Freedom

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This year has been marked by small clusters of holidays.  I wrote about Friday the 13th, St. Valentine’s Day, and President’s Day occurring the same weekend back in February.  Then in March, I noted we had a second Friday the 13th, the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day.  Here in June we find another cluster as today is Juneteenth—an important holiday finally recognized—and Sunday is both the summer solstice and Father’s Day.  Now, Father’s Day is always a conflicted day for me.  My father was largely absentee, and an alcoholic when present and accounted for.  For many of my childhood years we didn’t know where he was.  I always have difficulty feeling mad at him, though, because his self-sabotage wasn’t malicious in any way.  He was a man overwhelmed by what life threw at him.  Besides, mothers, it seems to me, give a lot more of themselves than fathers do.  But today’s Juneteenth.

Photo by Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash

Those with skin darker than pink folk have a more difficult time in the society we’ve built.  With open racism in the White House the struggle has been set back many years.  One thing I sometimes feel personally, having grown up poor, is that disadvantage of any kind is difficult to overcome.  Who, after all, seeks to make friends with someone who’s poor?  What’s the advantage in that?  Sometimes capitalism seems to be the ultimate evil where even people are commodities to be sold.  Human Resources, we call it.  Human capital.  Human assets.  Meanwhile our economic system has birthed us all a new trillionaire just a few days ago.  Juneteenth is an important reminder.  Human beings are not chattels to be bought and sold.  How people who’d ever read the gospels could allow that, I simply can’t fathom.

These holiday clusters occur now and again, like the alignment of the planets along the ecliptic.  They give us time to pause and ponder.  Are we really going the right direction?  Are we lost and unwilling to admit it?  Deep down, all but sociopaths know that all people deserve fair treatment.  Some people are unable to take care of themselves.  Juneteenth reminds us that simply seeing them as some “other,” some “not me,” and steeling ourselves against their needs is a high moral infraction.  It’s close kin to murder.  We are the ones who built this system.  We have the power to change it.  Juneteenth reminds us that anyone who openly, or even discreetly, believes that one race is better than another has no business telling others what to do.  The longest day is coming, if only we’d use it to consider what we’re doing.

Forever Young

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It’s strange.  People my age (and younger) are retiring.  It’s strange because in my head I’m still a teenager.  The mirror lies to me when I glance at it.  I’m not a guy old enough to have colleagues I’ve known for thirty years retiring.  Not me.  This hit me kind of suddenly at work.  One of the things an editor has to do is arrange for peer reviews.  One of my usual sources for reviewers has been showing names I don’t recognize, as of late.  Look, I was never some super-professor, but I knew quite a few of those who worked in biblical studies.  The same names would come around year after year at conferences.  They would age, but I would not.  I was still the same guy, teaching at Nashotah House, publishing articles, chatting with friends.  Where have they gone?

I recently saw a survey to which some colleagues I know and trust had responded.  They listed themselves as “late career.”  How is that possible?  I still work 9-2-5 and likely will until I die.  Who are these young people taking their places at the table?  Our minds, it seems, are as Bob Dylan termed it, forever young.  We remember, however imperfectly, our younger selves as we discover our lives entangled in work and other complications, and our bodies aging.  Me, I’m still trying to get through each day, just like I was in college.  Just like I was in high school.  Awaiting some ill defined destination where I might be able to relax for a while.  Like I could when I was young.  Before capitalism got its hooks in me.  Before AI.

Consciousness is a strange thing.  Our thought processes are formed by early experiences in our lives and we spend most of the rest of our time on earth reacting to them.  Our brains evolved to help us survive.  We do this communally (which is why Trumpism, tearing communities apart, is so dangerous).  I couldn’t survive with my desk job if many people—most of them younger than me these days—didn’t contribute to this experiment we call society.  I sometimes see people born the same year that I was and think, “they’re old.”  Why doesn’t that apply to me?  It’s not that I want to feel old, but rather that I’m still looking for the things I was seeking as a young person.  Financial security, books, love and acceptance.  And trying to avoid tedious tasks—there do seem to be more and more of those as you age.  I’ll have to ask some people who are old if that’s true.

Shocking Development

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With life being lived on the internet, electricity is now as important as food and shelter.  We bought our house going on eight years ago.  The former owner claimed to be an electrician and, based on his mail that we’re still receiving, has his own electrical business.  First-time buyers, we didn’t know to be skeptical.  It didn’t help that the home inspector we’d hired bowed out a week in advance of closing and we had to hire someone with no recommendation on the fly.  He said nothing about the electrical box (and many other flaws that should’ve been spotted and reported).  We started having some electrical issues soon after moving in.  We found a local electrician (not the former owner) who was friendly and once saved us by returning to the house as night was falling and hooking up the power so we could have heat (this was in a November).

Before picture

When the power went out completely in April, and the electric company said there were no issues on their end, we decided we’d better have the whole system checked out.  We hired from a larger, regional company.  These guys were good.  After being here for only half an hour they’d found the problem, and it was a big one.  The mast, or conduit, on the side of the house hadn’t been properly installed.  Water had been seeping into the breaker box and several of the breakers had rusted.  The repair cost was mighty, but it would be done correctly.  This led to a chilly April day without heat, but they did supply a line that let us work by powering the router, and kept the fridge cold.  They were here for ten hours.  For the first time since moving in, we have an uncompromised electrical system.

What makes all of this so strange is that we had been trusting of the seller that he knew what he was doing electrically.  As laypeople, we had no way to assess this, and the inspector apparently didn’t as well.  The good electricians (the most recent) suggested that our former electrician was afraid to tell us the real cost of doing the job right, and had decided to cut corners.  He may have been acting out of kindness.  Or he may not have been able to see the problem from a larger view.  So we’re poorer, but wiser.  And we have power.  As long as the electric company can be trusted to keep up its end of the deal, we shouldn’t run into internet access problems.  And that’s life itself.

Facing Identity Crisis

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It was one of those periods when time fails to work properly to keep major events spaced out.  We had three major economic events hit us simultaneously and unexpectedly.  Two of them required financing and yet a third involved the government and trying to get our taxes filed.  In any case, I tend to need chronological space to keep these things discrete and make sure I can pay them.  After all of this was done I realized that “secure” information is being collected by all kinds of places these days.  The thing that really got me was that two of them, including the federal government, involved facial recognition software.  In order to confirm my identity I had to hold up my phone and smile pretty for the camera.  Since I can’t speak for the experience of others, I had to wonder if maybe this was because I filed a report of a major scam last year.

I don’t trust AI at all (sorry Al), and governments that collect facial recognition data scare me.  I couldn’t complete my taxes without doing it, though.  A few years ago when I was volunteering for an organization (I can’t recall which one) I had to have my fingerprints put on record.  I thought that was pretty invasive.  I’ve never committed a crime (at least that I’m aware of) and I’ve never been arrested.  Having your fingerprints on record, and your face imprinted in databases certainly makes it feel like it.  Especially since doppelgängers do exist.  On my first visit to Kentucky in the 1980s to help a friend move, the local people all insisted that I was John’s son, a spitting image.  Would Al know the difference?

Once, at Nashotah House, during an accrediting team visit, I was struck by the fact that one of the assessors was a near-perfect doppelgänger of myself.  So much so that when I showed my young daughter a picture I found of him on the nascent web and asked her “Who’s that?” she replied without hesitation “Daddy.”  The facial recognition capacity of kids is pretty keen.  I don’t put a ton of trust in technology.  Of course, the software is probably measuring things like pore depth and nostril hairs.  In neither case did I have the chance to comb my hair and make sure nothing green was stuck in my teeth.  Besides, my face is in a number of spots on this blog.  It doesn’t get as many hits as our finances took in that period when time broke down, but I guess my face is now officially recognized.

Access Denied

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We like to pride ourselves on our levels of knowledge obtained.  But access to it is limited to the club.  I’ve run into this several times since being booted from academia.  I still research and write books.  They sell like academic books (not well), but I am blocked from academic resources.  I was attempting to access an article in a book from an academic press, named here nevermore, only to find every path blocked.  I had to verify that I was human a time or two, but being human isn’t enough.  You need to be a wealthy human.  I went to Academia.edu.  The author hadn’t posted the chapter.  It was posted on Research Gate, but to request a PDF I had to have an institutional email, which I do not.  I tried Internet Archive, which has saved me many times.  They didn’t have a full view and the link to the book told me I could purchase for a mere $150.

I know other academic presses that do this.  Limit the knowledge to those in institutions that can pay such high fees.  Academia is becoming more and more privileged all the time.  I get it.  You can’t just give the stuff away.  Whenever possible I post my articles for free on Academia.  I wrote them to be read, not to be tucked away and inaccessible as the world made love to the electronic revolution.  Not all scholars think that way.  And academic presses charge prices that can only be described as exploitative.  It’s as if they think we’re all paid like professors are.  Privileged.  And this pains me.  As a former professor I know that not all academics are paid well.  We’re in it for the knowledge.  But once you lose that academic email, it’s access denied for you.

Sadly, I’m not the only one in this category.  There’s an entire generation of us who’ve been thrown from the ivory tower.  Here’s the thing: your curiosity doesn’t die just because you’re not called “Professor” any more.  Maybe this is why I enjoy dark academia so much.  The truth is that there is something very wrong with our higher educational system.  University presses, stressed to make money when everyone just asks some AI that was never human and has no knowledge for an answer to a difficult question.  There used to be a way to find that answer through the hard work of research.  And when you were done you had the pride of accomplishment.  Now all that we have is access denied.

Note to Myself

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A note to myself (perhaps the best title for this blog) in a forgotten book.  Well, not exactly forgotten, else the post unwritten would remain.  In a book I’d been gifted at twenty-one.  I was working that summer as an intern in a church in Pittsburgh where my duties included visiting parishioners.  One of them was an elderly scientist that everyone mentioned with awe because he’d written a book.  In the eighties, writing a book still meant something.  He gave me a copy.  I could tell, even at that tender age, that the publisher was a vanity press.  Part of the satisfaction of “traditional” publishing is knowing that you’ve convinced at least a handful of people that your writing is worth publishing.  Vanity presses take your money and produce your words with wanton abandon.  Still, I read the book.

This was during those heady college years when I annotated everything.  So many books later, annotation is rare for me now.  Other people will want these books when I’m gone.  Then, I critiqued as well.  You see, the scientist (with a master’s degree) had undertaken a theological topic, trying to explain God with science.  I’m sure he died long ago and now knows more than I.  Still I had to express myself.  That’s what those of us who write do.  Here’s an image of my summary.  It took me a while to figure out the symbols the younger me made up.  One looks like a capital K with the lower diagonal ending in an arrow.  What did that mean four decades ago?  Context gave me the answer: “off the wall.”  Why not write it out?  Perhaps I was afraid someone would find the note to myself.  This is the danger of writing things down.

Another symbol gave me pause.  A circle with a stretched capital H in it within a cube.  Ah, a capital theta, my usual shorthand for God.  In a box.  I flipped through the pages.  Yes, some of his suggestions definitely put God in a box.  Did I ever discuss this book with anyone?  It occurs to me that since my teaching career tanked, I’ve discussed very few of the books I’ve read with anyone, except readers of this blog.  We who write know there’s always the danger that someone else will read our thoughts.  In my experience, putting them in book form is about the best way to ensure that nobody will.  Still, for anybody who’s written a book, if you google them, their tome will be the first thing that shows up.  That’s true of the scientist who died, I’m pretty sure, before the new millennium.  When, as it turned out, that writing a book would become as common as starting a website with a catchy title.

A Matter of Trust

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I used to write everything by hand.  We bought a used typewriter when I was in high school, and when I was in seminary I graduated to one of those strange devices that would print, like a typewriter, but had an LCD on the keyboard so that you could back up several characters before it printed.  This let you proofread while on the go.  I write a lot.  It may be a form of sickness, but I have hundreds of story ideas and little time to develop them.  Now I write on a computer but I’ve begun to lose trust.  It’s not just the whole AI debacle.  No, it’s that even with frequent backups, computers just lose things.  After having my hard drive wiped following a scam last year, I began work on some documents that I had to back up to the Cloud when the USB C ports on my laptop went bad.

After the repair was done I could download my files and pick up where I left off.  In theory.  I was working away on a new story and thought that I might be able to connect it to an earlier story I’d started.  Looking at the file, I remembered that the tale was much further along when I’d left off.  Where was it?  I looked on the Cloud version and it was the same as the one on my hard drive.  Then a larger project came along.  I went to start it again and discovered many, many pages missing.  Again, the Cloud shrugged its nebulus shoulders saying “I dunno…”. I pulled out my back-up disc.  (This was in April.)  I tried going back to January.  Same thing.  December.  Ditto.  Finally, my last backup in November had the full files.  Why these files didn’t backup to the Cloud, when done by a professional at the Apple Store, I can’t fathom.

What was especially disturbing is that one of the files (which I duplicated and put back on my hard drive, where they belong) showed that I’d completely reorganized things in a much clearer way.  After the laptop came home from the hospital, I’d forgotten (I’m not young and I’d been using a borrowed device for a few days).  I’d probably just picked up a story and, with my usual tunnel vision, began writing.  Not unrelatedly, I’ve been going through a spate of printing out any stories far enough along to warrant such treatment.  From what I’ve seen of the housekeeping on the Cloud, I’m glad I’ve been doing so.  I miss writing by hand.

Old Passion

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Something I find inherently fascinating revolves around used books.  I buy used books and I always examine the overlooked scraps of paper that get left between the pages.  Mostly it’s random ephemera, but it is the window into a stranger’s life.  They had this bit of paper lying around to mark their place.  Had I the time I’d piece together the puzzle.  Recently, while preparing to donate some books to the local AAUW book sale, I found a scrap of paper in one of my own books.  This was from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, based on the date in my wife’s handwriting: 3-19-04.  It’s an Associated Press story from Statesboro, Georgia, involving a dust-up between a married couple after watching The Passion of the Christ.  That makes it interesting in its own right, but what’s especially striking is the couple battled, including a pair of scissors, over whether “God the Father in the Holy Trinity was human or symbolic.”  Things got out of hand.

For context, I was still teaching at Nashotah House at the time.  Theological debates, sometimes heated, took place there on a regular basis.  People get very fired up over what they believe.  This may set our species apart from other thinking animals, or perhaps it’s part of the price we pay for abstract thought.  You almost want to step between the warring spouses and say, “let us handle this, we’re professionals.”  Of course, the species of specialist that has studied theology is dying out.  Universities are cutting religious studies departments.  Churches are losing members.  Better hide the scissors.

“Passion” is the operative word here.  We get quite attached to our views.  So much so that no amount of logic or rational discourse can dislodge them.  We see this with the utter devotion to political leaders and on-screen personalities as well as to religious beliefs.  Some of us were curious enough to study where these ideas came from and how we know that they’re “true.”  This is not for the faint of heart.  Testing your core assumptions can lead you into some very unfamiliar, unmapped territories.  And since religion deals with ultimate concerns, the stakes couldn’t be higher.  Our couple felt silly after the police had been called and the bail paid.  Passion is very much what drives our species, and perhaps others as well.  We feel we need what we believe to be true, and we’re willing to fight for it.  Even if it means, as the chief sheriff’s deputy remarked, they seem to have missed the point of religion in the first place.

New York Scent

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I recently had to go into New York City for work.  Now, I haven’t been to Manhattan for at least six years.  It’s like riding a bike, though.  For seven years I commuted there daily and I know my part of Midtown tolerably well.  There were a few things I noticed after my absence.  Despite the rumors that the pandemic had depopulated the City, it was plenty crowded on a Wednesday in May.  And I noticed how much had changed.  Manhattan is so large and complex that nobody can know it all.  Still, as I walked through parts of it I’d been through many times before I found no stores that I remembered.  I’m sure there are some that have remained unchanged, but New York is a city that is constantly reinventing itself.  Change may take place slowly, but six years accumulate small things.  Overall, however, the experience remains the same.

Like many visitors to the Big Apple, I sometimes think it might be fun to live there.  At least for a bit.  I’m not the biggest NYC fan, but once in a while it seems like it’s worth spending unrushed time in the City.  It’s iconic.  Being at work and seeing the Empire State Building, or the Chrysler Building, out the window has its distractions.  Walking down streets you’ve seen in many movies.  Encountering many thousands of people in the same day.  Heady stuff.  This time I took the train and I emerged into a Penn Station I didn’t recognize and in which I got lost.  It’d changed so much that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find my way back when it was time to go home.  The workings of New Jersey Transit were comforting in their familiarity.

The commuting life is something I never craved and which I don’t miss.  I can dedicate more time to my job as a remote worker.  I’m sure the culture of Manhattan has changed a bit in the years since it was a daily practice for me.  It’s a place that inspires stories, regardless.  On the way home, now beyond the end of the line, I did feel a little sad that I couldn’t spend a bit more time there.  New York is funny that way.  I arrived home in time for a late supper and bed, but I noticed that my clothes smelled like the Manhattan I remembered as I undressed.  It was a scent I’d almost forgotten.  Although much has changed since last I’d been there, it was pleasing to know that some things always stay the same in the midst of constant change.

Sleepy Thoughts

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It happens as you age.  Sleep patterns get disrupted.  This is normal and expected by all.  Except work.  That 9-2-5 has no sympathy for the sometimes days in a row when you awake looking forward only to going back to bed.  The day stretches out so long before you, many weary hours through which to slog, where younger employees wonder at your lack of energy.  A good night’s sleep is a gift.  One of the things I’ve observed about this is that poor sleep tends to occur in runs.  Overall, I don’t have much trouble sleeping.  I’m not in control of the quality of it, however.  And that’s what makes all the difference.  The mere handful of sick days won’t cover the inherent ageism of the few days off policy when poor sleep is the culprit.  In the non-profit world early retirement isn’t really an option, so lots of yawns it is.

It’s amazing how much we take youth for granted.  We could pull all-nighters in college and recover quickly.  Eight or nine hours hardly seemed like anything for work.  Then those hours begin to show their weight.  You have a vast gulf of meetings and self-starter projects stretching in front of you even until supper time, let alone the chance to redeem that previous night’s poor slumber.  I stopped caffeinating myself years ago.  I reasoned that I didn’t need chemical assistance to remain awake.  Was that self on coffee the same self as undrugged me?  And besides, you can save a lot of money by not buying coffee (which is now a luxury item).  So we pray to Morpheus and open our laptops.

The demand to be “on” for eight or nine hours a day, pretty much unbroken, for five successive days each week, wears a soul down.  And a body.  How I long to take a walk on a lovely spring day, only to be reminded that my lack of engagement online is noted.  I even receive work emails after 5 p.m. telling me something has to be done that night.  What I plan to do that night is sleep.  Make up for lost time.  Be human in an aging body.  The thirty-something that sent that email will understand.  Some day.  Age used to be equated with wisdom.  Now, it seems, it is considered lack of productivity.  It comes for everyone, if they survive that long.   No, I’m not ready for the ice floe just yet.  A good night’s sleep will set me straight.

Photo by No Revisions on Unsplash

Paper Writer Back

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We need to push back against the technocrats a bit more.  A story in Publishers Weekly recently affirmed what many of us know—people prefer books in print.  Ebooks have been shoved at us for years now and in academic publishing there’s been a trend away from print to electrons.  It was cheering to see in the same issue of PW that some British publishers are actually listening to readers and starting to release paperbacks first.  Imagine that.  People will read if they can afford to do so, and they do buy books.  And when I say books, I mean objects made of paper.  I don’t have a paper phobia.  I enjoy holding and reading books.  The only ebooks I’ve ever read were those I couldn’t access in print.  When I sit down to write a book, I have an image of a specific object in mind.

Technocrats are fond of telling us what we should prefer.  I wonder who died and made them king.  Or God.  If I recall correctly the latter preferred to write on stone.  That might create a few storage issues, but at least it was physical.  Consciousness, which we’re still a long, long way from adequately defining, can’t be captured in electronic form.  AI can pretend to be human, but it isn’t.  Nuance, subtlety, and embodiment are all missing.  We need to say that they need to stop telling us what to do.  Even as I was writing this post my laptop showed signed of requiring replacement.  To me, five years is a bit young to consider something old aged, but that’s what our tech masters tell us.  Thinking back over my laptop history, my previous computer lasted, let’s see, about five years.  It happens that this is a bad time for an expensive, unplanned purchase.  The tech lords have made the alternative unthinkable.

By my count, I’ve purchased six laptops over the course of my life, all primarily in the service of writing.  And they average out, it seems, on about five years.  This blog was started three laptops ago.  And the years seem to be going faster and faster.  I do most of my writing in a room filled with printed books.  I spend a lot of time in this room reading said books.  Tech has me caught between two worlds.  I’m trying to reconcile myself to spending a large amount of money after being scammed (by people using tech) last year.  If only I had a book to help me decide what to do.

Thorough

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It was a warm summer’s day, sometime in the mid-eighties.  I was living in Boston and some friends asked if I’d like to go to Walden Pond, outside Concord.  I’d read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, so yes, please.  I knew Thoreau was an early Massachusetts Transcendentalist, mystic, and nature lover.  That particular day we were the only ones at the site where his cabin in the woods once stood.  I suspect that, being there with friends, it wasn’t as contemplative a trip as it would’ve been had I made it alone.  Still, here we were, nearing a century-and-a-half after his death, remembering him.  My wife and I recently watched the PBS three-part documentary on Thoreau, and I learned a lot about him.  He was admirable in a way that few public figures are today.  What’s more, it’s clear that he’s widely appreciated as a visionary and believer in freedom.

Image credit: Benjamin D. Maxham, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons)

Writing in the nineteenth century, it seems, got you noticed much more than it does now.  Thoreau had profound things to say.  He had strong convictions about abolition and being shuffled into an existence of work, forced from being free.  He was able to live the way he did largely because he didn’t need many things.  He also had famous friends, Ralph Waldo Emerson, for one, who gave him a place to stay when he had none of his own.  The documentary makes the point that, despite being a hero to many, we’ve gone ahead and built the world Thoreau most feared.  Few, or at least a few of us, find that work doesn’t define us.  Writing, it seems, still helps with that.  Those of us born to write do so, and long days “in the office” must be endured to come to life when writing is again possible.

If you think deeply about it you start to realize that we’ve allowed ourselves to be hoodwinked by economics.  If you have a mortgage you know this to be true.  Or if you have a medical condition—you can’t afford not to have a job without insurance.  Thoreau, it seems, lived with the tuberculosis that ultimately killed him pretty much all of his life.  And he died too young, we feel, because he had so much to say.  So much to say that was worth listening to.  Such writers are rare today because, like everything else, writing has become a business and some readers even prefer things “written” by AI.  And yet I remember that warm summer’s day and think of a placid time still earlier when one might’ve met Henry David Thoreau in the woods.

Million Air

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Life is strange.  While I was in Boston for the AAR/SBL Annual Meeting in November, something unusual happened.  For a few days back then this blog was getting a lot of traffic.  I mean, a lot.  For me.  In fact, I posted about when I finally shot past a million hits.  I couldn’t figure out why.  Well, things have settled back to their usual trickle and I figured it was just “one of those things.”  Pleased but not obsessed, I went back to my usual blend of observations about life, dark academia, and horror movies.  Then, and I can’t recollect exactly how I saw it, I noticed that my old blogging buddy Dan McClellan had, about that time given me a shoutout on his social media.  Then I remembered that I’d run into Dan at the conference and we’d had a brief chat.

The pieces began to fit together.  (Thanks, Dan!)  I’ve known a few fairly well-known people over the years.  Most of them are academics, and a few of them clergy.  Occasionally an author who has made a name for him or herself.  Some of them sometimes give me shoutouts but I’d never seen the numbers tick up like they had after this particular one.  I can’t figure out blog stats.  During the early years of this blog I had quite a bit of traffic.  I remember that in 2015 my views plummeted precipitously.  They’ve stayed at that low level ever since.  Until last year.  Now they’re headed back to normal, post 2015-levels.  I’ve tried some other platforms such as YouTube, but they take a lot more time and lead to limited hits.  Some influencers suggest I should try podcasting again.

I do have plans to bring the podcast back.  It takes several hours to make such an entry into internetdom.  I started podcasting when I began this blog (well, actually the blog was started by one of my nieces when a family member suggested I should podcast).  What happened?  I lost my job at Gorgias Press and I had to spend the next five years trying to find full-time employment in a stable environment.  By the time stability returned I figured podcasts were dead because everybody was watching videos.  I may have done a Mark Twain there.  Podcasts are still popular.  When I can get a chunk of time, and a nip of courage, I may rush back into the fray again.  At this point, I had my maybe fifteen days of fame in someone else’s shadow.  Life is strange.

Snowballs in Spring

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Things snowball sometimes, even in the spring.  Weekends are among the most sacred of times when you work a 9-2-5.  They do double-duty as recovery time as well as prep time for the coming week to do it all over again.  I’m a proponent of the three-day weekend; life has grown so complicated that two days hardly cover it any more.  So in April I had a Saturday that snowballed.  I awoke vaguely thinking I might have to cut the grass.  It’d actually been dry a few days and the sun was out.  Then things started to get out of hand.  A letter arrived from the IRS.  Now, this is seldom welcome, but although it wasn’t scary it involved having to go back to our tax preparer’s office and, since tax day was just a couple days off, scheduling that was tricky.

Photo by benjamin lehman on Unsplash

Then the power went out.  Under a clear blue sky.  Being the middle of the day, we couldn’t tell if neighbors were affected or not.  After leaving a message with PPL, I walked to a local store about a block away and they had power.  The owner and I chatted a little, then I went home to await the PPL call or visit.  Since the power was out I was keeping a close eye on my phone’s battery level.  It was our only means of communication with the outside world.  Meanwhile, all of what we’d planned to do that Saturday had to be put on hold.  The house was quiet with no fridge hum or any other sound.  Suddenly I heard a kind of airplane buzz, but it seemed to be coming from inside.  I followed my ears to the kitchen where a big old bumblebee was trying to get outside.  I grabbed one of our ubiquitous peanut butter jars and waited for it to land.  The phone rang.  PPL said everything was fine on their end and we had to call an electrician.  It was now 4 p.m. on a Saturday, I was being buzzed by a bee, and I had to find an emergency electrician with my phone charge dropping.

I called a company I’d used before.  After explaining everything they decided they no longer serviced our area.  I called a second 24/7 electrician.  They could get someone out to us on Friday.  This was Saturday.  My wife took the jar from my hand and went after the bee.  The third company, which I will gladly use again, said they could get someone out by 9 p.m., at the latest.  By now the entire afternoon was gone.  My wife let the bee go outdoors and when we came back into the kitchen she said, “Isn’t that the fridge?”  It was humming.  Lights were out elsewhere so I made my fifth trip to the breaker box in the basement, using a flashlight, and tripped all the switches again.  Power was back on.  The electricians were good about canceling but suggested a follow up visit, just to check things out.  The grass didn’t get cut.  It was a snowball in April.

Eh Aye Jesus

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Have you ever wondered just how bizarre it can get?  At work I’ve been receiving push notifications for AI Jesus.  This is a software platform for exploring “the Bible,” “life questions,” and “guided reflection or therapy.”  No Jesus required.  Apparently tech has evolved to the point of addressing spiritual questions.  This is ironic since one thing AI simply doesn’t, and can’t, understand is religion.  Religion is not exactly a rational response to the world.  Often emotion is deeply, deeply involved.  Emotion is something AI knows nothing about.  I recently sat through a webinar promoting AI with the presenter listing problem after serious problem that AI poses.  The presenter optimistically saw no problem with continuing to use a flawed tool.  I would never advise crowdsourcing spiritual guidance.  Those of us who’ve spent lifetimes exploring it hesitate to put ourselves out there as experts.

The problem with AI is that we’re no longer being given a choice about it.  If you buy a new device, AI is there waiting for you.  If you do a web search, AI will offer the first answer, even if it’s often wrong.  Some of us with very human jobs are being told that we should be exploring how to use AI for efficiencies.  As if none of us were really doing a good job before.  I’m personally insulted.  What can AI know about how Jesus thought?  We have four gospels with sometimes contradictory sayings.  And it seems likely that the Gospel of Thomas has legitimate sayings as well.  Even so, that’s not enough data for an LLM (large language model, which is what generative AI tends to be).  They need massive amounts of information.

The human mind conjures its own image of Jesus.  Some think of a mild and meek shepherd of souls while others see a political firebrand with hopes of breaking the Roman hold on Judea.  Some think of Trump.  And everything in-between.   And how we think of Jesus informs the way that we interpret the sayings attributed to him.  I studied Bible in college for just this reason.  In seminary, aware of what textual criticism could do, I focused on the Hebrew Bible instead.  I grew up with the Doobie Brothers telling me that “Jesus is just alright with me.”  I’ve lived long enough to see a sitting president present himself as the parousia (look it up).  And now I’m being told that AI can subvert the carpenter from Galilee.  Just how strange can it get?

The tempter urges Jesus to use AI; image credit: Ary Scheffer, The Temptation of Christ (public domain via Wikimedia Commons)