Happy New Year. No single theme, in this post, but a few observations. Hell You may have figured out I’ve not presented a linear theme development from post to post lately. Just before Christmas I was working on a writing project and the topic of hell naturally came up. What a topic for the holidays. I didn’t […]
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Hell
Here I am right at the height of the holidays, and I’m thinking about hell. A few months ago I started re-reading Dante’s Inferno. I got about a third through and it wasn’t clicking very well, I felt I must be missing something. So I paused, did a little reading about the book instead of […]
Read more...Martyr
A few days ago I saw in one of my news feeds an odd story about an American who approached North Sentinel Island by himself and was killed by the natives. Almost nothing is known about the natives, but “the Sentinelese keep to themselves and are known to act hostile to outsiders,” read the report, […]
Read more...Folksy Automatons
I heard a strangely interesting monologue on NPR on Sunday, November 18, 2018. I tried, but I couldn’t find a reference to it online anywhere. Either google failed me or I imagined the whole thing. The pre-announcement was that the writer was going to explain why he didn’t believe in free will. I thought […]
Read more...Sonoran Rhapsody
Yes, I’m capitalizing on the similarly-titled movie playing now, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but the story I’ll tell is quite the opposite of that one. Imagine a little boy of barely eight, who I’ll call “David” because that’s his name. The year is 2001. We take a trip out west, from our home in Georgia. Just […]
Read more...Creation
In Absence, I concluded with this: The end of this life comes gently or harshly, but it comes, and the question then will be whether we overcame the silent absence of ourselves from God with understanding and patience; whether we have been successful at seeing God in His creation despite our absence from Him while we are […]
Read more...Deified State
A review of Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi, and some thoughts. Eboli is not the disease, it’s a little village in southern Italy. In that part of the world at mid-20th century, they would say Christ stopped at the next village south, Eboli (pronounced probably A-boll-e), as a way of saying civilization did […]
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Christian Wiman, from his book My Bright Abyss: “On the radio I hear a famous novelist praising his father for enduring a long, difficult dying without ever ‘seeking relief in religion.’ It is clear from the son’s description that the father was in absolute despair, and that as those cold waters closed over him he […]
Read more...Funny Computer
Some follow-up on “Artificial Intelligence,” plus some odds and ends. I wrote about “Artificial Intelligence” a couple of weeks ago, putting the phrase in quotes so I could say we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that what these machines do, does not include actual “intelligence” in the way human beings have intelligence. We shouldn’t assume […]
Read more...“Artificial Intelligence”
What the words mean It seems like there’s a new article or book almost weekly on the coming impact of Artificial Intelligence. The phrase, “artificial intelligence,” has always been puzzling to me, however, and I think we should stop and consider it, the more so if the phenomenon it denotes is actually introducing a disruptive […]
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