Carl Trueman on the Effects of Technology on Humanity: CCS-FIRST THINGS Austin Lecture 2026

We are pleased to announce the annual Center for Christian Studies – First Things Lecture, to be held in Austin, Texas, on Monday, August 31, at 7:00 p.m.  This year’s speaker will be the theologian and historian, Carl Trueman.    

We at the Center for Christian Studies are happy to cooperate in this lecture every year with First Things, which is one of the most widely read and influential religious journals in the United States.  First Things shares much in common with CCS, whose mission is to help Christians better understand, practice, and pass on their faith to others, to equip teachers of teachers.

Our speaker, Carl Trueman, is a graduate of the Universities of Cambridge (M.A., Classics) and Aberdeen (Ph.D., Church History). He taught on the faculties of the Universities of Nottingham and Aberdeen before moving to the United States in 2001. In 2017–2018, he was a James Madison Visiting Fellow at Princeton University. Since 2018, he has served as a professor at Grove City College, although for the academic year 2025–26 he is on loan to the University of Notre Dame, where he is the Busch Family Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government. He is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, a Fellow of the Center for Christian Studies, and a Contributing Editor at First Things. He is also an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. His books include John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man; The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self; To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse; and, most recently, The Desecration of Man.

Trueman will be speaking on, “Prometheus Ashamed: Technological Humiliation and the Human Condition.”  He writes, “Man’s exceptional technological ability has at its heart a strange paradox: the greater his achievements, the smaller he becomes in his own eyes.  Indeed, his Promethean aspirations promise to make him into a god and yet have in the last century served to make him often less powerful, less exceptional—perhaps less human—than he has ever been.  This strange phenomenon, dubbed ‘Promethean shame,’ now looks set to reach its apex in the advent of AI.  How should we understand this, and is it an unavoidable part of the technological human condition?”

The evening lecture and refreshments to follow will be hosted at the University Avenue Church of Christ in downtown Austin.  Admission to the lecture is free, but we ask that you RSVP at https://www.christian-studies.org/event-details/firstthings, and consider donating here to help subsidize lecture expenses (we suggest $20 per person).  Free parking will be available in the church lot and across the street at the AT&T garage. 

See here for parking details.

RSVP for the CCS-FT 2026 lecture

Click here to give a gift to support this annual lecture