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The Echoes Podcast dives into real-world questions about community, faith, and human connection. Guided by hosts Marcus Goodyear and Camille Hall-Ortega, each episode explores personal journeys and societal challenges with inspiring guests—from faith leaders and poets to social advocates—whose stories shape our shared experiences. Through conversations with figures like Rev. Ben McBride, who moved his family to East Oakland’s “Kill Zone” to serve his community, or poet Olga Samples Davis, who reflects on the transformative power of language, we bring to light themes of belonging, resilience, and the meaning of home.
From the creators of Echoes Magazine by the H. E. Butt Foundation, The Echoes Podcast continues the magazine's legacy of storytelling that fosters understanding, empathy, and action.
When we start trying to be efficient, we're actually missing the key thing because formation requires friction. The whole point of efficiency is to make that clock work so predictably and reliably. It's just that that's not good for actually forming people.
Camille Hall-Ortega:On the day I got engaged years ago, I remember being so excited to share the news, but I knew I had to share it in the right way. You see, for me at least, there would definitely be a fun post on Facebook with pictures of my then boyfriend Mike on bended knee, the Alamo standing strong as backdrop behind him, But there were some people in my life, those I was closest with, who would expect to hear the news in a personal message from me. That's because when we feel close to someone, when we feel like we're we're truly doing life with certain people who know us and love us, we don't want to find out personal information about them with the masses through technology. We expect more. But we're living in a world that feels more and more impersonal.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Relationships feel increasingly distant, and many of us have begun to feel isolated. It seems each of us may have fewer people that would share their big news in a personal way instead of letting us find out with everyone else on social media. It makes me wonder what we're losing out on. What changes should we be making in our culture to reclaim the intimacy we all need? How is technology driving this push toward the impersonal?
Camille Hall-Ortega:And how can we work to put people first in a world dominated by devices? From the A. G. Butt Foundation, I'm Camille HallOrtega, and this is The Echoes Podcast. On today's episode, we're welcoming author, musician, and public speaker, Andy Crouch.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Andy is the author of five books, including Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, and most recently, The Life We're Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World. He previously served as an executive editor for Christianity Today, and his work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time Magazine. We're excited to welcome Andy to the podcast. I'm here with my cohost, Goodyear. Hi, Marcus.
Marcus Goodyear:Hi, Camille.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Hi, Andy. Welcome.
Andy Crouch:Hello. Thank you so much. Great to be with you guys.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yes. We're thrilled to have you. We have, I feel lots to talk about because I'm sure you all know that your your work is just really top of mind, very timely, especially in your newest book, but all of your work. So we're very excited. I want to just jump right in and ask you, you know, you have said that we all have a need to be known and loved through personal relationships, but we've seen an attempt to sort of displace that need with the ease of technology.
Camille Hall-Ortega:I would love to hear you talk more about that.
Andy Crouch:I'd loved your intro, Camille, that gosh, I've got news to share. I think before a very short time ago, would have all thought, I will go tell my news. Maybe the most interesting news in human history was when a young woman who was betrothed but not married she hadn't been engaged She didn't have the photo in front of the alibi. Suddenly, this angelic visitor arrives and is like, You're actually going to have a baby, even though you've never known a man, right? And what does she do in Luke's account of this?
Andy Crouch:She goes with haste to her cousin who lives several days' journey away and then visits her for weeks. It turns out her cousin is also expecting a baby very unexpectedly. And our instinct would have been make the personal connection until very recently. But under the influence of this idea, we could get more out of the world if we depersonalized it. We have, in a whole series of transactions, kind of redesigned our world to be less personal, more efficient for sure, generating more economic value in many ways, but at the cost of no longer seeing ourselves, our relationships, and maybe even our relationship to the world as a whole, as a deeply personal affair.
Andy Crouch:So that is kind of what the last book of mine is about, That
Camille Hall-Ortega:efficiency piece is really important because there's this tension there, That efficiency is good, right? Efficiency that we want that, right? We're making a little more money. We're saving a little bit more time. Time is money.
Camille Hall-Ortega:All of those things. There's this instinct that this is a positive. What's the problem? Are we losing? What are we losing out on?
Camille Hall-Ortega:I think, yeah.
Andy Crouch:So I would say that the two things that technology has allowed us to greatly expand for people are actually efficiency. Could say productivity, which is another way of saying efficiency. And I would add safety. So my concern is that we've taken that model actually of both safety and productivity interestingly and applied it to realms of human experience where it doesn't actually work very well. And it is in everything that has to do with the formation of persons.
Andy Crouch:So where are the places where you and I are shaped to become the kind of people that we could be if someone cared enough to help us develop, help us be formed into something. I think there are three big ones for most human beings. The home is primary. There are things that happen in our family of origin, no matter how complex that is, that shape us in ways we can't get anywhere else. Then school is another, how human beings got shaped as young people in particular.
Andy Crouch:And then for those who are pursuing or kind of find themselves identified with a faith tradition, what you could broadly call church or religious community. And it's in those three places that I'm most worried that when we start trying to be efficient, we're actually missing the key thing because formation requires friction. The whole point of efficiency is to make that clock work so predictably and reliably. It's just that that's not good for actually forming people. And so in the formative places, and I would say the formative stages of our lives, and the big moments, I mean, like engagement, like the beginning of a marriage, where you may be of any age, but you're starting out on some new thing together, a new relationship is being formed.
Andy Crouch:It's in those places I think we should have tolerance way for efficiency and way less instinctive. Let's make this productive.
Marcus Goodyear:Hearing you talk about the challenges of technology and the challenges of where efficiency and productivity fit make me think about the way we approach challenges in general, whether it's a technical challenge or an adaptive challenge? And I wonder if you could bring some of those ideas into this conversation.
Andy Crouch:Oh, yeah, sure. Well, yeah, there's different kinds of problems. And so I'm borrowing I would borrow this from a really wonderful thinker and writer and teacher named Ronald Heifetz, who back in the 1990s and then more recently kind of extended this a bit, he said there's kind of three kinds of problems that we face as human beings. And the first and most fun are what he calls purely technical problems. And in this kind of problem, we can actually say what the problem is that's not to be taken for granted.
Andy Crouch:The problem's clear. And there's a clear solution, and there's probably an expert who knows what the solution is. And you just have to do what the expert tells you to do. So that's what Heifetz and Calarius sometimes call type one problems. Purely technical, we know how to solve it.
Andy Crouch:And the whole dream of the modern world is that we'll be able to make all the problems technical. We'll just solve all this stuff and the experts will tell us how to do it. The problem is there's two more types. And so there's an interesting type, what they call type two, which is interesting because the problem is actually clear and the solution may even be known and the expert knows what you need to do, but the problem is the subject or the patient. Let's stick with the medical setting.
Andy Crouch:The patient has to learn and grow and become something different to implement the solution. So this is what we call type two problems. We actually know what the solution is, just that to actually implement, you'd have to grow. Then there's what Heifetz calls Type three problems, and these are the real interesting ones. In fact, actually says we probably shouldn't call them problems because that implies there's a simple solution out there.
Andy Crouch:So he calls them adaptive challenges or Type three challenges. And this is where actually it's not so clear even how we would name the problem. So what you did in your intro, Camille, is you tried to sort of awaken us to a feeling we all have that something has gone a little wrong and the world as we have it. That we're lonelier than we thought we should be. People say often when you talk about social media, we're more connected than ever, but we don't feel more known.
Andy Crouch:That's it. I'm sure you felt even as you were thinking about how you'd start our conversation, how do I name this? How do I describe this product? It's not so clear. It's not like I have an earache.
Andy Crouch:I've got a heartache, but where did it come from? And then the solution is not clear. And in this case, there may be people with a certain level of expertise, but even the expert has to learn and grow to make progress on this. And there are things you can go to the doctor, such as certain conditions we don't know how to cure. I have several friends who have lived for long seasons of their life with what we call chronic fatigue syndrome.
Andy Crouch:And honestly, no one really knows what it is or where it comes from. There is no pill and there's no thing they can tell you to do that they know will work. And for a physician to accompany a patient who's living with chronic fatigue, that physician who has trained their whole life to solve people's problems has to realize, for now at least, I can't solve this, but I can be with you in it. And I can learn some things as we go as your physician or clinician. There's way more of life that is type three than we would like to admit.
Marcus Goodyear:Yep. A little messy.
Andy Crouch:Exactly. There's no pill. There's no answer. And so what does that require of us? It requires that we become a different kind of person than we are in order to be able to integrate whatever suffering is involved there, but also whatever opportunity for creativity is there.
Camille Hall-Ortega:We're forgetting or not ever acquiring skill sets that are essential.
Andy Crouch:Yes. They're not helping you grow as a human being. So I think truly humane technology would be things that actually keep us engaged in the world, ideally with the four basic dimensions of being human, which are heart, soul, mind, and strength. And I will say, I don't know there's a better example than the bicycle. So maybe I pick this because I love it.
Andy Crouch:It's my favorite Marcus thing to
Camille Hall-Ortega:is a fan.
Andy Crouch:All right. So Marcus, you and I, at least, mean, not everybody loves biking. And in fact, it's a declining sport in The United States, which is interesting. But the thing about the bicycle is it's absolutely technology in the sense that it requires a lot of there's a lot of metallurgy involved. There's gears.
Andy Crouch:There's all these things we've discovered through science that make biking compared to almost anything else human beings do. Actually, Camille, it's interesting. It's very efficient. That's right. Steve Jobs famously said he wanted a computer to be a bicycle for the mind.
Andy Crouch:And the reason he said that is that human beings on their own are not faster than many, many other animals. There are lots of animals that can outrun or outfly or even out swim us. But a human being on a bicycle is the most efficient user of energy of any creature. So the bicycle, definitely it's technology, but it involves you. It strengthens you.
Andy Crouch:It trains you. I acquire certain kinds of skill. And when I'm out on my bike, is assuming it's a stationary bike in your basement, I'm like out in the world and I'm experiencing sounds and smells and feeling the rush of the wind and I'm fully engaged in the world. I think that's a template. It's why Steve Jobs chose it as his metaphor for the computer in the early days of Apple.
Andy Crouch:The problem is, I don't think we got a bicycle for the mind. I don't think we got what Steve Jobs dreamed of. I think we got something like a self driving car for the mind, which is you kind of open up the screen and the algorithm starts doing stuff for you. And you may think, well, this is really cool. It's like doing it itself, but it's not helping you be you.
Andy Crouch:So real humane technology would help you be you in a way that no device can replace. But that's not mostly what we have, and it's not mostly what we've chosen to fill our world with.
Marcus Goodyear:But also with a bike, I am the engine. You are the engine. We're powering it in a different way than we might do where the computer is giving especially now with AI, the computer is giving thinking back to us. And we at least have to bring the same level of thinking to it. Or I don't know.
Marcus Goodyear:We're talking about technology, and it feels to me in some ways we're we're remiss if we don't acknowledge that we are on the cusp of we don't even know what. And I would just be curious to hear you talk about what new challenges and opportunities are you anticipating in the next two to three years. Talk about adaptive challenges coming our way.
Andy Crouch:We well, indeed, indeed. I mean, the dream continues. So I would say the dream we've been chasing with technology for about one hundred years because the scientific story is a few 100 years old, but we really start putting it all together into these things you might call devices about one hundred years ago in broad And I think it's an ancient dream of doing magic. We want the cheat code to the world. And magic is the dream that I'll be able to snap my fingers and the world springs to life at my command and ideally in submission to my will, and gets me all the good I want without having to become a different especially more loving kind of person.
Andy Crouch:Magic is the belief that all you need is power. And if you have enough power, you can get everything you want. And AI is the latest wave of human beings trying to get something we can snap our fingers, have it spring to life, have it serve us. There's a poem by the poet Jung Wolfgang von Goethe written at the dawn of the scientific era called The Sorcerer's Apprentice. And almost all of us, if we know of it, we know of it through a Mickey Mouse cartoon that was based on it's an eighteenth century poem about this poor apprentice one day to be played by Mickey Mouse who has to haul water and he charms the broom, right?
Andy Crouch:And the broom starts carrying the water and he's like, This is great. Now I can relax. Now the work will be done. Of course, the poem, it's so prophetic. And by the way, Goethe wrote this poem called The Sorcerer's Oppressed.
Andy Crouch:It's kind of a of a sing song ballad. It's very kind of charming in a way, and you can make a cute little Disney film out of He also wrote a really long poem called Doctor. Faust about a scientist magician who wants the key to power and gets it by selling his soul to the devil and is ultimately taken down to hell. It's a parable of wanting to do magic and the cost you pay. So here we have these systems that because of some amazing emergent properties of mathematics, very simple mathematics interestingly, I mean, not so simple that you and I can just sort of write it down and understand it all, but it's actually not complicated.
Andy Crouch:If you can give them everything human beings have ever put on the internet, and they ingest it, these what we call generative pre trained transformer models, and they take it all in, and then they do some math, very high dimensional, but very simple math. Something kind of emerges that is a lot like intelligence. I mean, artificial intelligence. It's not created, it's not natural, it's downstream of what human beings have done. But nonetheless, it kind of pops into being and it starts talking to you, and you can tell it, Hey, And be a it should and can be extremely useful.
Andy Crouch:The problem is, it's also going to tempt us to take a forklift with us to the gym of life. Is the best metaphor I've heard,
Camille Hall-Ortega:I didn't make
Andy Crouch:it up. Bringing a forklift to the gym. Should you bring a forklift to the gym? Well, I mean, it depends on what you want. If you just want the weights to go up and down, the forklift will do more of that than you'll ever do.
Andy Crouch:But if you're going to the gym because you have this residual sense, I'm a human being, I'm not made to sit on a couch, I'm made to develop strength', the last thing you want is to let something else do it for you. They will never be a person because a person is loved into being. And these entities have been willed into being, not loved. We willed that they exist to serve our needs. Is that all bad?
Andy Crouch:No. But it does rule out they are not persons because a person exists in the world and thrives in the world because they're loved. And that's just not how these systems work at all. No one's ever tried to love them. People have also it's
Camille Hall-Ortega:a tried little dark. Yes. I love how you paint that picture. Andy, I love how you paint that picture in this book. Then I saw Marcus, you kind of raising your eyebrows there of this idea of us existing and being people because we are loved and we have this desire to be loved and to love.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yeah, I would love Marcus. Tell us your thoughts.
Marcus Goodyear:I mean, I want to back up and ask question. But what exactly do we mean when we say love? Like, okay, so if we say I can't love, what does that mean? And what does it mean when we love each other? I have read about these I've read about these philosophers who work at Anthropic who are essentially coaching the AI.
Marcus Goodyear:Are treating it like a baby and helping it open its eyes as they say. Now these are metaphors, but that's how they're viewing the work they're doing. How is that different and how is the AI's response to what they're feeding it different than the way we treat our children? What does it mean to love another person?
Andy Crouch:Love is the realization that I come to care ultimately more about the good of this other that I encounter than I care about my own good. And I think there's an element in it as well of freedom. That is, we could say voluntarily decide or choose maybe is a better word that there's something about you that matters enough that I would give up things that matter to me, up to and including my own life. And I remember very vividly when I had a small child, realizing when Timothy was maybe one year old, that was our first child, starting to walk. And I remember putting him to bed one night and suddenly having this scenario break into my mind.
Andy Crouch:We lived on a very busy street. There were buses that went by every ten or fifteen minutes. And envisioning my little toddler son breaking free of my grasp for some reason, running out in front of a bus and realizing that if that were to happen, and if my running in front of the bus and knocking him out of the way and then me taking the hit of the bus would save his life, that I would do that without even reflecting. And you all feel this, I'm sure. Then I had the interesting thought, if my wife, Catherine, were to be stepping in front of a bus and my stepping would save her.
Andy Crouch:And I thought, I would do it. I would. But I would think about it. I'm like, Oh, no.
Marcus Goodyear:Have you had this talk with your wife? Maybe she shouldn't listen to this episode.
Andy Crouch:Just a moment. I'd be like, Oh, me, Catherine, has to be me. But with my bae, I'm sorry. I just think there's something about parenthood that brings forth the un like, no need to think, Yeah. Wired in your bones.
Andy Crouch:I know it is terrible.
Marcus Goodyear:Yeah. I mean, talking you're talking a little bit about what it means to make individual choices that impact the people around us and benefit them, sometimes more than us, which reminds me.
Andy Crouch:The essence of love is to do.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yeah, yes, yes.
Marcus Goodyear:This reminds me of a an audio clip from again deep in the archives of of Laity Lodge's archives from September 2025 when James K. Smith, Jamie Smith was talking about materialism and simplicity. And it comes at a lot of the ideas we've been talking about related to technology. So let's take a moment to listen to this, and then we'd love to get your take,
Camille Hall-Ortega:Andy. Alright.
Speaker 4:Again, can we just be honest that in the context of American Christianity where we inhabit unquestionably the most prosperous affluent nation in the history of the world. The lures and temptations and malformations of materialism and consumerism is not just a matter of our individual personal habits and choices, It's reflective of an entire social system that commodifies everything and really ultimately exploits all of us, though obviously in very very different ways. I would say, if we really want to have a more expansive sense of what's at stake here, we need to stop thinking about this just in terms of possessions, and it's almost more a matter of being possessed. I think as long as we only think about wealth and materialism as this kind of personal private problem and how I relate to stuff, we won't really understand why Jesus calls it mammon. A god, an idol, a false spirit that we have to wrestle with.
Speaker 4:We need to realize that this is a communal dynamic. It's not just a private and personal dynamic.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Andy, we would love to hear your thoughts on this clip.
Andy Crouch:I'm very aligned, I would say, with what Jamie is saying there. A couple of things I would highlight. We got around to this in an interesting way. I mean, the things we're confronting are not individual problems. I think part of what Jamie is saying is you can't just sort of individually be like, I'm going to live a simpler life, because we've made this collective decision as a whole society to pursue the kind of magic that we think is going to do amazing things and relieve us of so many burdens that we don't want anymore.
Andy Crouch:And so it's an inherently social communal, as he says, problem. The one thing that I think I would go beyond what we heard, at least just then, is I don't think the problem is stuff. I think the problem is tools, is devices, is things that work for us. It's not just I want lots of things in my life. It's that I want robots.
Andy Crouch:Robot, some people know, is a word coined by a Czech writer
Marcus Goodyear:who was Yeah, writing a RUS.
Andy Crouch:Rawson's Universal Robots is the name of the company in the play. Gosh, Chapek was the last name of this playwright. And his brother was looking for a word to describe these automatons that would be made by human beings, but in the play ultimately rebel against and extinguish human beings. They actually extinguished the human race. And his brother said, Oh, you should use this word from the Slavic word, Robota, or I don't know how they pronounce it, but that means slave or enslaved population that work without compensation.
Andy Crouch:I mean, we want lots of things, but what we really want is lots of, if I may be so bold, slaves. That is things that we are not morally accountable to, that because they do not really love and we're not loved into being, don't call forth love from us. They are just useful to us. But wouldn't it be handy if they actually acted like people? Because then we could talk to them and then we could get them to do all the things we want people to do for us, but you can't properly ask people to do, like be available any time of day to do
Camille Hall-Ortega:the thing
Andy Crouch:you want. We have no obligations to them morally. Why do we want them? Jamie says this and I think this is very important. There is a power at work in the world that Jesus gives us the proper name for that is not just its generic description, but it's the name like your parent would give you a name.
Andy Crouch:Its name is mammon. And mammon is the principle of using the material things of the world to get power such that you can get whatever you want without responsibility, duty, obligation, and certainly not love. And I really believe if you ask why are technologies deployed, they are not deployed. They aren't even deployed consistently because they'll make our lives better. Because if that were the case, when Meta, as it's called now, or Facebook as it was for many years, got the first bit of research, internal research, well validated that its own products were doing harm to the self image of teenage girls, the whole system would have been like, Woah, woah, woah, we've got to change this.
Andy Crouch:Clearly something's wrong. And there were people in Meta who wanted to do that. But the system as a whole was like, we're going to disregard that. We're going to suppress that. We're going to stop doing that research.
Andy Crouch:Why? Because it's more profitable to do what we're doing. We don't have these technologies pockets because they are good for us. We have them in our pockets because they are good for mammon, for the principle of gaining wealth and power through the material things of the world and by disregarding the obligations of love. So, those are my riffs on what I hear there.
Andy Crouch:It also makes you realize the stakes here are I wrote a book called The Tech Wise Family that's been widely read. I'm so glad. I'm really glad for all the influence it's had. But the only thing I don't like about it is when people say, Oh, Andy wrote a really good book about screen time limits for kids. I'm like, That is not what I was trying to write about.
Andy Crouch:The game is so much bigger. First of it's not just about the kids. The kids want their parents to have screen time limits. If you ask the kids, they're like, I wish my parents would put down their phone and talk But to it's not even about the screens. It's about what are we after in this world who's whispering in our ear?
Andy Crouch:Because I define the demonic that is the spiritual powers that rebel against God as a will with a whisper. The demonic is not able to kind of directly take over the created world because they don't have bodies. But what they can do is whisper in our ears and say, Wouldn't you like to have power? Wouldn't you like life to be easy? Wouldn't you like to not have to love in order to get what you want?
Andy Crouch:The communal question
Camille Hall-Ortega:Wouldn't for you like all the knowledge?
Andy Crouch:Yes, exactly. And of course there's a whisper that one story says, our parents heard and took the bait, which was 'Wouldn't you like to be like God, knowing good and evil? Wouldn't you like the tree of the knowledge?
Camille Hall-Ortega:And
Andy Crouch:we've got to decide, no, I don't want any good thing without becoming a different kind of person who is able to handle it. And that will mean ultimately becoming fully transformed by love. To handle all the good this world could offer me, I have to become entirely formed by love. And there's no shortcuts. And we have to become the kind of people who say, I'm not interested in the shortcut.
Andy Crouch:Don't want your
Camille Hall-Ortega:form Yeah. I think it's so important. Jamie gets at something here. Of course, there's so much there, but this idea of this being a communal dynamic. And I think about, you know, in sort of these practical terms, when I apply the same logic to the use of technology, I think about the fact that there we have all adopted these technologies in ways that would make it difficult for me just to say, I'm going to stay off my phone.
Camille Hall-Ortega:I'm going to stay off my phone. My mom would have a problem with me staying off my phone for a full day. Right? Like Kathy Hall is gonna be like, You didn't call me back. Right?
Camille Hall-Ortega:There is this necessarily inherently communal dynamic at play here where we don't make that decision in a vacuum.
Marcus Goodyear:No. Yeah, this is a social compact we're in. My wife and I fantasize about getting a flip phone and we're like, Wait a minute, we would lose our authenticator apps. I would lose podcasts. I mean, you know, I do love podcasts.
Marcus Goodyear:I would I wouldn't be able to text people. That's kind of the least of my problems. But I've experienced this over the last three years as I've been biking to work because I got rid of my car. My family has a car, but I bike to work all the time. And let me tell you, it is it's stressful.
Andy Crouch:Well, I think you guys are so right. I mean, John Hyde and others have have raised the salience of this phrase collective action problems, you know, because that is what smartphones are with kids, which is what John is working on in particular. So, I think there's, you know, I would say it's both like it. I think there's bad news and good news. So the bad news is indeed, we're all kind of implicated in this and it's very hard to extricate yourself, especially when mom's sending the text message.
Andy Crouch:The good news though I think is we can redesign. I really think we can redesign and it's not about the things, it's about the processes and the assumptions and the dreams we're chasing with these things. In the Life We're Looking For', the most recent book, I talk about the difference between devices which I would use for all the technology that kind of lets us off the hook, you might say, being human and does things for us. But there's another kind of very high-tech stuff, which I call instruments, which can be very technologically advanced, but keep human beings fully engaged with each other in the world. And we can absolutely start kind of insisting, you could say, as consumers or as users or purchasers, I only want this if I can use it to be human.
Andy Crouch:And we need a worldwide, better do it quickly because it's only getting harder, redesign of what we're expecting these things to do. And I don't think that's out of reach, but it does require a new imagination and the will to say, Hey, mom, let's figure out how we can stay in touch, but I need to not be at the mercy of my device, so how will we do it? You figure that out with your family, with your coworkers, But we have to have the desire to live human lives again. That's sort of why I write what I write.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yes. Well, thank you for doing that. Yeah. Andy, as we're nearing a close here, we have referenced it and made nods to it throughout, but I would love to know if you have any more to say about whether there is a unique issue or need for people of faith to really tackle this issue of overuse of technology. Is there nuance here specifically for people of faith and overuse I of
Andy Crouch:think actually one of the cool things, if you could say that about some of the discontent with technology, is how broadly shared it is. There are other issues on which I, as a person of faith, am really concerned, but my neighbor who may not share my faith actually isn't concerned at all about it or maybe on the other side. On this issue, we're kind of all on the same side. We all feel like something's wrong. We all feel like something needs to be redesigned.
Andy Crouch:I think that's a beautiful moment of solidarity and opportunity for a kind of dialogue about what is to be human and what really matters that we haven't maybe had a reason to have for many years. So I would just say that. But I do believe for those of us who and faith can be a lot of things, but let's say you orient your life around the story told through the Jewish and Christian scriptures of a loving God who comes actually in the flesh and joins our human condition and then sends his spirit such that we can actually share in his divine life, this kind of Trinity story of the Christian faith. There's two things that real resources for addressing the moment we're in. The first is, we have a coherent story of what it is to be human.
Andy Crouch:And by the way, it centers on a human being who called himself using this Hebrew expression, the son of man, which means kind of typifying or the example of. And so, he's saying, If you look at my life, I want you to come to believe that I'm actually showing you the best way to be human. And the fascinating thing is, he did not use any technology, including the ones available to him. The first two technologies in human history in some ways are money and writing. And Jesus of Nazareth, there was apparently a purse of money, but it was carried by the disciples.
Andy Crouch:It was actually carried by the least reliable disciple, Judas. So he didn't care about money. He didn't rely on money. He didn't need money to get done what he got done in the world, his incredibly consequential life. And he didn't write anything down.
Andy Crouch:Other people did, but he himself did not. So the most consequential human life is not one that depends on even the things we consider indispensable. They weren't for him. We've got a story. And also, Marcus, you asked that impossible question, what is love?
Andy Crouch:Well, ultimately to answer that, you got to go find a story that will help you understand And the Christian belief, the Christian claim and offer to the world is this story will tell you. If you want to know what love is, it's everything you thought in More, it's everything you thought in Different, and it's told in this story that starts in Genesis and ends in Revelation. So we've got the story and we've got the example, and not just a theoretical example, but someone who took it all on, all the pain of being human, all the risk. We're recording this in the season of Lent where we pray that in some traditions, this is the one who was tempted in every way like we were, but without falling prey to temptation. He's in it with us, right?
Andy Crouch:So that's amazing. And then the other thing I would say is that human nature abhors a cultural vacuum. So if you say don't do something, like stop checking your social media every five minutes or whatever, you've got to give people something else to do.
Marcus Goodyear:It's miserable. Yeah, that's right.
Andy Crouch:Nothing gives you a more robust way and a community who will do it with you of a different thing to do with your life, a different rhythm to order your life by, a different way of spending your hours, your days, your weeks, than the practice of faith. And this is why people like John Hight, who I've collaborated with on some things, John will very straightforwardly say he doesn't believe in God. He's a very secular person, ethnically Jewish. But John will be the first to say only religious communities are having any different outcomes from anyone. They're the only ones having beneficial outcomes in technology, especially with children, which is what he is working the hardest on.
Andy Crouch:Because religious communities actually can hold together a different way of being human and do it in the face of pressure and when the whole world is doing something different. So ultimately, not just because we're really good people and we band together, but because we inhabit a story that gives us a reason to be a different kind of people, and then gives us a group of people to do it with. So those things are the indispensable contributions that faith makes. The just beautiful thing is that our whole world is hungry for it. And for those of us who believe we're called to share our faith, there's no more amazing time than right now to say, I believe something different, and my community and I are living it out, and come and see.
Andy Crouch:We'd love to have you join us because we think it's the way back to real human life.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Gosh, Andy, that just feels like a perfect place to really wrap up. And anything else we should be on the lookout for coming up for you?
Andy Crouch:Good Well, keep a lookout for our community at Praxis, which is my day job, a community of entrepreneurs and venture builders. Given the topic of this conversation, I'd just say we've got a couple of we call them opportunities for redemptive imagination, where we have whole groups of entrepreneurs working on issues. One is technology and family life, and another is artificial intelligence. We have a redemptive thesis for artificial intelligence, how people actually build on this stuff could think differently about it. You can find that online if you Google Praxis redemptive thesis for artificial intelligence.
Andy Crouch:You'll read how our community is actually building companies with a different kind of vision of Voyages to be Human. So yeah, maybe not so much my own work, but those are the people I collaborate with every day.
Camille Hall-Ortega:I love it. Andy, we're so grateful for your time and for our conversation. This has been awesome. So thank you very much.
Andy Crouch:Such a gift. Thank you both.
Marcus Goodyear:Thank you so much.
Camille Hall-Ortega:The Echoes Podcast is written and produced by Marcus Goodyear, Rob Stinnett, and me, Camille Hall-Ortega. It's edited by Rob Stinnett and Kim Stone. Our executive producers are Patton Dodd and David Rogers. Original music is by Johnny Rogers. Special thanks to our guest today, Andy Crouch.
Camille Hall-Ortega:In addition to the Echoes Podcast, we welcome you to subscribe to Echoes Magazine. You'll receive a beautiful print magazine each quarter, and it's free. You can find a link in our show notes. The Echoes Podcast and Echoes Magazine are both productions brought to you by the H. E.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Butt Foundation. You can learn more about our vision and mission at hebfdn.org.