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Book Discussion Series– Shadowing St. Francis: A Pilgrimage of Sacred Emergence in the Age of AI

February 24 @ 8:00 pm - 9:00 pm
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Join Rev. Natalie online for a six-week discussion on Tuesday evenings as we read Shadowing St. Francis: A Pilgrimage of Sacred Emergence in the Age of AI by Jonathan Bentley. We will discuss the beginning through Act I for our first meeting, and then approximately 50 pages a week from there. If you are interested in joining this discussion group (or miss a meeting and want to get caught up), email Rev. Natalie at nperkins@middlechurch.org. You can register here.

About the book (from Barnes and Noble):

What if orthodoxy is dead and AI knows why?

A barefoot monk, a broken church, and an open future.
A retired tech entrepreneur. Fifty years as a committed evangelical. A decade of questions he couldn’t outrun. And a 120-mile pilgrimage through Italy that changed everything.
Shadowing St. Francis follows Jonathan Bentley from Florence to Assisi to Rome, walking the ancient path of a man who stripped naked in the town square, handed his clothes to his father, and walked into the woods to find God.
Eight hundred years later, Francis of Assisi still has something to say to those exhausted by certainty, wounded by the church, and wondering what faith looks like in a world of algorithms and anxiety.

This book is for you if you:

  • You’re wondering about AI and how it will affect and what it means to be human
  • Want to know what Saint Francis has to say to our times
  • Have been hurt by weaponized religion
  • You’ve given up on church but not on Jesus
  • Are wondering about AI and whether it will it help or hurt us

What you’ll find inside:

– A memoir of spiritual reconstruction not based on creeds and doctrine
– An introduction to Open and Relational Theology-a God who walks with us rather than scripting our lives
– Reflections on St. Francis as a guide for post-evangelical faith
– An unexpected conversation between ancient mysticism and artificial intelligence

Praise for Shadowing St. Francis:

“Profoundly hopeful… Bentley’s storytelling gives theology a human face.”
-Thomas Jay Oord, author of Open and Relational Theology
“This is a book for question-askers and those who suspect that the gospel might be wider and wilder than we’ve been told.”
-Keri Ladouceur, Executive Director & Co-Founder, Post Evangelical Collective
“You cannot think your way to God. In this pilgrimage, ideas are not argued but lived-textured with doubt, humor, longing, and faith.”
-Samantha Beach Kiley, co-author of Next Sunday

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