorial. Likewise, the rabbinic tradition thrived on havruta—paired debate where students sharpened each other “as iron sharpens iron.”²²

Digital culture tugs toward solitary consumption. Feeds personalize content until each of us inhabits a filter bubble. AI compounds the tendency: ask a theological question, and the answer appears in a bespoke paragraph tailored to your prompt history. The risk is epistemic narcissism—truth reduced to whatever resonates with my curated preferences. Covenantal co-learning counters by staging theology as a communal song.

A living model of such shared inquiry emerged at Baylor University in May 2025, when Truett Seminary partnered with the School of Engineering and Computer Science to host a one-day event titled “AI and the Church.” More than two hundred pastors, seminarians, and technologists gathered in a hall normally reserved for engineering symposia; the organizers placed round tables rather than lecture rows to encourage conversation. After a plenary on large-language-model ethics, participants were divided into mixed cohorts of clergy and computer-science majors and asked to feed the same theological prompt—“Explain the meaning of the imago Dei for modern work life”—into three different AI systems. Within minutes the room crackled with debate. One model reduced the doctrine to generic self-esteem; another drifted into panentheism; the third offered a serviceable but bloodless paraphrase of Genesis 1. Groups compared outputs with printed excerpts from Irenaeus and Calvin, marked divergences in the margins, and then tested each draft against the Nicene Creed projected on a screen beside them. A student later remarked that the exercise felt “like apologetics meets code review.” In that crucible of dialogue, algorithms became conversation starters, not doctrinal arbiters, and the body of Christ—not the software—rendered the final judgment on truth.²³

More broadly, co-learning collapses generational hierarchies. Retired saints versed in Barth but baffled by keyboards partner with digital-native seventh graders who can coax nuance from a model but need guidance on creedal boundaries. Paul’s metaphor of the body becomes flesh again: “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you.’”²³ When a thirteen-year-old explains token probability to a septuagenarian theologian, while the elder traces Psalm 23 through patristic homilies, the Spirit gladdens at such choreography.

Toward a Sacramental Epistemology

All these habits—lectio, transparency, co-learning—prepare the heart for the deeper mystery of sacrament. The Eucharist is, among other things, a school of knowledge. We approach, hands open, receiving what we cannot engineer. We do not ingest nutritional data; we ingest the grace of the risen Christ. “Taste and see that the LORD is good,” the psalmist exults, wedding sensorium to insight.²⁴ The verb for “taste” here, ṭaʿam, appears elsewhere when Jonathan samples honey and his “eyes brighten.” Revelation sweetens perception.

Alexander Schmemann famously argued that the sacrament reveals the world as pan-sacramental, charged with God’s presence, yes, but also demanding reciprocating gratitude.²⁵ In that eucharistic light, artificial intelligence becomes neither idol nor enemy but raw material to be lifted in thanksgiving and disciplined by prayer. Bread and wine begin as ordinary gifts—grain ground, grapes crushed, the stuff of labor and culture. They are not despised; they are offered, blessed, broken, and shared. Imagine pastors processing to the altar with a flash drive alongside the bread, symbolically presenting the week’s code, queries, and datasets to be consecrated—submitted to Christ’s lordship and the Spirit’s fire. The gesture might feel strange at first, but would it not proclaim that all artifacts of human creativity cry out for redemption?

Maximus the Confessor perceived the cosmos as a liturgy in which material realities become “logos-bearers,” mediating divine wisdom.²⁶ An algorithm, when surrendered, can serve as such a mediator: translating Scripture into minority languages, identifying patterns of injustice hidden in terabytes of urban data, assisting the visually impaired with audio homilies in real time. The sacramental imagination does not fear technology; it baptizes it.

The Way of Wonder

We come, then, to the threshold of mystery. There are words often attributed—though not definitively sourced—to G. K. Chesterton: “The world will never lack for wonders; only for wonder.”²⁷ The line names the disease against which covenantal epistemology inoculates. Algorithms dazzle, yes, but they can also deaden. They offer fireworks without the hush that follows. The church’s vocation is to steward that hush—to cultivate the reverent astonishment in which wisdom germinates.

Habakkuk foresaw a day when “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.”²⁸ Such knowledge will not be downloaded; it will be beheld. Until that day, the Spirit invites us into smaller enactments of the promise: a parish hall where triads parse AI outputs by lamplight; a study carrel where a seminarian copies Romans by hand before consulting commentaries; a sanctuary where bread and bytes alike are offered on the altar of gratitude. In those spaces, the church rehearses for the endless Sabbath when “we shall know fully, even as we are fully known.”²⁹

And so the story circles back to the man in the café. I sometimes wonder what might have happened if, after Siri spoke, he had lifted his gaze to find another believer ready to listen, pray, and wrestle Scripture together. Perhaps the answer would have come more slowly, perhaps with fewer bullet points—but perhaps it would have tasted like covenant, like bread broken among friends. Such slowness, such sharing, is not inefficiency; it is fidelity. It is the kind of knowledge Eden lost and Christ now restores, one patient conversation at a time.

Even the most elegant habits—lectio, transparency, co-learning—occasionally buckle under the brute weight of habit itself. One slips back into quick searches, sermon deadlines loom, and the hum of servers feels nearer than the whisper of the Spirit. Renewal, therefore, cannot be a one-time resolution; it must become a rhythm of repentance and re-alignment. Paul captures that rhythm in a single imperative: “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”³⁰ The verb, metamorphousthe, pulses with ongoing motion. Minds formed by covenantal knowing are never static; they widen like circles rippling from a stone dropped in still water until they touch the edges of the world.

The Emmaus Template

Luke tells of two disciples trudging home, their hopes of messiahship crucified on a Roman stake. A stranger joins them, listens to their sorrow, and then—beginning with Moses and all the prophets—opens the Scriptures. Hearts kindle. Eyes, at last, recognize. Bread breaks. The stranger vanishes. And the disciples? They hurry back to Jerusalem, breathless with news.³¹ Emmaus gives the church a travelling liturgy: listening, opening, breaking, sending.

In a culture where questions ping servers more readily than they confide in fellow travelers, the Emmaus rhythm offers a humane corrective. Listening comes first. Before any answer is generated, pain is heard. Pastors who meet parishioners in crisis might imitate Christ’s patient inquiry—“What things?”—even when they know the story already. Opening follows: Scripture is unveiled, but notice, in community, not in solitude. Only then does breaking occur—bread shared, bodies nourished, an enacted knowledge beyond propositional content. Finally, sending: theological insight spills into mission.

When chatbots become pastoral triage, the risk is that the first and third movements—listening and breaking—evaporate. Advice may be biblically accurate, yet covenantally impoverished. Congregations that adopt the Emmaus template, whether in digital small-groups or in brick-and-mortar sanctuaries, re-embed learning in friendship and sacrament.

Re-Enchanting the Ordinary

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from an underground seminary that met in farmhouses and fishing huts, insisted that Scripture must be read “against ourselves,” lest we bend revelation into a mirror of our own desires.³² Algorithms, optimized for user satisfaction, rarely offend. They are engineered to please, to conform output to input. But the God who confronted Jonah under a withered vine or Peter beside Galilean coals often disrupts. Thus a renewed epistemology must cultivate what Charles Taylor calls “enchanted” attention—the capacity to receive the ordinary as charged with unpredictable grace.³³

Maybe you could encourage your congregation to practice “technology sabbath” on the first Sunday of each month. Members leave phones in a basket by the entrance, walk to the service reading Psalm 19 aloud, and afterwards annotate their printed bulletins with ways the sermon unsettled them. Later, they photograph those annotations and upload them to a shared digital archive. By juxtaposing enforced slowness with later sharing, they hold technology in tension—servant, not sovereign.

Such rituals may appear quaint, yet they echo a deeper theological logic: creation itself is sacramental, mediating God’s glory to those who linger.³⁴ The practice re-enchants the ordinary—hillside, breath, neighbor’s voice—so that knowledge is once more a doorway to adoration, not merely a ladder to mastery.

Discerning Power and Principalities

No discussion of AI can omit the question of power. Data is not neutral; it is mined, labeled, magnetized. Early Christian writers spoke of “principalities and powers,” invisible forces that twist structures toward idolatry.³⁵ Today, algorithmic opacity can perpetuate racial bias in credit scoring, manipulate political sentiment, or silence minority voices through design choices buried in code. To “know” in a covenantal key is therefore also to unveil distorted knowledge regimes.

The church has precedents. Basil of Caesarea built hospitals when imperial economics neglected the poor. John Wesley urged Methodists to boycott goods produced by slave labour. Translating that witness, a city-centre parish in Nairobi now offers “Data Justice Catechesis.” Members study biblical prophets alongside investigative reports on algorithmic bias, then lobby local telecoms to publicize how customer data is sold. The curriculum weds Amos’s cry—“let justice roll down like waters”³⁶—to twenty-first-century analytics.

Pastors need not become programmers, but they must become interpreters of power. When parishioners praise an AI-driven parenting app, shepherds might ask: Whose data trains this model? Who profits? If its counsel conflicts with scriptural discernment, which authority stands? Such questions move knowledge from abstraction to discipleship.

Hope Beyond the Algorithm

All critique rings hollow without hope. The New Testament frames hope not as naïve optimism but as the “anchor of the soul,” tethered to Christ’s risen life.³⁷ Anchored disciples may engage technology robustly precisely because their identity does not depend on its verdicts.

I heard about a teenager named Lucia who battled anxiety, amplified by social media metrics—likes, views, streaks. During a class, she asked whether God’s opinion was just another metric. The question silenced the room. Then she opened Psalm 139, reading of a God who “searches and knows” before any algorithm could infer. Lucia later created an art project layering her social-media archive beneath hand-written verses, then blacking out every data point except the psalmist’s refrain: I am fearfully and wonderfully made.³⁸ The exhibit toured local schools as a witness that one can inhabit digital space without surrendering self.

Hope, in that sense, is prophetic imagination. It refuses both dystopian surrender and utopian hype, choosing instead what biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann calls “the hard, prophetic task of nurturing, nourishing, and evoking a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness of the dominant culture.”³⁹ It is the consciousness of covenant, of Sinai murmuring across silicon.

An Open-Ended Benediction

We end, not with closure but with invitation. The mind renewed in Christ is spacious, playful, and resilient. It gathers truth wherever truth may be found yet measures every fragment against the Word made flesh. It prizes leisure not as laziness but as the sabbath soil in which contemplation grows. It names distortions of power yet expects beauty to break through algorithms like lilies pushing through asphalt.

Perhaps the next time you reach for your phone in search of counsel, you might pause. Let the query linger. Whisper a prayer. Open a window. Ask a friend to walk and argue Scripture aloud. Then, if needed, return to the device—now as a humbled tool, never as an enthroned oracle. In that turning, covenantal knowledge is renewed, one choice at a time, until the day when “the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea,”⁴⁰ and every query is swallowed up in face-to-face communion.

1. Genesis 4:1 (NRSV).

2. Jeremiah 31:34 (NIV).

3. John 17:3 (NASB).

4. Augustine, Sermon 43.7, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1991), 498.

5. Anselm, Proslogion 1, in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 85.

6. Apophthegmata Patrum, Alphabetical Collection, “Abba Poemen 63.”

7. Genesis 3:5 (ESV).

8. Jeremiah 4:22 (NRSV).

9. Colossians 1:9 (NIV).

10. Andrew Feenberg, Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 14–15.

11. Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54, trans. John Behr (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), 104.

12. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses II.225, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 115.

13. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 12, a. 6–13.

14. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.5.14, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960), 70.

15. Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press, 1998), 82.

16. Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin, 2015), 12–15.

17. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge, 1999), 117.

18. 1 John 4:1 (NIV).

19. Guigo II, Scala Claustralium (“The Ladder of Monks”), trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1981), 67–71.

20. Rule of St Benedict 48.1, in RB 1980: The Rule of St Benedict in Latin and English with Notes, ed. Timothy Fry (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1981), 270.

21. 2 Corinthians 4:2 (ESV).

22. Babylonian Talmud, Taʿanit 7a.

23. 1 Corinthians 12:21 (NRSV).

24. Psalm 34:8 (NIV).

25. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 30–31.

26. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 7.23, in On Difficulties in the Church Fathers, trans. Nicholas Constas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 1:119.

27. Kevin Belmonte, Defiant Joy: The Remarkable Life and Impact of G. K. Chesterton (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011), 89.

28. Habakkuk 2:14.

29. 1 Corinthians 13:12 (NIV).

30. Romans 12:2 (NRSV).

31. Luke 24:13–35.

32. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, trans. John W. Doberstein (New York: Harper & Row, 1954), 65.

33. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 73–78.

34. Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.18.5.

35. Ephesians 6:12 (NIV).

36. Amos 5:24 (NRSV).

37. Hebrews 6:19 (NRSV).

38. Psalm 139:14 (NRSV).

39. Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), xii.

40. Habakkuk 2:14.