The Machine & the Mystery — A podcast on AI, religion, and philosophy

i. A note from the host

Issue No. I · MMXXVI

A.I. (or what we somewhat deceptively call A.I.) is beginning to touch everything in our lives, from the macroeconomic pictures of our home nations and military weapons deployments to providing a friendly voice to the elderly and offering medical diagnoses.

So I’ve finally decided to put my M.Div. to good use, and I’ve been doing a deep dive (better known as going down a rabbit hole) into AI, specifically how it relates to faith and philosophy. What does it mean to be human in an age of thinking (do they think?) machines?

My background is explicitly Christian, though my journey has taken me far from my evangelical roots. This, however, is not a “Christian” project but rather an attempt to bring into focus a range of beliefs and ideas on some of the most pressing topics of our day. Some are fun (is AI conscious, and what does that even mean), others are deeply troubling, such as mass surveillance and environmental destruction.

This brings me to my heart for this project. This technology is here. Attention is All You Need was written. The philosophical and religious questions it creates are essential to answer, and quickly.

Whether you choose to use the technology yourself is up to your conscience and ideals, but putting our heads in the sand and just assuming that if we ban OpenAI and its competitors from the West we don’t need to think deeply on this topic from an ethical, philosophical, and religious standpoint is, I believe, a massive misstep and, to put it optimistically, a missed opportunity to shape the future in a thoughtful and, hopefully (at least from my perspective), human and love centered way.

I look forward to going on this journey with you.

— Christopher

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iii. The archive

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iv. Listen anywhere

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v. The dispatch

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A letter and a podcast.

The dispatch lands in your inbox alongside each new episode — the host's notes, recommended readings, and a short selection from the source texts that shaped the conversation.

vi. On the host

Christopher Tawney

Portrait · MMXXVI

Christopher Tawney is the host and creator of The Machine and the Mystery, a podcast at the intersection of artificial intelligence, philosophy, and religion. The show is built around a single conviction: that the questions AI is forcing us to ask about consciousness, creativity, agency, attention, and our shared humanity aren’t new. They’re as old as time. And the people who’ve been wrestling with them longest deserve a seat at the table alongside the engineers building the future.

He comes to the work as a working filmmaker. Over the past seven-plus years, Chris has built a career as a Director of Photography, camera operator, producer, and editor with credits across HBO, PBS, HGTV, Discovery, NPR, NBC, A&E, and Oxygen — including We’re Here, The Great American Recipe, NPR Music’s The Mansion Sessions, 90 Day Fiancé, Master Distiller, and the indie horror feature House of Flies, currently in production. Through AKA Dinosaurs, the production company he runs with producer Katie Tawney, he develops films and music videos rooted in a conviction that every frame should reach for what it means to be human. The Machine and the Mystery is what happens when that question gets pointed at the technology rewriting the answer.

Chris holds a Master of Divinity from Westminster Theological Seminary. He draws on a range of religious and philosophical traditions with equal seriousness, refuses to treat any single one as the default, and brings no evangelistic agenda to the work. On the show, he’s not a journalist and not an expert, he’s a co-thinker, working alongside guests and listeners in real time, holding the technological, philosophical, and religious lenses in tension without collapsing them into one another.

He lives and works in Middle Tennessee.