"Thinking Occurs" Is Not The Same As "I Think": On AI And The Question Of Personhood

Guest Author | 31st July 2026 | Prayer

Guest Post By Fiach OBroin-Molloy My own roots lie in the Catholic tradition, but my workbench has brought me into contact with Christians whose devotional lives differ from mine. I make Catholic rosaries, Anglican prayer beads and other forms of devotional beads by hand. That work has not taught me that distinctions between traditions do not matter. It has taught me that, beneath those distinctions, many of us know the same difficulty: we want to pray, but our attention is restless. I have travelled, lived and worked in a number of countries, from parts of Africa to countries further east. Again and again, I encountered beads or knotted cords held, counted or carried in prayer. The words, beliefs and purposes were not the same, and I would not flatten them into one vague spirituality. What stayed with me was the recurring human instinct to give devotion rhythm and weight—to let the body help the mind and heart remain present. For a Christian, however, that instinct is gathered into a particular faith—the faith confessed in the creeds. Our prayer is addressed to the God made known as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is shaped by Scripture and centred on Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, crucified and risen. Prayer beads do not broaden that confession into something less definite. At their best, they help us stay with it. A faith that takes flesh seriously Christian prayer is never only an activity of the mind. We speak and sing. We stand, kneel and bow. We fold our hands, make the sign of the cross, and receive bread and wine. The Christian faith does not ask us to escape being embodied creatures. At its centre is the astonishing declaration that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). Material things are not God, but they can serve our attention to God. That is the modest place in which I understand prayer beads. They do not create faith, improve the words of Scripture or make prayer more sincere. They simply give the hands something quiet to do while the heart and mind try to remain present. As a maker, I think about weight, texture, spacing and movement. A bead should pass naturally beneath the thumb. The cord or chain should be strong enough to be returned to repeatedly. A good set of prayer beads should not continually demand admiration for itself. Its purpose is to become quiet in the hand. Over time, beads polish, wood darkens and metal takes on the small marks of use. I rarely know the prayers that have been said with something I have made, but sometimes its wear tells me that it has been held often. That is a different kind of beauty from newness: not decoration, but evidence of return. What the hands bring to Scripture Lectio Divina invites us to read Scripture slowly and receptively. Luke J. Wilson has written much more fully about its four movements—reading, meditation, prayer and contemplation—and I would not try to redefine that teaching here. What interests me as a maker is the point at which a reader’s hand might support that attention. Most of us have become highly practised at moving quickly through words. We skim messages, headlines and pages, often looking for the next piece of information before we have received the one in front of us. Sacred reading asks something different. It asks us to stay. A bead introduces a small resistance to speed. It marks a pause and gives us somewhere to return when the mind has already hurried ahead. The Anglican prayer beads I make contain a cross, an invitatory bead, four cruciform beads and four groups of seven, often called weeks. I know that structure first through the work of my hands, not because I would presume to tell Anglicans how they ought to pray. What strikes me about it is its spaciousness: there are landmarks, passages and repeated opportunities to return to the cross. One possible practice would be to choose a short passage from the Gospels. At the cross, the reader might remember that Christ is the centre of the reading. ...

Luke J. Wilson | 29th July 2026 | Faith & Reason

��Pilate asked him, ‘What is truth?’ (John 18:38) What is “truth”? A question famously asked by Pilate to Jesus during his trial. Ironically, Pilate was speaking to the embodiment of Truth itself. John 14:6Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life.’ Here’s a little ‘riddle’ to think about while you read this; see if you agree or not: “all truth is fact, but not all facts are truth”. I’ll explain it at the end if you’re confused. Jesus is the ultimate Truth, but in a world and society that is becoming increasingly more relative, how do we test the truth and know what’s real or not? Especially with the sudden rise of AI video and photos getting more and more realistic, that old adage “the camera never lies” is completely false now. This makes sifting and filtering facts from fiction on social media all the more difficult. Memes and images are shared stating claims bluntly and authoritatively as truth, which people just assume are accurate and then share it hundreds of thousands of times. Truth has been replaced by opinion masquerading as truth. “Your truth”, “my truth”, “their truth”. But we can’t just blindly accept everything we see and are told. We must use our brains, check the sources and use our reasoning. God gave us intellect and reasoning to be used. In Isaiah 1:18, God invites us to come and reason together with him. We don’t follow a blind faith, we’re never asked to believe “just because”. The Old Testament is full of times when the historical examples of God’s actions are used as an anchor and reason for faith, and the same is true in the New Testament where we have the Gospels as eyewitness accounts, rooted in history. Paul writes to say that 500 people saw the risen Christ and that many are still alive so you can go and verify it for yourself and that he is passing on what he received from trusted people. The resurrection itself is grounded in it being a real event that if shown otherwise would make our faith “futile” and that we would be people to be most pitied. 1 Corinthians 15:17“If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” So with this in mind about our faith being grounded, all the more we should aim to do the same in other aspects of our lives. “Do your own research” is a common mantra online, but that in itself isn’t just Googling something and taking the first result that pops up. Especially now as most search engines give an AI overview first, which is just a compilation of the top results, not anything verified or fact-checked. And top results don’t always mean best results, or even accurate results. It typically just means the best keyworded and SEO-optimised result, which could be anything. To properly research, you must know which are trusted sources, reputable websites as well as looking up people who are experts and authorities in their fields. Now this doesn’t always mean they are right but at least you’ll be better informed to make up your own mind and make decisions based on well-researched information, rather than the first blog you find online, or the most viewed YouTube video with someone yelling “facts” at you. Doing your own research means doing the leg-work in tracing down sources and footnotes and citations to see who said what and where it originated to ensure its faithful and trustworthy, and used in context. The answer and example of the riddle The “Black Swan Problem” Strictly speaking, it highlights the difference between observed facts and absolute truth: The “Fact” (at the time): For thousands of years, every recorded, verified observation of a swan in Europe was white. As far as European zoologists were concerned, “all swans are white” was a well-documented, empirically backed fact. The Truth: Millions of black swans were happily swimming around in Western Australia. The truth was always that black swan...

Luke J. Wilson | 27th July 2026 | Archaeology

In early July 2026, Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced something pretty amazing: an entire Byzantine-era city, buried beneath the sands of the Dakhla Oasis, had been uncovered almost intact! Streets, homes, bread ovens, a fortress, and at its heart, a fourth-century basilica church. That might not seem very exciting on first glance. But this find deserves a closer look, because it puts flesh on something we usually only encounter in the abstract: what it actually looked like when Christianity took root, house by house, in an ordinary town far from the centres of imperial power. What Was Found The excavation, carried out by an Egyptian mission under the Supreme Council of Antiquities at the Ain El-Sabil site in the New Valley Governorate, roughly 185 miles west of Luxor, has been underway for several seasons. According to Hisham El Leithy, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, the settlement was laid out on a deliberate grid — north-south thoroughfares crossed by east-west streets, forming open squares and public spaces. This wasn’t a huddle of huts; it was a planned town. At the centre of that plan stood a basilica church dating to the mid-fourth century AD, overlooking one of the main streets. Around it, archaeologists found the remains of two watchtowers, a heavily fortified structure with thick defensive walls, and houses with spacious reception halls and vaulted roofs — complete with bread ovens, kitchens, and grinding stones for processing grain. Everyday life, preserved almost exactly as it was left. Two houses stand out that have been identified. One belonged to a man named Tisous,* identified as a church deacon, dating to the second half of the fourth century. The other belonged to a man named Tabibos. Over a thousand years later and we know the name of who owned a house and a home-church; I always find it fascinating! Archaeologists believe Tabibos’s house, which dates to the early fourth century, functioned as a house church before the basilica was ever built. A collection of coins bearing Byzantine emperors, Christian symbols and Latin inscriptions was uncovered during the excavation. (Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities via Facebook; Dea Picture Library/De Agostini via Getty Images)   There’s also a documentary find that’s easy to skim past but genuinely significant: nearly 200 ostraca — broken pieces of pottery and limestone used as everyday writing material — inscribed in Coptic and Greek. Diaa Zahran, head of the Islamic, Coptic and Jewish Antiquities Sector, described them as recording sales transactions, correspondence, and other mundane details of daily life. Things we rarely get a glimpse into as the mundane rarely makes history. Alongside these, the mission recovered a substantial haul of bronze coins bearing Byzantine emperors and Christian symbols, plus gold coins from the reign of Constantius II (337–361 AD) — coinage that anchors the site’s prosperity firmly within the fourth century. Before the Basilica: The House Church at Ain El-Sabil What makes Tabibos’s house the most theologically interesting part of this discovery is timing. If it predates the basilica and dates to the early fourth century, it sits right at — or just before — the pivot point of Roman-Egyptian Christian history: the years surrounding Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 AD, when Christianity moved from a persecuted minority faith to a tolerated, and increasingly favoured, one. A time of transition between a house church and a purpose-built basilica when the threat of persecution no longer loomed over the Church. We know from Paul’s letters that the earliest churches met in homes — Romans 16:5 greets “the church in [Prisca and Aquila’s] house,” and similar greetings appear in 1 Corinthians 16:19 and Colossians 4:15. If we were to imagine how a letter from Paul to this house church might...

Luke J. Wilson | 12th March 2026 | Eschatology

Something bizarre happened in the White House Oval Office this week. Photographs circulated on social media showing President Donald Trump seated at his desk, surrounded by approximately twenty Christian pastors from across the country, their hands extended towards him in prayer. The image provoked sharply divided reactions: some saw it as a moving expression of faith; others found it deeply unsettling. Whatever one makes of the optics, it arrived at a charged moment. Trump held a prayer meeting in the Oval Office after his administration admitted the war with Iran will likely last weeks longer than promised | Credit: Dan Scavino's X account Days earlier, reports emerged that a military commander had told troops that the current US war with Iran is “all part of God’s divine plan,” and that President Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” These were not fringe internet rumours. They were filed as formal complaints with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) by an anonymous non-commissioned officer acting on behalf of fifteen service members — the majority of whom were themselves Christians. By Tuesday of that week, MRFF had logged more than two hundred similar complaints across fifty military installations, covering every branch of the armed forces. More than two dozen Democratic members of Congress have since called for a Department of Defense Inspector General investigation, citing what they describe as “glaring Constitutional concerns” and potential violations of DoD regulations on religious neutrality. The political questions about separation of church and state in the US are for others to address. What I want to do here is something more straightforward: examine what Revelation actually says, because the theology driving these claims does not hold up under scrutiny. And that matters here a lot; not as a partisan point, but as a question of biblical faithfulness. First, a Word About Context If you have read my previous article on Revelation some of what follows will be familiar ground. But it bears repeating, because the misunderstanding at the heart of this story is so widespread that it has taken on the feel of settled orthodoxy in many circles. The Book of Revelation is commonly thought to be written in the late first century ~95 AD, during or around the reign of Emperor Domitian. Though there is internal evidence that it was possibly written during Nero’s reign prior to 70 AD. Both of these emperors were most aggressive proponents of the imperial cult in Rome’s history. Domitian required that he be addressed as “lord and god,” had this title printed on coinage, and expected acts of religious reverence towards the Emperor as a demonstration of political loyalty. To refuse was to invite economic exclusion, marginalisation, and worse. Rome on seven hills It is into that precise context that John of Patmos writes. He is not composing a coded forecast of twenty-first century geopolitics. He is writing resistance literature — what scholars call apocalyptic literature — a well-established Jewish and early Christian genre which uses vivid symbolic imagery to pull back the curtain on earthly power and name it for what it truly is. The seven-headed beast of Revelation is Rome. The seven heads are the seven hills of Rome, an identification so widely acknowledged in early church scholarship that it barely requires argument. The mark of the beast, calculated through Hebrew gematria to 666 (or 616 in some early manuscripts), points directly to Nero Caesar (transliterated into Hebrew as נרון קסר, “nrwn qsr”) — the Emperor who became the archetype of anti-Christian persecution due to the levels of evilness he enacted. The second beast, which looks like a lamb but speaks for the dragon, performs signs to deceive, enforces the mark, and compels worship of the first beas...