A meandering book that explores the connections between technology and religion. This was a nice read immediately after Riskin’s The Restless Clock, from which this book quotes liberally, and I think of it as an extension of that book’s central thesis: the “shadow history” of a world filled with things containing inner agency, counterpoised against the standard post-Cartesian view of a passive, mechanistic world, finds expression here in developments in philosophy, science, and technology, particularly that of AI. I especially liked O’Gieblyn’s analogy between the “nominalist” God of Calvin whose nature is completely alien to us and the machine learning algorithms that run of our modern world, both of whom fail to provide us with explanations for their dictates.