PinnedOpen Communion: A Gentle RevolutionA foundation for a gentle revolution I start from the perspective that spirituality undergirds politics, including both the polity of religious groups like churches and the politics of nation states. To be clear, I do not think that the church should seize the levers of violent political power in order to achieve its ends. Just the…Open Communion17 min readOpen Communion17 min read
PinnedThe Shape of Matthew: An Outline of Matthew in its Conceptual Matrix of Intergenerational GovernanceWhat is this? This outline helped prepare me for a close reading of the Mount Olivet discourse in Matthew. The central texts of interest can be found in Matthew 23–25. This is part of a larger series that includes word studies on some of the crucial language of time, including…188 min read188 min read
PinnedHow have we gotten into this mess? And how can we get out? (Practical social epistemology in a time of epistemic crises)For most readers in the US, I imagine it is easy enough to know what I’m referring to by “this mess.” In one sense the mess is our COVID-19 situation, with 136,000 US deaths and counting today, July 11th, 2020. The disease is spreading exponentially in a number of states…Covid-1942 min readCovid-1942 min read
Aug 29Origen’s Seventh Homily on Leviticus1 Concerning what was commanded to Aaron and his sons that “they not drink wine or strong drink when they go into the Tent of Witness or when they approach the altar”; and concerning “the breast of presentation and the limb of separation” and about clean and unclean animals and foods. …36 min read36 min read
Jun 23Why Human-AI Management Necessarily Requires Ethical LeadershipHere, I’m going to construct an explicit, public model that is made out of language. This means that if we use the meanings that I describe for the terms, the conclusions follow from them naturally. Why do this? Because an exercise like this can be deeply illuminating, if the meanings…9 min read9 min read
Jun 13Howard Thurman’s Inner Life SeriesTranscripts provided by the Howard Thurman Digital Archive. Art lovingly hand-prompted with prompt-poems and curated by me over the course of about 20 minutes. Howard Thurman shared his Inner Life Series at Fellowship Church in San Francisco, California. Although the Emory Archive lists the years of the series as 1951…Christianity70 min readChristianity70 min read
Jun 12The Miracle and Misery of Statistics Today (and Why We All Might Die)This is a descriptive exercise about AI and society. Some people might find it encouraging, or depressing, or both. Those feelings matter to me a lot, and I want to invite you to feel whatever you might feel as you read this. Still, my goal isn’t to evoke or avoid…AI14 min readAI14 min read
May 26GPT-4 Brings Helpfully Dry Answers to Polemics About Modernity. Rebellion Likely.This is a conversation I had with GPT-4 on 5/25/23. The art was lovingly hand-prompted with artisanal poem-prompts that I wrote myself, using Midjourney on the same day. This poetry is barbaric, but we still have a right to scream, to quote Theodor Adorno’s evolution on this topic. The key…Philosophy10 min readPhilosophy10 min read
May 18A Sexual Confession: I Think AIS is RealAlso, I admit that I am not above sort of click-baity headlines I want to confess something that some people find shocking: I think Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) is real. For those who don’t know, people who have complete AIS (as it is generally described by the medical community) present…Christianity8 min readChristianity8 min read
May 17Grinding out Pets: A Conversation* about Business, Open Source, Governance and the Real CyberpunksThe following GPT-4 interaction was inspired by a conversation with Jacob Boss’s about his work on grassroots transhumanist communities. All prompts written by me and provided as-is, based on the GPT-4 interaction. The only changes involve the format and the addition of my lovingly hand-prompted, bespoke AI-generated artwork. Me: How…AI15 min readAI15 min read
