The Deep Spiritual History of AI

By Batsheva Labowe-Stoll

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Arc: The Podcast

Every other week, Arc Magazine's editor-in-chief, Mark Oppenheimer, is joined by guests to talk religion, politics, et cetera.

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Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer

For decades, klezmer musicians have kept traditional Jewish music alive despite war, genocide, and erasure. They’ve done so by playing a small handful of surviving songs again and again. Many more songs—a trove of tunes with the potential to redefine the genre—have sat just out of reach, in a former Soviet archive. This music was unseen, unheard, unknown. But now, newly rescued, it’s transforming the klezmer world, the people who work in it, and our picture of 20th-century Jewish life in a destabilized Europe. Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer tells the story of that music.

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The Deep Spiritual History of AI

By Batsheva Labowe-Stoll
In 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told a room of developers in London that he does not pray for God to be on his side, but instead prays to be on God’s side, and that working on frontier artificial intelligence feels like “being on the side of the angels.” Other figures in the field have been more explicit. Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral AI, has stated that AI is “about creating God.” Engineers have described their work as “creating God” or becoming gods themselves, and technology executives have characterized artificial general intelligence as a God-making project. In 2015, a former…

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Blake Smith: How does Christianity help us mediate, as you suggest, between the worst sort of collectivism and the worst sort of individualism? Or perhaps mediate is the wrong word, since these two “worsts” do so often go together! Let’s say, transcend?
Julius Krein: I don’t think it’s anything more complicated than Christianity’s consciousness of the division between the City of God and the City of Man, “render unto Caesar,” and so on. But this distinguishes Christianity from the other monotheistic religions as well as ancient paganism and, I would argue, “rational” philosophy. This distance allows for another dimension or perspective from which to approach the relationship between the individual and the collective.