This is a play on the Public Service Announcement I heard from time to time growing up in the in the later 60s and mid-70s. “It’s 10 PM. Do you know where your children are?” You’re going to think this blog is about autism or Asperger’s when it’s really about AI. Continue reading
I’ve had my eye on this “church” ever since they bought the building Kohls vacated, tore half of it down, and rebuilt a big box to replace the big box retailer that was there. This really is a Big Box Church. I use ‘church’ in the broadest sense that can be used. There is not one single thing, object, or art in the movie theater auditorium indicating this is a sanctuary, a holy place, a refuge. No altar, no cross, no pulpit, no lectern. It did have the markers of today’s nondenominational churches. Huge screens, big band, big sound, and lots of light action. They had the markers of Big Evangelical too. Many pastors almost all of them interchangeable with the Big Kahuna. But then something curious happened. Continue reading
This Good Friday blog had its genesis in my pastor’s remark in a Lenten sermon, but it sprung to life while on a walk somedays later. The first sermonic thought I had had in 15 months. No exaggeration. Before retirement, I had thought my mind would be pungent, abundant, extravagant with sermon ideas from the lack of preparing them. But nothing, nada, zip, zero in over a year. Then like the exploding in heaven purple tree in Robin William’s 1998 film “What Dreams May Come”, BOOM! There it was. Continue reading
The above is the title of Harper’s July 2024 issue. I sure don’t hear many raising this hue and cry. According to Benjamín Labatut’s essay “The God’s of Logic – Before and after artificial intelligence”, we ought to be listening to Geoffrey Hinton. Labatut says Hinton is widely considered the godfather of AI who “has mutated from an evangelist of a new form of reason into a prophet of doom.” He himself credits the change to “the realization that we had in fact, not replicated our intelligence, but created a superior one” (28). Continue reading
I heard my mother-in-law say now and again that she ‘suspicioned’ this or that. I always thought that was a made up word. My Merriam-Webster says it is a word though they consider it “chiefly dialectal”. I always liked the word because you knew what it meant and it was apropos to many things. Continue reading
The Satellite News Network (SNC) debuted in 1982 with this slogan. It would be more accurate to say that if you give them 18 minutes they will give you their world, the world as they see it, believe it, edit it. The internet does that instantaneously and overwhelmingly. Continue reading
Again, I don’t go browsing, surfing, or shopping the web for Communion Statements. Something else brought me to St. Paul Lutheran Church & Early Childhood Ministry, Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, Columbus, IN. Once there I checkd out their Sunday bulletin, and you won’t believe what I found… Continue reading
You know the adage that history is written by the winners. Well, it’s re-written by the losers. Solzhenitsyn points out in one of his books on the Gulag that the Soviets removed from their history ¾ of what really happened. Like the embarrassing mutinies. Those uprising became myths within 15 or even 10 years. “No wonder some say that there was no Christ, no Buddha, no Mohammed. Then you’re dealing in thousands of years” (Gulag 3, 228). But today I think the history is being re-written by what historically is the lowest rung on the intellectual ladder – fiction writers. Continue reading
