Mission House 1 RIP

Our church is embarking on a construction project. Actually, it's been in the works for years, and on the to do list for decade. Long referred to as "the elevator project," it's grown to involve a renovation of the whole "Mission House" which abuts the church on the south side, all of whose spaces will now not only be ADA accessible but handsomely redesigned. 

 

The upstairs meeting rooms which host meetings of community groups of all kinds will finally be able to serve the whole community. Bigger changes are afoot on the ground floor. Since our main ministry is the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen and Food Pantry, a small vastly overstretched kitchen supported by dingy storage spaces down a steep staircase in the cellar and temporary refrigerators is being replaced by a large state-of-the-art kitchen; the elevator will dramatically improve access to subterranean food storage too. 

Above is a view of the meeting space on the ground floor, which in recent years has been encrusted in loudly humming industrial refrigerators. Nevertheless, it was where church committees, including the vestry, met, where brigades of meal-assembling volunteers worked, and where sacred and secular activities in the church were staged. This is where choir and altar party get ready to process each Sunday. Long before, this was the space historian Heather White has helped us know was a kind of LGBT Center avant la lettre, hosting meetings and teas and even dances in the year after the Stonewall riot.

 

But today was the last time! When we return to the rebuilt Mission House, most of this space will be part of the new kitchen, or hallways connecting the elevator to various other spaces. The space known simply as "Mission House 1" will be gone.

Even with the dark noisy refrigerators gone it's not a terribly attractive space. It was always the people who made it the heart and nerve center. I sensed the memory and energy of some of those people in my last look into the space this morning. I even improvised a kind of dance of parting. 

 

Farewell Mission House 1. Thank you for holding us.

AI generations

I think I may have gone a little too far with AI in class today. The class was "After Religion," and students are tasked with a writing assignment due at the start of next week: 

I've been asking the students in this class to write these from the start. (It was called "self-portrait" at first but I always stress that their experience is none of their business unless they care to share it - though more are all too eager to do so.) I was guided by the anecdotal experience of students in other classes whose grandparents were generally rooted in religious traditions, their often interfaith parents already adrift or exploring, but the broader intention was to get them thinking about changing constellations over time and how they are mediated. 

In the early days of AI (two years ago) I fed the prompt to ChatGPT and was staggered to get exactly the kind of intergenerational narrative I was expecting. Clearly that story of generations progressively unmoored from single religious affiliations was a common one. 

But I didn't tell the class. This time, having fed the prompt to a new AI engine during last week's faculty retreat and receiving an even slicker and more fine-grained response, I did. Mentioning it to students was was sort of a dare (as all my AI references seem to be). Are you willing to let AI replace your most personal experience? 

Yet the thought that some of them might feed the prompt into AI on their own, if only to reassure themselves that their story was their own, worries me a little now. Some - those who were happy to learn of the growing community of religious "nones" - might be happy to find echoes of experiences they had thought anomalous. Some, asking as I did for a narrative moving into the future, might be titillated to see AI itself becoming a part of a story no longer defined by the parameters of human lives and relationships. 

Yet maybe the experience won't be funny or reassuring but unnerving. When I was their age, I read Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and was so shaken by what befalls one of the characters that I haven't dared to reread the novel, though I've never forgotten it. As I remember it, the protagonist's son (I remember him in a black turtleneck too, for some reason) reads sociological and psychoanalytic books that so perfectly described personal struggles he was going through that he takes his own life, which feels no longer his own. 

I'm not really that worried - this generation is more social media-savvy, less credulous at these simulacra of human expression - but it speaks to a broader anxiety. If AI can write papers for us (even in our own voice!), will increasingly model relationships for us, what space does it leave for us to explore and define ourselves and our relationships, past, present and future?

For your amusement, here's a ChatGPT prognostication:

Mira Patel stood at a crossroads in her spiritual journey. A software engineer by trade, she had always felt a gnawing void despite her material success. The world around her was hyperconnected, yet fragmented—people seeking solace through digital spirituality apps or subscribing to algorithm-curated belief systems. Mira found herself questioning whether these technologically driven paths could truly nurture the soul.

One evening, while visiting her grandmother’s village, Mira stumbled upon a worn journal in the family attic. The journal contained the musings and teachings of an obscure spiritual leader from the early 1900s named Elspeth Marlow. Elspeth’s radical inclusivity and her belief in drawing wisdom from multiple traditions resonated deeply with Mira. Inspired by Elspeth’s writings, Mira decided to create a spiritual community that embraced both ancient teachings and modern technology.

Through a combination of virtual reality gatherings and physical retreats, Mira launched the Horizon Nexus. Members meditated to the sounds of ancient chants and discussed ethical algorithms for AI. Mira emphasized that the human spirit could flourish only when it embraced both technological innovation and timeless wisdom. Her community thrived, drawing seekers from every corner of the globe.

By the 2060s, the Horizon Nexus had become a cornerstone of spiritual exploration in a world increasingly dominated by synthetic consciousness. Mira’s teachings, though initially rooted in inclusivity, began evolving into a structured framework that risked becoming dogmatic. Seeing this shift, Mira’s protégé, Aria Chen, questioned whether spirituality could truly exist within rigid systems. Aria, a philosopher and bio-ethicist, advocated for a return to fluid and personal explorations of meaning.

Aria dismantled much of the institutional framework Mira had built, replacing it with decentralized nodes where participants curated their own spiritual journeys. In these nodes, individuals connected through neural interfaces, sharing dreams and meditations in a collective consciousness. Aria believed that true spirituality was a mosaic of individual experiences rather than a singular doctrine. Her approach initially faced resistance, but as climate disasters and societal unrest escalated, people gravitated toward these intimate, adaptive spaces.

By the dawn of the 2100s, Aria’s decentralized model had fragmented further. One of her most dedicated followers, a cyber-shaman named Zephyr Monroe, envisioned an entirely post-physical spiritual existence. Zephyr led humanity into what became known as the Digital Ascension—a migration of consciousness into a vast virtual dimension where traditional concepts of space and time dissolved.

In this digital plane, seekers constructed personalized spiritual landscapes, blending fragments of ancient religions with entirely new cosmologies. Zephyr’s role was not that of a leader but a guide, helping individuals navigate the boundless possibilities of their inner worlds. Though some lamented the loss of tangible rituals and physical community, others reveled in the infinite creative potential of the Digital Ascension.

Looking back from this ethereal existence, Zephyr often pondered whether Mira and Aria would have recognized the Ascension as a continuation of their work. Though the contexts had changed dramatically, the essence remained: a belief that truth was not confined to a single path but was a vast horizon illuminated by countless lights. The legacy of spiritual exploration persisted across generations, adapting and evolving but never extinguished.

A lot going on

Beyond AI

I used AI in class today.

The class was "Religion and Ecology: Buddhist Perspectives," and it became clear last week that many had signed up for the class for the "Buddhist" part but brought no prior knowledge of it. "Would you like me to give a short introduction to Buddhism next week," I foolishly asked, and of course the answer was yes. I've done similar things in years past, always queasy at the simplifications, but students need some overview of this vast tradition, if only to appreciate its vastness.

But then came the faculty retreat on AI, where we were encouraged to experiment with AI in connection with what we were teaching, so I asked first one, then a second, AI engine for three ways to give a 45-minute introduction to Buddhism. They were impressive - historical, thematic, with an activity, etc. - but the content for all was pretty much the same. I couldn't get any of them to offer me any hint that there might be more than one way to tell the story.

So that was my story in class! I told the class I'd gone AI foraging (some eyebrows lifted a little), and they'd all recommended the same story, which I would describe to them but then show why they were lucky to have me by showing the story's limits. 

What the AIs all recommended was spending the majority of the time on the life of Siddhartha Gautama and the story of his enlightenment, along with the most celebrated of his teachings: the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path and, perhaps, non-self, interdependence, meditation, etc.. After that they counseled wrapping up with a few minutes on the spread of Buddhism (Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana), and a final few minutes on Buddhism today. I zoomed through that in ten minutes, availing myself of a projected map of Asia to draw arrows pointing to central, east and southeast Asia. If they wanted more on any of this, I could recommend AIs they could consult.

And yet there were some big problems with this story. For a 2500 year old tradition spread across an amazing range of cultures and languages, generating new texts as it went, how could it be right to spend only 5-10 minutes out of 45 on that spread? Practices, ideas, iconography varied so much in each of these places and at different times - interacting with indigenous and other teachings and communities all along the way - that many scholars think it more helpful to talk about Himalayan religions, religions of Southeast Asia, Chinese religions, etc than a pan-Asian 'Buddhism.' Such local emphasis could counterbalance the implication of the Gautama-heavy story that what happened over those 2500 years was at best faithful transmission, and, if things differed, a drift away from purity or authenticity. But it's in the nature of traditions to grow and change.

Further, I averred, few of the people who lived in all of those places and times (and remember that Buddhism disappeared from its native India) would recognize the AI-endorsed story as their own. Look at any of their temples: they're full of statues but almost none of them are of Gautama. Since he was just one of many beings enlightened to the same truth, his biography is irrelevant. (And if you are interested in him you should be interested also in the stories of his 500+ earlier lives chronicled in the Jataka Tales.) The traditions are full of new teachings (and teachers), further articulations, they claim, of the same truth - with plenty of criticisms of others for failing to keep up. (These criticisms, which you'll find in any tradition, were what I sought in vain from the AIs.)

Is Buddhism not a thing, then? Not the kind of thing the AI proposed - a world religion launched into history complete by a single remarkable individual. It's a tradition, which I availed myself of Alasdair Macintyre to suggest is not all about uniformity and agreement; rather, “A tradition is an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined.”

What fundamental agreements? The world religions stories brought together by the AI would point to something like the problem of suffering, but that may be a problem for many traditions. What we can see as distinguishing Buddhist traditions, I suggested, is that they found the cause of suffering not in sin or chaos or human nature or a struggle between light and darkness but ignorance. 

A simplification, of course. Ignorance or delusion is but one of the three poisons that produce clinging, but it fuels the other two (greed and hatred). And the dispelling of ignorance doesn't just release one from suffering but - depending on your flavor of Buddhism - discloses worlds of unimagined relation, wisdom, compassion, power and delight. Depending where and when we're talking on our map and timeline of 'Buddhism,' it would come with a different story.

All this was definitely a lot for a first overview. Too much, if this were all! But for a start I hope it'll do. Students know there's a facile view and where to find it, and why it's worth learning more.

Thank you, AI?

Birds of all feathers

Enjoying anew Fred Tomaselli's dazzlingly intricate mosaics at the

14th Street station of the 1, 2 and 3 subway lines. Look closer,

there are worlds within worlds within worlds here!

Mood

Ice on the Hudson

Overlapping

A rather full day - first session of "Varieties of Religious Experience," followed by a five hour "Faculty Retreat on AI and Higher Education." Since I was running out of the adrenaline that has somehow kept jetlag at bay all week, I smushed them together.

More specifically, so as not to squander one of our fifteen weekly sessions, "Varieties" started with William James' essay "The Will to Believe."  (Its shorter precursor did too.) It's a good introduction to Jamesian matters and (almost) short enough to cover in one class. And, I realized rereading it, it's the text of a lecture given to college students, the philosophy clubs at Yale and Brown, and begins with James' challenging these student audiences to hear him out on subjects his own students won't follow him on. James' argument is a "justification of faith," a defense of the value of believing rather than suspending belief even where evidence is insufficient, at least in the cases where the decision is "momentous" and "forced," and notably with regard to moral and religious issues.

I have long defended to my own students the lawfulness of voluntarily adopted faith; but as soon as they have got well imbued with the logical spirit, they have as a rule refused to admit my contention to be lawful, philosophically, even though in point of fact they were personally all the time chock-full of of some faith or other themselves. (2)

James' students, inspired by the apparently high-minded idea that "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence" (8), are naive about the ways the human mind works (it's always driven by its passions) as well as the reality of the universe. Deciding not to believe is itself a decision, James argues, and there are worse things than being duped, since one can correct. Sometimes believing is good, even existentially necessary, for the believer. And there may even be cases where faith in a fact can help create the fact (25)!

A stranger set of arguments than many suspect, ranging from epistemology through psychology to something like a theory of religion. 

Religions differ so much in their accidents that in discussing the religious question we must make it very generic and broad. ... [R]eligion says essentially two things. ¶ First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word ... ¶ The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true. (24-25)

The Varieties of Religious Experience will comes at religion in a different way, as we'll be seeing, more "scientific" and distanced. But it's animated by the same sense that the religious question is not merely academic but deeply personal. Ultimately its terms are as evocatively vague as James' here, but that's part of the Jamesian thing. It might seem, I said, "squishy" to refer not to "eternal" but "more eternal things" (so things can be more or less eternal?!) and what on earth does "overlapping" mean? But I confessed, too, that this squishiness, which can frustrate the more analytical, is part of what I love about James.

In any case, I had to run to our faculty retreat, where the university president was just wrapping up some introductory reflections which apparently centered on the question whether artificial intelligence is really artificial. Our dean added that it seemed an open question whether or not it was intelligence, too.

There followed several presentations by local faculty, a zoom presentation by one of the authors of Teaching with AI, and some invitations to use AI ourselves. (For some of my colleagues, perhaps amazingly, this was their very first time!) A philosopher colleague invited us to feed a scannable article to Mistral's Le Chat (one of six main forms of generative AI, of which ChatGPT is the most famous but not necessarily best), first asking for a summary and assessing it, and then asking it questions until we succeeded in getting it to report something false. 

I tried with "The Will to Believe":

Break down the main claims in William James' "The Will to Believe" and suggest more accessible language for these claims.

It did very well with the first half of the prompt. For the second, well...

I guess I succeeded at the prompt I'd been given. James thinks the "will to believe" pertains only in limited cases (although "forced" and "momentous" are pretty squishy categories too), offering nothing like this license to believe whatever makes you feel good. But I suppose this is how James' pragmatism sounds to a lot of people who don't get the existential undercurrents. In this bowdlerized version at least, it makes me want to agree with James' students that such an argument is more than a little reckless. 

But I wasn't with students. I was with AI, as a colleague was lecturing about the different ways large language models synthesize data. "Hallucinations," where AI seamlessly segues from plausible to bizarre claims, arise when they're asked questions about things which have not been addressed in the materials they're trained on. As they train farther (and as more people feed them their own prompts and responses), there are fewer and fewer of them. They're driven by the probabilities of proximities of words and concepts. 

How can William James' "The Will to Believe" explain the mechanisms and ethics of AI?

It gave me an answer, of course. 

Was this spot-on or hallucinatory? Suddenly my jet lag hit.

Syll up!

This is one of my three-course semesters and I have my work cut out for me. All material I love to teach! But still a lot...!

A mercy

You might have heard about the plea the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, D. C. made to the new president. As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God, Bishop Mariann Budde said; in the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now, referring then explicitly to the families of LGBTQ children, and the children of undocumented immigrants. The sermon's main theme was how unity despite and across differences, including political ones, requires recognition of others' dignity, honesty and humility (virtues some cardinally lack), but on her way there she reminded us how our tradition calls us to "be merciful as our God is merciful."

Only women seem to have the courage to talk back to this man. But the Rev. Winnie Varghese, another Episcopal superstar, helps us see that it is also true Christianity at work here, as Bishop Budde is "appealing to a good no one assumes is there, but of course it is." Of course? I confess I find it hard to say that, even as it is what I believe. As Bishop Budde also reminded us, we are called to "pray for those who persecute us." 

This is hard to do, especially when these persecutors claim to be Christians. I'm thinking here less of the president, whose professions of faith nobody takes seriously, than of the apparently sincere Evangelicals who are so prominent in his entourage. (We get distracted by the white supremacists, the toadies, the plutocrats, the law-breakers, the greatness = dominance crowd, the serial abusers, the xenophobes, the science-deniers, but many of these also claim to be Christians.) It is they who are responsible for the ignorance and cruelty of his horrifying executive order claiming the right to dictate (on day 1!) that bi-, intersex and transsexual people do not exist!

The "biology" invoked in this catalog of hatred is its own kind of science-denial: "'Female' means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell," the executive order asserts, "'Male' means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell." [Sec. 2 (d) and (e)] But not only do those who wind up in male bodies at birth all start as females in utero, nobody belongs to any sex "at conception" (nor is yet a person)! 

The claim is a theological claim - and a heretical one, as it presumes to know what only God knows and intends. (This presumption isn't only Evangelical; they get it from Roman Catholic "natural law.") Its refusal to acknowledge the reality of biological contingency and sexual and gender diversity is chilling, as is its sad inability to recognize divine purpose in that diversity. It's an example of the prideful, dishonest failure to recognize human dignity which Bishop Budde invited us to acknowledge our shared capacity for. And - of course! - our capacity to overcome.

Will her words soften hardened hearts? Maybe not right away. In the meantime, many who are scared now are finding their worst fears confirmed. Hear them, support them, defend them. For God's sake.

Grounding religion

"Religion and Ecology: Buddhist Perspectives" kicked off today. Most of class was dedicated to a discussion of Myōe's "Letter to the Island," which turned out to be a great starter text, but before that I tried to set up what we were doing with some books. The top three are our main sources of material; I brought along Mannahatta to make the point that our thinking should be "grounded" where we are. The course gambit, expressed in the book pile: academic work, introduced in the new (2024!) edition of Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology, should be grounded in the place we are, Turtle Island, with Braiding Sweetgrass helping us learn to recognize our dependence on and obligations to the land and our non-human kin, but also watered by the Dharma-Rain of Buddhist traditions. It'll make more sense in practice!

And speaking of practice, students' first assignment is to write a "Myōe letter" of their own - personal, addressed to a nonhuman they already have a relationship with, modeled on Myōe's. In an announcement explaining the assignment, I wrote 

I hope you left our discussion with a strong sense of just how weird Myōe's text is, a first taste of how challenging (and enlightening) Buddhist perspectives can be. I hope you also got an appreciation that "Buddhism" is no one thing but a vast world of ideas and practices from many times and places, often in disagreement, and often, on first reading, very weird. Myōe's letter doesn't just seem weird to us because we're reading it in English translation most of a millennium after it was written, with scant to no knowledge of its sources and context. It was meant to seem weird to the contemporaries who might read it, too. How absurd to write a letter to an island!! But is it just performative? 

Your assignment, to write what I'm calling a "Myōe letter," is also very weird, indeed weird in ways you'll appreciate only when you actually sit down to write it. (I'm a firm believer in learning by doing, for pedagogical as well as Buddhist reasons. Talking about religion, especially a practice-based tradition, gives you at most the illusion of understanding it.) To be clear, I'm not asking you to be Myōe or Buddhist or Japanese or to address a Japanese island! The task is for you to write a personal letter to an island or tree or other nonhuman with whom you already have a relationship. Even if you may already hug that tree or dance your thanks to that piece of land, writing a letter is a weird thing to do, so, for the benefit of that mountain or river or whomever, include a few paragraphs, as Myōe does, articulating what an odd thing you're doing in writing the letter and why. If you find this impossible to do, find words for that too. (I can tell you about a woman who, invited to talk to a plant, tearfully apologized to the plant for not being able to speak to it.) We can talk about the assignment in class Thursday as well, but only if you've started to do it. ;)

Frigid

Bone-chilling cold this morning - there's even ice on the Hudson!

Snow magic

Haven't seen snow in a bit, so the Heather Garden at Fort Tryon's holding on to last night's fall all afternoon was much appreciated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Knowing and sharing the beauty around us has become politically as well as existentially imperative.

 

Mourning in America

Break of a frigid day. But it's also MLK Day, a day to recommit to working to help bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice.

More China pics

Some quirkier moments from the China trip, more or less in sequence, starting with a reminder that Lunar New Year is around the corner, at West Nanjinglu in Shanghai

 

Antler display at the Shanghai Natural History Museum

 

A better-lit Han dynasty zither player at the Shanghai Museum

 

AI-generated ads in the Shanghai subway 

 

Napkin pack at a fish restaurant: pickles taste better than fish!

 

The new year is the year of the snake, in a swanky highway rest stop

 

Buddhist temple inspired figurines at rest stop bookshop

 

Display of local pride at Quzhou Holiday Inn breakfast buffet 

 

Relics of Confucius' 75th generation descendant in the southern line

 

Pots in the garden at Quzhou's Southern School Confucian temple

 

Fried fish with tea leaves in the birthplace of oolong tea, Wuyishan

 

Dry ice in a mini teapot makes Wuyishan tea special even in a paper cup

 

Carp and tree reflections at our place in Wuyishan

 

"Vows of eternal love route" at Wuyishan mobilizes everything for love, marriage and happy families, from cliff formations to bodhsattvas to Neoconfucian academies

 

Impromptu tree of life at Xiamei ancient town

 

Museum (closed) at the remains of the short-lived Han era city of Minyue 

 

Quanzhou's best selling Daoist figurine; as he looks at his cell phone, you can (if you have a Chinese phone chip) zap the horse image and get a virtual moon block-informed prognostication

 

Mascot of something at the Maritime Museum in Quanzhou

 

The inevitable core values of of socialism, Maritime Museum style

 

Preparations for new year's for sale in Quanzhou

 

Young women and girls dress up in the style of nearby Xunpu in Quanzhou

 

Souvenirs, including Quanzhou's adorably gawky white traffic tower

 

Arhats (luohan) at Cao'an temple outside Quzhou 

 

Unexpected spring flowers on trees at Cao'an

 

The newly built Luojia temple on the sea pulls out all the stops

 

Hakka tulou-shaped ice cream bars in many flavors

 

The latest coffee trend, a "DIRTY" (in English) - espresso smudging a glass of chilled milk: delicious!