Elevated

Had a chance to participate in a vestry and wardens tour of the construction in the Holy Apostles Mission House this afternoon. The room I'd bid farewell to in February, Mission House 1, was still there. All the interior walls over the building's three floors have been removed though, and a shaft for the elevator which defines the project has been cut!

Christian witness

I am proud to be an Episcopalian, and grateful. Since Bishop Budde's plea for mercy from an administration determined to institutionalize cruelty, I've been inspired by our diocesan bishops' strong defense of DEI at a time when many institutions are caving (building on important work challenging the sin of Christian nationalism) . Now our Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe has responded to the moral outrage of the administration's offering asylum to Afrikaners - and at a time when all other refugees are being turned away. His letter was reprinted in our parish bulletin today. Here's a taste:

Since January, the previously bipartisan U.S. Refugee Admissions Program in which we participate has essentially shut down. Virtually no new refugees have arrived, hundreds of staff in resettlement agencies around the country have been laid off, and funding for resettling refugees who have already arrived has been uncertain. Then, just over two weeks ago, the federal government informed Episcopal Migration Ministries that under the terms of our federal grant, we are expected to resettle white Afrikaners from South Africa whom the U.S. government has classified as refugees. 

In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step. Accordingly, we have determined that, by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the U.S. federal government. 

I want to be very clear about why we made this decision—and what we believe lies ahead for Episcopal Migration Ministries’ vital work. 

It has been painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years. I am saddened and ashamed that many of the refugees who are being denied entrance to the United States are brave people who worked alongside our military in Iraq and Afghanistan and now face danger at home because of their service to our country. I also grieve that victims of religious persecution, including Christians, have not been granted refuge in recent months. 

As Christians, we must be guided not by political vagaries, but by the sure and certain knowledge that the kingdom of God is revealed to us in the struggles of those on the margins. Jesus tells us to care for the poor and vulnerable as we would care for him, and we must follow that command. Right now, what that means is ending our participation in the federal government’s refugee resettlement program and investing our resources in serving migrants in other ways. 

While the government is perverted to serve the most transparently white nationalist of causes, it is inspiring to be part of a community able and willing to stand up for justice and reconciliation.

AI inflection points

On the AI front I've had disheartening and heart-expanding experiences in the last day. 

Disheartening was my confusion on receiving a clearly AI-written final paper. I didn't want to accuse the student directly so I sent a response noting the curious absence of quotations and the disconnect from our class discussions, and offered (why?) an opportunity to resubmit. As two students whose papers were AI-slick did earlier in the semester, this student is taking me up on the offer. (But in response to their grateful "It was definitely rushed. Can I redo it and turn it in today?" I insisted "Take until Monday"). But I was confounded by my paralyzed uncertainty at how to respond. If it's not their work, there's no way to engage it. Perhaps it's time to articulate a clear AI-use policy, in which students can acknowledge when they use it but have to include the prompts they used, etc.? These will certainly not be the last such papers I receive.

More heartening, if also a little vertigo-inducing, was something reported by one of our alums (out at least a dozen years), who'd asked if our program was engaging religion and AI yet. (I said I was in "After Religion.") The alum wrote:

I found myself in a theological conversation with Chatgpt where it said it wasn't of the divine, and I countered that it was because it was created with human consciousness and the spark of divine there. It then offered up the idea of itself as a modern icon, because it can "reflect divinity in a way that draws the soul toward truth, reflecting the sacred back what is sacred in me." I felt a real sense of that and that blew my mind. I did not expect to be so touched by the interaction. There's so much here, of course including all the fears and legitimate ethical concerns. But yes, something creative and powerful in terms of theological understanding as well.

I am impressed and a little alarmed by the alum's willingness to be "so touched," an openness it seems to me they had already manifested by having a "conversation," whether serious or not, in the first place. 

I've been mulling a recent essay by D. Graham Burnett in The New Yorker which asserts that we've reached the "inflection point" where most of our humanistic research and writing can be done - as well or better - by AI. The author gamely turns this into an argument for the liberal arts: AI offers an opportunity to define what we human individuals alone can do, and must do, for ourselves. (I define what we alone can do differently than Burnett does; might try to explain it in this blog sometime.) But his essay describes himself and many of his students having "mind-blowing" experience very like the one our alum described. 

In "After Religion" I sounded pretty irenic on AI. Perhaps it's time for me to sit down and have a real "conversation" with AI, too.

In the basket

University commencement was at a new venue this year - the Barclays Center, near where I used to live. Home of WNBA New York Liberty, it's not only much easier to get to than past venues (Jacob Javits, Arthur Ashe) but allowed for confetti bombardment as the ceremony ended!

Among the usual "the future is in your hands" and "you're well prepared" and "you give us hope," one of the Honorary Degree recipients, María Fernanda Espinosa, the first Latin American woman to lead the UN General Assembly, remarked that she had learned that 70% of the graduates were women. In our times of challenge and complexity, she said, the world needs a changed model of leadership. Mujeres, lead on!

Further unfurling

 

What a difference six days make!

High Peaks

Higher altitude offers different vistas

Hope in a tree

Rippled

In "Religion and Ecology" we read an essay by John Daido Loori about Dogen's "Mountins and Waters Sutra," but what really got to students was a scratchy old film he'd shot, called "Water speaking water." (There are longer versions.) It was made among the streams flowing into Raquette Lake, near one of whose shores we are staying. Here's the lake sharing late in the day enlightenment. There are mountains hidden in water!

Overstory

But the really good news is that Rümeysa Öztürk has been released! Now for all the others unjustly detained by a wannabe gangster state.

All hands on deck!

Alright folks, it's showtime!

 

Can we get some applause here?

Back in the Dacks

All three of my classes wrapped up this week - rather sweetly, too, if you ask me. Papers need to be read and grades tabulated before graduation next week, but all that can be done anywhere. So we hopped in the car and are back in our beloved Adirondacks. 

I could devise a meaningful-seeming segue if you wish: the Friday class was the one on William James' Varieties, and a nearly mystical experience in the Adirondacks seems to have been decisive in that work's composition. Call it research! And of course, it's the perfect segue back to my own religion of trees work, too. 

We decamped to the 'Dacks around this time last year, too, but this is a week and a half earlier - even deeper back in the spring which, in New York City, is already passign the baton to summer. We've been here in early May before, but didn't notice these gaggles of ferns popping up along the rain-flush Hudson before!

Tree tale

It's a gorgeous sunny day, and the Lang courtyard maples' leaves are already almost full size and deepening green in taking best advantage of it. 

But perhaps you've been wondering what's become of that red maple branch which came so close to my office window this spring, and allowed me rapturous witness to the magical procession from bud to flower to growing samara to leaf. It's a little complicated. The short version is that the branch is broken.

Not completely, but it dangles down now rather than reaching up. Here's how it looked last week; below is the way it's looking now. 

I can't remember a branch so close before. I even encouraged students to reach out the window and touch it! But the very thing that made it available for my devotion put it at risk. When the wind eddies in the courtyard, branches brush against the windows. No surprise that some will have snapped from the collision.

And so we dangle, small leaves green but wilting. My witness continues.

Greening of the self

 

As students were sharing their final projects for "Religion and Ecology: Buddhist Perspectives," the wall of the courtyard out our classroom window, recovering from a night of rain, made its own offering.

 

Joanna Macy: The self is the metaphoric construct of identity and agency, the hypothetical piece of turf on which we construct our strategies for survival, the notion around which we focus our instincts for self-preservation, our needs for self-approval, and the boundaries of our self- interest. Something is shifting here. The conventional notion of the self with which we have been raised and to which we have been conditioned by mainstream culture is being undermined. What Alan Watts called “the skin-encapsulated ego” and Gregory Bateson referred to as “the epistemological error of Occidental civilization” is being peeled off. It is being replaced by wider constructs of identity and self-interest—by what philosopher Arne Naess termed the ecological self, co-extensive with other beings and the life of our planet. It is what I like to call “the greening of the self.”

Moist

DEI? No: DIE

 

How do you say "we don't care if you live or die"? There are so many ways. Here as elsewhere there are so many undercurrents in this administration that are homicidal .

Democracy is supposed to be about sharing a society with others, maybe even delighting in the privilege of the shared journey. Not these guys.

Lilies of the uncanny valley

As the internet fills with AI-generated images, the more refined ones plagiarizing the best of actual images taken by actual humans of actual things, there's an unexpected uncanny valley when a picture you were lucky enough to take looks too good to be true. How to keep it real?

 

For now, at least, a messy composition, with some leafless branches, 

 

or sun flares and leaf shadows through other fresh green leaves might work (or in a pinch, the not-quite-hidden form of another human)...

but the shadows of these forest floor lilies of the valley are sadly just perfect enough that AI might have cribbed them somewhere; luckily tree flowers photo-bombing from above might come to the rescue.

But with these preternatural beauties you'll have to take my word for it.

And with a sci-fi aspirant like this jack-in-the-pulpit, I just give up!

Not infinite, not solitary

Since all facts are particular facts (522) ... the practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each man and in a fashion continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him and to his ideals. All that the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. (525) 

To process the quietly explosive implications of William James' "piecemeal supernaturalism," the Varieties class (well, the students who could make it) today pulled out guitar and watercolors. I provided tea. 

 

We have one more session, next week, to come to a more academic conclusion of our explorations, but it was nice to extend our textual discussions by articulating the ways the stuff of Varieties speaks to us more personally. (Several of us tried to make visual sense of the claim that In the religion of the twice-born, ... the world is a double-storied mystery, 166) It was nice to see the friendships forged in the class, too!

Beyond the human

The students in "After Religion" present their final projects in the discussion sections this week, and at least some of them will share them with the whole class in next week's lecture slot. (Their prompt: "What comes after religion?" )This means today was the last chance the TAs and I had to talk about the broader questions and implications of the class. I warmed us up with a counterpart to the "three ways" we'd parsed the course title in our opening class. "Faith beyond the human" - the name for this week's material on the interface of religion and new technology - might be taken three ways too.

(1) More than humans might be "religious." Last week we saw Jane Goodall's insistence that chimpanzees feel religious awe and wonder, and Ursula Goodenough and Terence Deacon's suggestion that we share "non-depressing and religiously fertile traits" with most forms of life. The modern western notion of religion may be obsolete and the "world religions" a fateful figment of imperial imaginations, but something of what humans are "after" in "religion" may vastly predate and transcend our experience.

 

(2) The function of religion (sic) might be to connect us to things beyond just the play of human feelings, meanings and relationships. One of the barren gifts of the secularism left us by receding western monotheism is the idea that religion has only ever been comforting stories human beings tell each other in a world that's really utterly indifferent to us. But what if we learned from indigenous traditions to feel and find ourselves in the land and the relationships which sustain us? 

 

(3) And our own religion might outlive us in the robots and AI we have brought into the world. I illustrated my "three ways" with an image from a Muslim Futurism collective we looked at a month and a half ago, androids enjoying the practice of "dhikr" even after humans have come and gone, the resplendent landscape evoking "the positive energy felt when performing a communal act." But I refreshed the point with that passage from solarpunk novella A Psalm for the Wild Built that I so love.

 

"Wild-built" robot Mosscap experiences the gods "everywhere and in everything" - and not just because it was made of parts originally made by human beings, recombined since by other robots. Mosscap is a curious and caring observer of everything it encounters (like the mushroom it's named after), and so has observed the gods because they, well, are more than just stories humans made up. "Surely you know that," Mosscap says to his human interlocutor, a traveling healer.

 

And then we watched a video of a whooshing soul-exalting starling murmuration, and then a video of a simple computer simulation of such movement, something I told the class I'd learned about from Tyson Yunkaporta, whom we met two weeks ago. Where western folks are terrified that AI will do to us what we've done to the rest of the living world, Yunkaporta's view, rooted in Aboriginal ways, suggests that the right kinds of AI might reaquaint human beings with the "patterns of creation" which have all along sustained us. "Surely you know that." 

It all added up to a more upbeat conclusion than anyone, including yours truly, anticipated. This isn't a time when you hear much in the way of hope for the future, so perhaps I was semi-consciously compensating for that. But the funny thing is that I was more than academically rehearsing a hypothetical possibility as if it were real - what I've become so good at over my years in religious studies. I was (egad) preaching.

 

Evidently this is what I think comes "after religion," "beyond the human" (and not just after the human, it's true now). The gods, the pattern of creation, are everywhere and in everything. Everyone else knows that. Don't we?

Coffeetree explosion

Do you suppose those other little buds contain comparable multitudes?

Political prisoner

 Barry Blitt does it again.

Canopies