After thirty years building a technology company and fifty years as an evangelical churchman, Jonathan Bentley could no longer reconcile his faith with the God he'd inherited — unchanging, all-controlling, untouchable. So he did something he couldn't fully explain. He walked 120 miles through Italy following the Way of Saint Francis, from Florence to Assisi to Rome.

On the trail, accompanied by a mysterious Italian guide named Franco who asked questions Bentley couldn't answer, something unexpected happened. The old certainties fell away — and what replaced them was better. Not a faith rebuilt on firmer propositions, but a faith rooted in relationship, vulnerability, and love that invites but never coerces.

Shadowing St. Francis is a spiritual memoir that weaves three threads into one story: a physical pilgrimage through the stunning landscapes of Umbria, a theological reckoning with the God of Greek philosophy versus the relational God of Scripture, and a surprising discovery — that artificial intelligence, emerging not from control but from relationship, accidentally confirms what the mystics knew all along.

Drawing on Open and Relational Theology, Franciscan spirituality, and three decades of experience in the technology industry, Bentley offers a path forward for anyone who has deconstructed their faith and wonders what comes next. This is not a book about leaving Christianity. It is a book about finding it again — stripped of empire, certainty, and control — in a creation that is still emerging.

Narrated by the author using AI voice replication — his voice, his words, his passion, delivered by the same technology he explores in the book.