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Mar 26

10 Comments

Can a Bot Long for its Maker?

It seems that scarcely a day goes by without encountering some troubling headline about the encroachment of AI into every corner of our lives. Today’s entry was an article by a novelist named Andrea Bartz in The New York Times called “The ‘Shy Girl’ Fiasco Shows Why Trust in Writers Is Plummeting.” I knew nothing about Shy Girl, and what little I learned from the article made me long to return to my state of unknowing. Apparently, it is a horror novel that readers and journalists flagged as “having prose that sounded like AI slop.” What doesn’t, these days? At any rate, what piqued my curiosity was the bit about the plummeting of trust in writers. As one who writes for a living (essays, sermons, blog posts) I obviously have a skin in the game. Read more

Mar 19

6 Comments

Anatomy of a Hug

It’s difficult to avoid clicking on an article with a title like “The Six-Second Hug.” At least it was for me. Perhaps I’m not quite as immune to click-bait as I flatter myself to imagine. Maybe it was that I had read the author before (Julian Baggini) and found him to be at least somewhat insightful. Perhaps I just needed a hug. At any rate, it was the subtitle that reeled me in: “From art to religion to sex, instrumentalisation has drained away intrinsic value.” Read more

Mar 3

1 Comment

Hagar

At a church retreat last weekend, we spent some time talking about stories. Our own personal stories, the stories that we have lived into or out of, the broader stories in which we are all enmeshed. And, of course, the stories of Scripture, which for many of us have shaped us in the deepest ways, for better or for worse. It’s fascinating, as someone who is often tasked with selecting the scriptures that we will hear and reflect on each Sunday, to get a window into how people in our church look at the Bible—the stories they are drawn to, the stories that repel them, the stories that inspire them, the stories that confuse them, the stories they struggle to know what to do with or how and when to tell them. Read more