Just yesterday an essay of mine, “Transcendent Narrative in the Age of Hacking,” got published in the online magazine Christ and Pop Culture. You can view it here for free.
In short, I respond to a recent op-ed by Yuval Noah Harari, the best-selling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harari wrote that free will is an illusion, and that if you fail to recognize this, you will be deeply vulnerable to data-enabled hacking. He then argues that we must know ourselves better and rethink the foundations of democracy—an ambitious project in which religion has no place. In response, I question his theory of free will and argue for why I believe religion does in fact have every bit of relevance to our daily lives as we grapple with the scientific and technological realities of the future.
Let me add that even though strongly I disagree with Harari in my article, I am a big fan of his historical work and admire him as a thinker. In particular, I highly recommend his book Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry (which I wrote about in a blog post last year), and I hope to get to his other more mainstream books one day.
Richard Rabil, Jr. 