word | spirit | world | church
AI is sycophantic, did you know that? Antropic AI, recently published a paper explaining their recent research in Large Language Models (LLMs, what we have taken to calling Generative AI). They found that LLMs have a bias towards answers that they defined as sycophantic but incorrect. In other words, the AI tells us what we… Continue reading Sycophants and Liars
Chris Watkin’s Biblical Critical Theory has been much lauded in evangelical circles over the past year. Because I clearly suffer from extreme FOMO I decided to read it too. No, that’s not fair at all, it’s lauded by people I respect greatly so I hoped that it would be a useful and beneficial read. I… Continue reading Biblical Critical Theory: A (Modestly) Critical Review
As I write, Christianity Today have just published an article extolling the use of ChatGPT for Pastors in their preparation for preaching and Bible studies. It has gone viral for all of the wrong reasons. I am, as you’ll have picked up, committed to ‘cold takes’, so I’m naturally wary about deciding that you really… Continue reading Beginning to think about Generative AI
Some time last century Nietzsche killed God, or reported on our murder of the divine, anyway. As the trends and forces which made him declare that God was dead accelerated we have systematically done the same to each authority figure we encountered, in diminishing scales of authority like repeatedly smashing Russian dolls, until they are… Continue reading Killing the Schoolmaster
A niche topic, perhaps, but very popular in the businesses I’ve worked in, and reasonably popular in the church worlds I’ve worked in too. I suspect most readers know someone who has talked about their Enneagram number or Myers-Briggs Type Index (MBTI), perhaps you even like thinking this way yourself. How should Christians think about… Continue reading On Personality Profiling
As I write there’s just been a small Christian Twitter brouhaha (which places me temporally, not at all), over a new institution launched by The Gospel Coalition: The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. At the outset it’s worth saying that I was naturally warmly disposed towards the idea simply because more than one of the… Continue reading We Need Institutions
The words that we use create the categories that we think in. Language is upstream of thought. Which sounds like a completely crazed thing to say, I imagine, though I’ve touched on the concept before when explaining why we can’t be ‘fixed’ and why ‘family’ is not a helpful term to use for the church,… Continue reading Language Matters
A few days ago, as I write, I watched Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral, procession, and committal, along with 5.9 billion other people. If you’re reading this (you are) then it’s likely you watched it too. Two thirds of the world did. As an Englishman whose roots on these isles date before the Conquest—which… Continue reading After Watching a Funeral
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second died last week. Of course, that isn’t true. Not to you at least as you read. It is true as I type these words, though not as I edit them. My commitment to cold takes generally means I write little about current affairs and is salutary in that controversies… Continue reading In a Moment of Public Grief
We live in a digital world. Except, we don’t really, we live in a perfectly ordinary analogue world, but we visit and intersect with an ephemeral digital one all of the time. So, what does discipleship look like in a digital world? This is an important question if we want to follow Jesus as well… Continue reading 6 steps to digital discipleship
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