This week, as part of our Advent celebration, we light a candle representing our prayers for peace. In lighting this candle, we are reminded that Christ was born into a world shaped by fear, occupation, and political violence. Yet the longing for peace is not only ancient — it is also deeply and painfully present.
We cannot talk of peace without remembering that Ukraine enters yet another winter under bombardment, the shadows lengthen not only over cities and villages but also over the moral imagination of the world. Ukraine is not a symmetrical conflict. They did not ask for war. They did not invade a neighbor. They are fighting for survival and sovereignty.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is quite personal for photojournalist Julia Kochetova who has observed the war through her camera lens. In interviews and public statements about her work, she has emphasized that photographing war is not simply about capturing destruction but about naming the human cost. Her camera becomes a way of resisting the anonymity that violence imposes. She says her vocation is to “tell the truth about people’s lives,” because in war, truth itself becomes a contested territory.
Kochetova has also reflected on the ways ordinary Ukrainians have learned to survive amid relentless threat—observing that families, children, and elderly neighbors now instinctively listen for the difference between incoming artillery, the buzz of a drone, or the whine of a missile. It is not a skill anyone seeks to acquire; it is one imposed by necessity.
The ability to distinguish sounds is not poetry, nor hyperbole—it is the grim education of life under bombardment. In a world where drones and remote-guided munitions can be deployed without ever seeing the face of a victim, those who live beneath them must become experts in the machinery of their own endangerment.
Here, the moral dimension intersects with the technological one. Many drones used in modern warfare incorporate AI-assisted systems—such as pattern recognition, autonomous flight stabilization, or target-selection algorithms — that influence who suffers. Violence is mediated by machines that accelerate choices, obscure responsibility, and widen the distance between the one who orders the strike and the one whose life is destroyed by it.
In our companion book for this series, Mark Coeckelbergh calls this the “moral distance” problem: when killing becomes easier because it becomes less personal.
Kochetova’s body of work, paired with testimony from other journalists in Ukraine, reveals something else: the targeting of civilians is no accident. Modern warfare often treats cruelty as a strategy—destroying homes, schools, power stations, hospitals—not only to weaken an enemy militarily but to break their will, identity, and future. Photojournalists on the ground witness this first-hand. They move through the rubble after the cameras of the world have turned away. They tell the stories that no algorithm will ever understand.
U.S. photojournalist Lynsey Addario speaks candidly about the emotional cost of her work. Addario has family she longs to see. She misses birthdays and holidays. She fears for friends on the front line. She has said in various interviews that the hardest part of photographing war is not the danger but the knowledge that many of the people she photographs today may not be alive tomorrow. This is what proximity to suffering looks like—not an abstract moral puzzle, but the weight of real human faces carried home at the end of the day.
Hopefully, their testimonies slow us down and cause us to look again. They force us to face what distance—political, geographical, or technological—makes easy to ignore. And this is where the themes of Artificial Christmas meet the lived experience of those caught in war.
In a world where machines can listen, track, and target without compassion, and where violence can be carried out by screens instead of soldiers, we need something more than a superficial or sentimental peace. We need a peace that restores human presence. A peace that refuses to treat people as abstractions. A peace rooted in justice, dignity, and truth.
Stories like these remind us that peace is not an abstraction. It has faces. It has graves. It has mothers, fathers, children, and elders who bear the marks of decisions made far from their homes.
At the heart of this war is the use of AI-assisted targeting systems—software designed to identify patterns, movements, or heat signatures and determine, in real time, who or what should be struck. Some systems can track a single vehicle for hours or identify a “high-value target” using facial recognition scraped from social media. The line between surveillance and attack has collapsed.
This technology is often described as “precision warfare,” promising fewer civilian deaths. But the promises rarely hold, since warfare increasingly targets civilians deliberately—not as accidents, but as strategy. Cruelty becomes policy. The result is not simply the destruction of buildings but the erosion of moral norms that govern how nations relate to the vulnerable.
When AI speeds up the process—when a drone receives a new target in seconds rather than hours—technology does not produce peace. It simply accelerates harm.
The struggle to restrain violence is as old as Scripture. Before there were armies or weapons forged in fire, Cain rose up and killed his own brother. The first recorded act of violence required no technology at all—only the tragic capacity of humanity to turn against itself. And yet, as history unfolded, we learned how to shape metal into blades, blades into weapons, and weapons into instruments of terror.
God breaks through the artificial.
The prophets confronted this reality head-on. They cried out not only for the end of war but for the transformation of the human heart and the tools it creates. It is into this world—our world—that the angels proclaim “peace on earth” to the shepherds in Luke’s Gospel, and Isaiah envisions a day when nations will beat their swords into plowshares.
This is the world in which we light the candle of peace. And into this world Scripture speaks.
Luke tells us that the birth of Jesus was first announced not to commanders or diplomats but to shepherds, people far from the levers of political power. The angels proclaimed: “Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth.” This proclamation was not wishful thinking. It was a declaration that God’s reign interrupts the violence of our world with a different kind of power. God breaks through the artificial.
Isaiah then lifts our eyes toward a future rooted in God’s justice: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares…nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Isaiah 2:4).
He will settle disputes among great nations. They will hammer their swords into plows and their spears into pruning knives. Nations will never again go to war, never prepare for battle again.
Isaiah 2:1-5
This is not a call to naïveté. Isaiah understands warfare intimately. His vision is radical precisely because it confronts reality. The transformation he describes—turning weapons into tools for life—is a transformation of purpose, not merely metal. God breaks through the artificial.
The Prophet Micah echoes the same hope: a world in which people sit under their own vines and fig trees, unafraid; a world where weaponry is no longer the organizing principle of national identity.
These texts do not deny the brutality of the world. They speak into it. They name a peace that is not coerced but cultivated, not imposed but embodied.
If Scripture offers the vision, our age confronts the question: How do we live toward that vision when our tools and technologies can be used for both harm and healing? This question leads us into the ethical terrain of technology—ancient and modern.
Long before artificial intelligence existed, humanity struggled with the dual use of technology. The blacksmith’s forge could shape a plow or a sword. The question was never whether metal could be formed, but for what purpose and in whose hands.
Our companion book, AI Ethics, reminds us that technology does not possess morality on its own. Human intention shapes the outcome. Without justice, “precision” becomes a more efficient form of cruelty. Without accountability, automation magnifies the impulses of whoever wields it.
Isaiah’s image of beating swords into plowshares is not a mandate to abandon tools, but to redeploy them toward flourishing. The prophetic imagination pushes us to imagine drones that deliver medicine rather than missiles, algorithms that track missing persons rather than amplify disinformation, and data systems that protect children rather than monitor dissidents.
And it challenges us to resist the seductive idea that peace can be achieved by forcing the vulnerable to accept injustice. For Ukrainians, the question is painfully real: Can peace be called peace if it requires them to lose their home, their language, or their freedom? Scripture’s answer is clear—peace without justice is not God’s peace.
These reflections bring us to the core of Advent: not simply observing the world as it is, but preparing ourselves for the world God intends. Advent is the season when we choose hope in the midst of sorrow, when we acknowledge the world’s wounds without surrendering to them. When we practice the waiting that forms moral courage.
Artificial Christmas challenges us to examine how our tools shape our souls. Our digital habits, our engagement with news, our trust in algorithms, and our fears of the future all influence how we understand peace. Yet Christ calls us to a peace made of courage and compassion, not complacency.
In Christ, God enters a world ruled by violence and chooses vulnerability. In Christ, God reveals that justice is not a distant dream but a lived commitment. And in Christ, God invites us to join the work of reshaping our world—one tool, one decision, one act of compassion at a time.
May this Advent transform our imagination and our use of technology, so that we become people who not only pray for peace but practice it. People who look honestly at Ukraine’s suffering and refuse to avert our gaze. People who resist imitation light and walk toward the Light that the darkness cannot overcome.
Remember, that God breaks through the artificial.
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Pastor Tommy
Dr. Mark Coeckelbergh, AI Ethics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020. (ISBN 9780262538190).
Sofia Sereda. Translated by Olesia Storozhuk. “The Impossible Picture.” © What about Ukraine newsletter, 32nd edition, May 30, 2024. Link.
Sam Fragoso. “War Photographer Lynsey Addario Still Has Hope.” © NPR Fresh Air, Dec 2, 2025. Link.