The Abbey of Misrule

Recently, in response to some of my own writing on the topic, Andrew Caspersen, a reader of the Abbey, sent me an article he had written on how Christians should respond to AI. This is a topic I struggle with all the time, and part of the struggle is how to articulate the challenge in Christian terms. I thought Andrew’s piece did this so well that I invited him to publish it here. I would love to hear the thoughts and responses of other readers. Please do leave your comments below.

Suddenly, everybody wants to talk about what it means to be human. As I predicted in Against The Machine, the rise of AI is turbo-charging this debate, and in the last few weeks the legacy media seem to have woken up to it. Out of nowhere, seemingly, I am now getting requests from big mainstream news organisations, papers and magazines, to talk about the spiritual and ethical implications of AI.

Last year, somewhat to my surprise, I was approached by a company which runs international Christian pilgrimages. They had come across my writing here about pilgrimages and holy wells, and they wondered if I would be interested in leading a group of pilgrims around Ireland in 2027. I could choose what I wanted them to see, and design most of the tour myself. This idea was new to me, and very much out of left field. I didn’t know (still don’t, actually) if I was really qualified for it.

With Wendell in Kentucky, October 2025 The great Wendell Berry has died. ‘Great’ is probably an overused word, but in this case I would say it is justified. Berry was a remarkable man. A very particular figure whose influence was genuinely global. A Kentucky farmer who looked always to his place and to his past, and made of those materials something universal: something that would speak to people like me, and perhaps you, about what it means to be human in a time like this.

Imagine it was all a trap. Right from the beginning. The project: to create a living being. An artificial person. A new kind of intelligence. To replicate the human mind, but take it further. To replicate the human body, but without the flaws that God or Nature had included, or let go unmended. The project: to create a god. And thus to become one. Imagine that this project had been going on for decades, centuries, millennia.

I go through phases. Don’t we all? Is life’s journey anything else but a series of phases, or stages? Looking back from the vantage point of my sixth decade, it seems that these phases are often quite distinct, and that we are not really in control of when they begin and end. Often we don’t notice them until later. At that point, it may become clear what they were for, and where they were leading us. I am currently going through a phase of quite intense silence and withdrawal.

Welcome to the Abbey’s very first ‘ask me anything’ post. Last week I asked readers to ask me anything about my recently republished novel The Wake, with the promise that the best question would win a signed copy. There have been some good and thought-provoking inquiries in response. My favourites, and my attempts at answering them, are below. The winner is revealed at the end, after a suitably tense and thrilling build-up.

Hello everyone. Before we get started on this month’s salon, let me plug yet another book. They seem to be coming out of my ears at the moment. This time it’s the UK paperback of Against The Machine, which is published this coming September. Waterstones is currently running an offer for those of you who are chomping at the bit to pre-order it: until midnight this coming Friday, you will get 25% off if you place a pre-order.

Contain your excitement, people Today’s the day. For only the second time in all human history, my novel The Wake is published. Regular readers may know that this book - my debut novel - was first published in 2014. Recently, alas, the publisher went out of business, but my story has found a new home. John Murray are re-publishing The Wake today in a new edition, as part of their ‘classics’ range, with an introduction by my friend Mark Rylance, the Oscar-winning actor.

St Tikhon of Kaluga Russia. Sixteenth century At the heart of all things lies a tree. At the beginning there is a tree, and at the end. A tree caused the downfall of Man, and another tree was the cause of Man’s salvation. I have been here a long time now, listening to the river sing and the trunk groan and mutter in the wind. Long enough to have drawn one conclusion, from both nature and scripture: God loves trees. Perhaps almost as much as He loves his endlessly wayward children.