In Chapter 2 of my book Gratitude in Life’s Trenches, I discuss how spiritually unfruitful it is to beat ourselves up over our sin, or to engage in excessive grief and turmoil…
This post has moved to Salvo Magazine here.
From my article, “The Power of Complaining,” The notion that people need to vent in order to feel better was influenced by the age of steam power in the 19th and early…
Last week our disclosure culture reached a new level of intensity. Shakira broke YouTube records with a Spanish-language song about how Gerard Piqué cheated on her. In just 24 hours, 63 million…
My forthcoming book, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation: A Manual for Recovering Gnostics, continues to receive endorsements from scholars who have been shown advanced copies of the manuscript. Below are some of…
From The Mystical Marriage: Spiritual Life According to St. Maximos the Confessor, pp. 89-90 “We should be careful not to disturb or upset our relations with others, even a little. We should not…
This evening I went onto OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3 – the new public AI that is taking the world by storm because of its ability to imitate human thought, language, and creativity. I had…
Scott Aaronson, an engineer at OpenAI, reported that Ilya Sutskever, Chief Scientist of OpenAI, would like to reduce ethics, and even the definition of goodness, to an algorithm. I have these weekly calls with Ilya Sutskever,…
I’m sorry to keep posting about politics, but things are becoming so interesting. There is no question that we are living in a transitional period politically, without a clear sense of how things…
One of my favorite artworks was made by the French artist, Auguste Rodin (1840–1917). His sculpture called “The Arc of the Covenant” or “The Cathedral,” shows two intertwined right hands gently touching…
The recent explosion in AI technology may force scholars working in the Humanities to retreat from their increasingly insular preoccupation with things like exploding metanarratives, deconstructing authors’ race and sexuality, and their…
A friend recently wrote to me with some questions about conspiracy theories, in addition to offering push-back to a statement I made to the effect that I was uncomfortable with conspiracy theories.…
