Aristotle called friendship a virtue. Mark Zuckerberg made “friending” a verb. Next up: AI companions—What happens when they listen better than your fellow Christians?

Loneliness is being called an epidemic, even as we’re “connected” all day. Online spaces reward hot takes over hospitality, and friendship gets flattened into a friend request, a feed, or a follower count. Meanwhile, Jesus’ most personal message was a passionate prayer for friendship. How can Christians recover real, virtue-shaped friendship in an age of hyper-connected loneliness—when AI affirms us, social media tribalizes us, and smartphones stick closer than a brother?

Chris and Adam trace friendship as a virtue through Scripture and classic and contemporary voices, then weigh modern tech against what friendship actually requires: presence, trust, humility, and a shared pursuit of the good.

In This Episode

• Did social media’s rise lead to friendship’s decline?

• Why Jesus put friendship—more than family—at the heart of the Church

• Aristotle’s three kinds of friendship: the useful, the pleasurable, and “of the good.”

• Friendship killers—the vices of slander, reproach, betrayal, sloth, and codependence

• Historical deep dives—how a new technology drove the social platforms of the 17th century, spawned new friendships, and gave us the world’s oldest magazine

• AI companions—their comfort, their stigma, and what Christians could learn from their example

• Chris and Adam reflect on whether friendship is a vice or a virtue in their own lives

Links

• Stanley Hauerwas, The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson. Buy a copy and read along with us!

• Mark Vernon micro-podcast lectures “Aristotle’s philosophy of friendship”

• U.S. Surgeon General advisory on loneliness and social connection (pdf)

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

• Cicero, On Friendship

• Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship

• The story of Joseph Addison and Dick Steele’s The Spectator

Talk Back

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  Image: Detail from François Venant's "The Parting of David and Jonathan"

Can we live humbly and still post that photo on Instagram? In the digital age, humility isn't so straightforward. With the smartphone at our fingertips, is pride just one selfie away?

Many of tech’s biggest names have been anything but humble. Tesla, Edison, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Musk. Does that mean their inventions will re-make us in their image? Or is there a way to hold humility in one hand and our smartphones in the other?

Drawing from Christian wisdom, Greek virtues, and modern theologians, Adam and Chris look for the borderland between pride and pusillanimity, between vainglory and self-abasement. And they explore how those borders are shifting thanks to social media, smartphones, and artificial intelligence.

• The AC/DC battle between Tesla and Edison, and what Frank Lloyd Wright said under oath
• The many shades of pride: ambition, autonomy, conceit, domination, vanity, and more!
• Aristotle’s concept of magnanimity
• Why you can’t have humility without Christianity, Stanley Hauerwas says
• Newsfeeds and the vainglorious “love of novelty”
• Chris and Adam’s reflections on pride and humility in their own lives

• We’re using the list of virtues from Stanley Hauerwas and his book, The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson. Buy a copy and read along with us!
• Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics
• Rebecca Konyndyk Deyoung’s Glittering Vices
• More on Edison v Tesla
• “The Virtues of Pride and Humility: A Survey” - Robert C. Roberts
• “Beware Our Tower of Babel” by John Walton

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The word "temperance" may make us think of prohibition, but this virtue isn't some outdated legislation. Today's technologies are creating all new challenges. Should we be prohibiting them now?

It’s the season of Virtues! We’re exploring the old-school virtue of Temperance—including how a technology in the 1800s changed the course of American politics, spawned hundreds of Christian organizations and even changed the US constitution!

Plus, why ice cream could be an moral issue.

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• How virtue ethics can be understood through parenting
• What it could mean to be “temperate” in our social media and smartphone usage
• How temperance could change the way humans use A.I.

THE WILLARD FOUNTAIN.Children Invited to Contribute Their Mite to the Fund for This Gift.The commission for “Willard Fountain.” which is to be a gift to the city of Chicago from children all over the world connected with the Loyal Temperance Legion Department of the World’s W.C.T.U.,…All money raised should be sent to Miss Anna Gordon, Evanston, Ill., and it is earnestly desired that little people everywhere should be impressed with the thought that the mission of love and money which they might perform by giving a cup of cold water to men who might otherwise be drawn into the saloon, can be carried out by this patient little figure, which will never grow “weary in welldoing.” It rests with them to send their pennies if they would be thus represented.

Cold Water Girl Fountain—Chicagology

…the self indulgent man is so called because he is pained more than he ought at not getting pleasant things (even his pain being caused by pleasure), and the temperate man is so called because he is not pained at the absence of what is pleasant and at his abstinence from it.The self-indulgent man, then, craves for all pleasant things or those that are most pleasant, and is led by his appetite to choose these at the cost of everything else; hence he is pained both when he fails to get them and when he is merely craving for them (for appetite involves pain); but it seems absurd to be pained for the sake of pleasure. —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

• We’re using the list of virtues from Stanley Hauerwas and his book, The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson. Buy a copy and read along with us!

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