The Question of Formation and the Virtues of the Digital Future

On Wednesday, March 4, 2026, Dr. Antón Barba-Kay gave a public lecture at Christian Study Center. Dr. Barba-Kay is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Practical Ethics at UC San Diego, and a Fellow at the Carr-Ryan Center at Harvard.

Virtues are forms of habitual excellence. They are coherent responses of character to some stable set of threats, challenges, and temptations. But what becomes of the notion of virtue when we inhabit technological and social circumstances that are changing more quickly than we know what to do with? How should we approach the task of educating children to adulthood and forming human beings within a world that is increasingly unable to imagine the long term? Dr. Barba-Kay ventures some thoughts on these questions based on his experience teaching at Deep Springs College and offers some suggestions for formulating virtues suited to a time of deep disruption and uncertainty.

Speaker bio

Dr. Barba-Kay is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Practical Ethics at UC San Diego, and a Fellow at the Carr-Ryan Center at Harvard. He received his PhD in 2013 from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago; he has been Associate Professor of Philosophy at Catholic University and Robert Aird Chair of Humanities at Deep Springs College. In addition to his scholarly publications in nineteenth-century German philosophy, his essays about culture and technology have appeared in The New Republic, The Atlantic, The New Atlantis, The Hedgehog Review, and The Point, among other magazines. A Web of Our Own Making–his book about what the internet is and what a difference it makes–was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press.Dr. Barba-Kay ventures some thoughts on these questions based on his experience teaching at Deep Springs College and offers some suggestions for formulating virtues suited to a time of deep disruption and uncertainty.

This event is made possible by the John Templeton Foundation.

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