Oceans Rise, Empires Fall

We’ve been listening to a lot of Hamilton lately. Our children have been playing (and memorizing and singing) the soundtrack on repeat this summer. Merianna has a great post about our Hamilton-era here:

“The World Turned Upside Down” – by Merianna Harrelson:

We might be a little late to the game, but we are definitely in our Hamilton-era. Maybe it was the trip to Washington, DC this summer or the Revolutionary War studies last year, but once we found the Hamilton soundtrack it is the only thing that can play in the car (besides the occasional Wheels on the Bus).

 As we head into the cooler mornings of the Fall here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Merianna and I thought it might be time to actually have them watch the full production… so this morning, I pulled up the show on Disney+ and hit play. I’m no stranger to shedding a few tears in front of our kids, but I was moved at the opening song as I sat there with our family. 

A great deal has happened to us personally and in our global community of humans and more-than-humans in this last decade. It struck me that I don’t think Hamilton could be made, or at least received well, today in 2025 in this “post-woke” era of defining good jeans and AI slop. Hamilton captured something real and imaginative and visceral in 2015-2016 that we seemed to have already lost, forgotten, or glossed over (and are intent on erasing). 

People of color portraying our “Founding Fathers” who shed blood to carve out a nascent republic with higher ideals than the established order sparks different emotions in a country of complexity-erasure and intentional forgetting. Take the outrage of Google’s AI depicting Washington, etc. as black a few years ago or the recent hand-wringing and outcry from some of our fellow citizens (no doubt due to the constancy of manipulative coverage by certain 24-7 “news” corporations and social media actors that feed into and from outrage engines) over a corporate hedge-fund controlled restaurant changing its logo. 

I also shed tears when I first watched Hamilton with our older girls a decade ago… the imagination, the pointing to and away from and towards, the use of caricutre and spittle to prove points… and now those tears come from a different place in my consciousness that I feel we are all carrying… disappointment, loss, even despair… at where this country has been led, not from the whims of “a king on a spending spree” but from oligarchs who know that the time is short and the center cannot hold:

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst  
Are full of passionate intensity.

More tears ahead, but I hope I can continue to show our children glimpses of what can be while I rage against this machine. Lack of imagination got us “adults” into this, but imagination will get us out. Mark gives us the prescription to enter the Kingdom through the narrow Way, and as much as I stumble, I hope that we can see through this scanner even darkly and realize that we need eyes to see and ears to hear the imaginative call of grace in new ways and what can be…

People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.’ And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

Not throwing away my shot and all that jazz.

This is a Horrible Idea

I don’t understand how anyone (besides tech execs who haven’t been all that great at info-security over the years…and sharing personal health data with AI companies?? no thanks) would think that this is a good idea.

Sharing health data can be a nightmare, but we have questions about this US govt plan – Android Authority:

Donald Trump yesterday announced a new system that will store the medical history of all citizens in electronic formats that will be easy to share with various medical facilities, such as hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, as well as with mediclaim providers. The government is also working towards creating a consolidated medical ID, akin to your social security number, to allow quicker access to medical history.

The project will be developed with the involvement of over 60 leading technology companies, such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, etc.

Thinking Religion 172: Matthew Klippenstein

Matthew joins me again to discuss artificial intelligence, ancient constructs of aid, panpsychism, science and the humanities, and formation of religious texts.

Mentioned:

⁠Panpsychism⁠

Matthew Segall⁠

⁠The Blind Spot

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5WOgpBOrn0jdjBbOrJKkrW?si=debe90ed5df84673

YouTube and “Reinforcing” Psychologies

“The new A.I., known as Reinforce, was a kind of long-term addiction machine. It was designed to maximize users’ engagement over time by predicting which recommendations would expand their tastes and get them to watch not just one more video but many more.

Reinforce was a huge success. In a talk at an A.I. conference in February, Minmin Chen, a Google Brain researcher, said it was YouTube’s most successful launch in two years. Sitewide views increased by nearly 1 percent, she said — a gain that, at YouTube’s scale, could amount to millions more hours of daily watch time and millions more dollars in advertising revenue per year. She added that the new algorithm was already starting to alter users’ behavior.

“We can really lead the users toward a different state, versus recommending content that is familiar,” Ms. Chen said.”

via “The Making of a YouTube Radical” by Kevin Roose in the New York Times

Romans 13 and American Appeals to Authority of the Government

Good read on the historical uses of Romans 13 in American history to justify obedience to the government in light of our Attorney General’s use of that text today to defend the deplorable and immoral and utterly un-Christian internment camps we’re setting up along the Mexican border for children that we’re forcibly separating children from their asylum-seeking parents…

As I wrote at my own blog, I’m not sure we should “act as if the New Testament has any kind of authority over the religiously plural officer corps that protects a democratic republic that separates church and state.” But Pence is hardly the first prominent American to make such public use of these Christian scriptures — though what they mean has been hotly contested since even before the Republic won its independence.

— Read on www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2017/05/mike-pence-romans-13/

Do We Really Want Our Government Run Like a Business? | Sojourners

In the Easter sermon at my own church, the priest commented that Jesus was killed by the 1 percent, in the form of an empire that exploited its citizenry for the sake of profit and growth. While this sentiment might not be surprising where I live in liberal Northern California, it’s also present throughout the Bible. President Trump, whose own religious beliefs remain puzzling, vague, and nearly impossible to parse even among theologians and religion journalists, has repeatedly pushed policies that are the opposite of many of Christ’s messages even in his short time in office.

Source: Do We Really Want Our Government Run Like a Business? | Sojourners

Evangelical Crisis of Faith

The 20 percent of white evangelicals who did not vote for Trump — many of whom are conservative politically and theologically — now seem to have a lot more in common with mainline Protestants. Some in my own circles have expressed a desire to leave their evangelical churches in search of a more authentic form of Christianity.

Other evangelicals are experiencing a crisis of faith as they look around in their white congregations on Sunday morning and realize that so many fellow Christians were willing to turn a blind eye to all that Trump represents.

via Trump threatens to change the course of American Christianity – The Washington Post