"The Lord knows our human thoughts; how like a puff of wind they are." (Psalm 94:11)
kwh Last night my husband and I saw Passages. It’s our fifth film at a theater in six weeks, which is a record for us, not only post-pandemic but for our entire relationship. We’ve always liked “going to the movies,” but never did it quite as often as we have been doing recently, and frankly I … Read more
Maybe the real AI was the stupid things we made along the way. Richard Beck on the subversive nature of the Bible: It “denies the ultimacy” of any political system (we are not citizens of this world), the prophetic tradition opposes oppression and injustice, and the themes throughout the scripture are about emancipation, liberation. Beck … Read more
“Got a special celebration on your parish calendar? A.I. can compose a unique hymn for the occasion!” Is this satire? I’ve very recently started reading David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament as part of my morning routine, usually a chapter at a time. Reading the gospel as something both familiar and strange has … Read more
Resuming my read-through of Jacques Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World. I got sidetracked for a while with life, vacation, other writings and readings. There is still quite a bit of Chapter 1 to muddle through. In my last post, I mentioned Ellul’s contention that the world is now so interconnected that all of us … Read more
Iain McGilchrist, in describing the left hemisphere of the brain, could just as easily be describing ChatGPT based on multiple reported experiences with the LLM, which is somehow worrying: “It is demonstrably self-deceiving and confabulates — makes up a story, when it cannot understand something, and tells it with conviction … It is not reasonable. … Read more
Yes, It Is Nothing But what does this mean, what am I to do, or what is the effort that can be said to seek, to aspire to God’s kingdom? Shall I see about getting a positioncommensurate with my talents and abilities in order to be effective in it? No, you shall first seek God’s … Read more
This starts out interesting and ends in complete and total absurdity. Yes: stop whining on your Discord server, go to your local parish, and say, “If everyone is welcome, then welcome me and people like me.” Uh, no: don’t chase people out of the parish and onto the sidewalk while screaming, “You shall not lie … Read more
Seems to me that the sort of people who sneer at “old books” are the same sort of people who might find it a reasonable idea to use artificial intelligence to “understand reality.” “Nothing anyone is saying is necessarily wrong; it’s just not interesting.” (Adam Kotsko on moralism in cultural criticism) Finished reading Howards End … Read more
So now I’m thinking about reading Eric Ambler, because he fits right in with the mild enthusiasm I’ve developed in middle age for 20th century thriller writers. Not only the sublime, like Graham Greene, who I’ve been slowly reading over the last five or six years, but the completely forgotten, like Helen MacInnes, several of … Read more
Yesterday’s Old Testament reading turned out to be the Sacrifice of Isaac, and hearing it read aloud in church for the first time since my experience with Fear & Trembling earlier this year made me realize how much of an impact SK’s book had on me. Murderer, I thought. Six episodes, about fifteen minutes each … Read more