The Game of Life: Whose Victory Conditions? Which Stance? with Ted Castronova

On this episode of the podcast, Grant interviews Ted Castronova, Professor of Media at Indiana University and author Life is a Game: What Game Design Says about the Human Condition. 

Mathematical game theory defines a game as anything that has players making strategic choices to achieve an outcome that matters to them. From this, Ted argues that life itself is a game, and as Christians we can view God as a game designer who has given us free will to make choices within His design. 

But if life is a game that we are playing, why do so many people find themselves frustrated and bored by it? And why is the allure of virtual worlds—from the hype around the Metaverse, to the vibrant culture around online gaming—so strong? Many futuristic movies and novels (such as The Matrix, Ready Player One, and Snow Crash) portray virtual reality as having a fundamental role in a dystopian world, often as a distraction from a real world that is somehow broken. Is virtual reality attractive because we’ve forgotten how to “play” the game of life? Or can the games of the real and virtual worlds coexist in a balanced way? Which game are we all really playing, and how do we actually win it? What can games—whether tabletop or VR—teach us about living?

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Can I Give My Heart to You, Literally? with Barbara Newman

In her book The Permeable Self, Barbara Newman—John Evans Professor of Latin, as well as English, Classics, and History at Northwestern University—explores the importance of coinherence in the medieval view of personhood. This is the concept that persons are profoundly interconnected, existing not in isolation but “in” each other. One illustration of this is the trope of exchanging hearts, whether between lovers or between female mystics and Christ. 

The concept of our selves having such porous boundaries is perhaps an alien one to the contemporary American mind. But in this episode, Barbara discusses stories of heart transplant patients who—without knowing anything about the donors of their new hearts—began to take on personality traits of the donors. In a society where we often define personhood by its individuality and separateness, what do we make of instances such as these, which seem to bear out a medieval understanding of what it means to be human?

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What Questions Should We Ask in Our Technological Age? with Jason Thacker

In April of 2019, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention published a document called “Artificial Intelligence: An Evangelical Statement of Principles.” Armed with the belief that God has created humans with both the ability to invent new technologies and the wisdom to answer new dilemmas those technologies raise, the document outlined basic principles to guide a Christian ethical approach to advances in AI. In a cultural moment when many Christian voices express anxiety over the effects of the digital world on faith, community, and identity, the tone of this document was one of hope, acknowledging the dangers of advances in technology while professing that “nothing we create will be able to thwart [God’s] redemptive plan for creation.” 

In this episode, Jason Thacker, lead drafter of the document and director of the Research Institute for the ERLC, further explores the intersection of theology and digital technology with Gretchen. Together they consider the meaning of discipleship in the 21st century, the ways that our identity is (and isn’t) formed by technological advances, and the “big” questions that underlie ethical issues relating to data privacy, digital surveillance, and more. Jason seeks to help root the Church’s approach to AI in a posture of wakefulness and hope, alert to the impact of timeless questions on current issues and equipped to engage with them as members of a digital age. 

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What is the Cost of Human Flourishing? with Brendan Case

Theologian Brendan Case sits down with Grant to discuss the various ways that society can foster—or hinder—the well-being and flourishing of its members. Case is Associate Director for Research with the Harvard Human Flourishing Program, where he helps foster dialogue between the humanities’ long and rich tradition of contemplating human happiness with the evidence-based research of the empirical and social sciences. He brings this unique expertise to the conversation as he and Grant discuss some of the many strands in our social weave that may contribute to or hinder the living of meaningful lives. 

Can we have all we hope for, or can some goods only be possessed at the cost of others? 

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