Two Things 3/25/24
Gen Z Reformers. Digital twins. Plus, decline of religion, Purim, and virtue.
This Good Friday, we’ll gather for coffee at the usual time (6:30 am) and place (Loyal North).
(1) Protestant Reconquista: Several months ago, Christianity Today reported on a movement by theologically orthodox Gen Z Christians to reform mainline Protestant denominations and arrest their theological drift. The piece, penned by a nondenom Missouri pastor, is titled “Meet the Zoomers’ Martin Luther.” Like much of CT’s recent reporting, it’s peppered with vaguely woke-ish virtue-signaling, insisting that, despite “superficia[l]” “allusions to violent conquest,” the movement is “radically different” from the “very online” “political right” “manosphere.” (Which seems obviously true, so why bring it up?) Setting aside the preachy editorializing, the piece is worth a read:
[On Reformation Day, October 31, Denver-based Episcopalian Jake Boston] is reenacting that old story by tramping through the Colorado snow from mainline church to mainline church—60 in total—to post his own theses on their doors.
The lists, tailored to the seven American mainline denominations, critique their drift from orthodoxy into theological liberalism, challenging them to reaffirm the Resurrection, the divinity of Jesus, the authority of the Bible, and much more besides….
Their interest is institutional renewal in the mainline church, and their method—as detailed in a video explaining their Reformation Day activism—is calling young, theologically conservative Christians to reform and revive the denominations that their Christian forebears sweat and bled to build. Beyond the Reformation Day event, this primarily looks like mapping theologically conservative mainline congregations and encouraging Gen Z peers to join and serve in those communities.
The explainer video by Redeemed Zoomer elaborates on the movement’s goals, as does the website, Operation Reconquista. The group seeking reform within the United Church of Christ—heir to the congregationalist tradition—goes by the name “Puritans of the UCC,” which succinctly captures the insistence on internalized reform over separatism.
(2) Your own digital twin: What if “every aspect of life could soon be modeled in a parallel digital simulation,” where “[e]verything happening in our lived reality would be tracked and monitored and fed into software … to create a high-fidelity real-time digital representation of the world”? With advances in hardware and AI, creating such “digital twins” of everything, from factories to airplane wind tunnels to weather systems, is becoming possible. The real promise, according to this Noema article, may be in healthcare:
In 2018, a group of scientists … started a spinoff company called ELEM Biotech. The company’s tagline is “the virtual humans factory,” and its ultimate mission is to create highly advanced digital humans that can be used for medical experiments….
In the beginning, they wanted to create a highly complex and hyperrealistic computer simulation of the average human heart. That involved doing a lot of physics, from the electromechanics that determine a heartbeat to the fluid dynamics that determine blood flow. After that, they collaborated with a local hospital to gather as much cardiac data as possible, and they took heart scans of everyone who worked at the company. Eventually, they had a highly realistic average model that could be tweaked and adjusted based on personal data to create a whole range of virtual hearts that mirrored the diversity of sizes, shapes, ages and health levels that one might find in a random group of real people….
ELEM’s new ambition … is to create precise digital twins of specific people’s hearts right down to the cellular level…. Any medicines or therapies or devices (like a pacemaker) that you need to receive could be designed around your unique anatomy and then tested in your twin heart to gauge effectiveness and possible side effects. Surgeons, should you need them, could rehearse an operation in this risk-free zone.
Of course, the promise comes with peril: heightening awareness of our bodies even while alienating us from them, widening the disparity between rich and poor, deepening the dilemma over our personal data (who owns it, can use it, etc.?). More fundamentally, “what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to have a physical body? Would a digital body part feel like a prosthesis or like an extension of the self?”
Other Things:
It’s not just the mainlines that are dying. Religion itself is losing its influence in American public life.
Reflecting on Purim, CCU Chancellor Don Sweeting encourages Christians to “read and re-read the book of Esther. Remember what happened. Memorialize it … and do not be silent.”
Brad Littlejohn, building on work by
, says it’s time to recover the rich Christian vocabulary of virtue and vice.
Hope to see you Friday.