'Faith can be the current': Aaron Z. Lewis and the intersection of God, earth, and tech

WASHINGTON — Aaron Z. Lewis is a maker.

The early-30s Yale graduate studied psychology and computer science, which might at first seem a strange combo. However, as it turns out, the recent sea change in the tech world has all but made it a necessary intersection for understanding how to navigate artificial intelligence, social media, and the incessant attachment to devices of all kinds.

Oh, and did I mention he’s a Black Catholic?

“I just feel very thankful,” Lewis said of the historically African-American parish of St. Augustine, where he has attended since first seeking out a place to hear gospel music near his home in the U Street/Cardozo neighborhood.

There, in an area once known for its vibrant display of Black culture, enterprise, and social life, Lewis has helped to revitalize a sense of space and place with a unique blend of tech and common-sense community-building.

The U Street Neighborhood Association, which he leads, is part of a collective effort that maintains the Temperance Alley Garden, cofounded in 2020 by Lewis, his partner Josh Morin, and then-housemate Benjamin Haynes.

“Behind the apartment in the alley at the time was just 10,000 square feet of sterile field. It was being mowed down every week, had barbed wire, and was locked up,” said Lewis of TAG, which is maintained by a team that includes Lewis and Morin, a spiritual ecologist.

“It was the beginning of the pandemic, and there wasn't much outdoor gathering space in the neighborhood. So, our roommate figured out who owns it and he worked out an agreement with the developer to let us build a garden on their construction site.”

TAG was once the site of Temperance Court, a row of cheap tenements that housed Black Washingtonians in the early 20th-century. They were demolished under an urban renewal plan in the 1950s, not long before the destruction of the larger neighborhood in the 1968 riots after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

The space in the alleyway later became a parking lot, and only recently has U Street returned to some of its former glory, though no longer as a center of Black culture. 

Lewis moved into the neighborhood in 2020, starting TAG as a short-term project to create community and honor the largely forgotten era of Black D.C. Early funding from the alleyway’s developer helped get the garden off the ground, and it has unexpectedly become a semi-permanent fixture, now in year five of a three-year lease.

“It's still temporary technically,” said Lewis of the thriving green space, which includes planted vegetation as well as gathering areas for meetups, workshops, exercise, and meditation. The USNA has also begun a fellowship program, which helps manage the space’s daily events—which recently included a city council candidates’ forum.

“We do a lot of urban agriculture and traditional farming type of stuff, but then we also have a lot of social events,” Lewis said.

“We got a lot of inbound organizations who want to collaborate on making some type of event happen. We have a lot of music, theater, dance, ecology, and some more civic-oriented stuff. It's a pretty wide range now.”

While the future of TAG is inherently uncertain, the same could be said of the residential development for the property it sits on. Planned for more than a decade, it would bring 15 luxury townhouses to the neighborhood but has yet to get off the ground due to safety concerns.

Meanwhile, as they help run the garden for as long as providence allows, Lewis and Morin co-operate a creative studio, See What’s Under, that brings their creative passions in direct contact with their faith.

Both Catholics, they have developed an artificial intelligence chatbot that bucks the trend of a typical, digitally focused app or large language model. The tool, SaintGPT, was launched by Lewis before he had even officially converted. (He was raised as an evangelical in a Messianic Jewish congregation.)

The tool allows one to “talk” to a saint, ideally while present at a shrine, statue, or memorial, and ask them questions about their life and faith. It also works for those not yet canonized, including the seven African Americans on the path to sainthood. Currently, it is designed for specific use cases, such as at St. Augustine Church in Washington. 

“It comes out of the idea of trying to tether a digital experience to a particular statue in a particular place,” Lewis said, noting that it is counterintuitive in that it demands the kind of physical task AI tools are usually trying to eliminate.

“Instead of just being on your phone alone in your room, the idea is that a statue itself becomes your interface to a digital archive… The goal of the tool is ultimately to draw you out into the world to an encounter with a sacred place.”

SaintGPT is thus at once an innovation possible only with the help of an unproven and often problematic technology, and an attempt at reform of the same science. And like the garden, it makes use of untapped resources for the sake of collective renewal and exploration.

Lewis says this is the thrust of what he and Morin hope to continue to bring to Washington and beyond, with TAG and SaintGPT.

“It kind of sits in the middle of our sweet spot of trying to bring together the digital world and local world, and also the text sphere with the ecological sphere,” he said.

Speaking on the larger project of combating tech fatigue and the growing scourge of digital imbalance, Lewis said it's crucially important for humans to continue to act as masters of technology rather than the other way around.

“It will form you if you're not forming it. It has its own logic and current, and if you don't have a strong countercurrent, you just get swept away,” noted Lewis, who added that the proper response may just involve divine intervention.

“The faith can be that current that goes against the law of these sorts of tools and platforms. In the best cases, that's what the faith and the tradition always does,” he said.

“A new tool gets introduced, it threatens our dignity in some way, and then there has to be a faith-based conversation around what these tools are actually for, and what are we for. The question becomes how we fold these tools into our mission.”

Nate Tinner-Williams is co-founder and editor of Black Catholic Messenger.

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