Interesting Book of Mormon reading here.

I don’t like Spotify, but they’re not wrong here.

C’mon Apple.

Last Sunday, I gave a sermon on the Temptation of Jesus for a Beyond the Walls service by the Toronto Congregation of Community of Christ. The whole service was great, and I was happy to make my small contribution to it. It’s been recorded and archived here:

As I did the last time that I gave a sermon, though, I wanted to share the text I preached from:

Good thoughts from Newton here. “Who could have predicted this?” indeed.

Well, this sucks. Appreciate Ron Wyden’s diligence in this area.

Gift link.

Sideloading for Americans, too, please.

I was already fed up with Twitter before election season started. C’mon, Musk.

Gift link.

I don’t get what’s missing from a world without generative AI—and examples like this don’t make me any more convinced.

Musk ne s’intéresse à la liberté d’expression que quand il peut en profiter.

If OpenAI is going to be an influential company, it would be nice for it to be more transparent.

I was recently complaining about religious books that I felt were below where I am in my thinking, so this was a slice of humble pie. I don’t do great with dense philosophical or theological works, and my rating is more a reflection of that than anything else. I made it through with an audiobook, but I don’t know how much I’ll retain.

Tillich came highly recommended by other authors, but I think that most of what I wanted to get out of it was concentrated in the final chapter of the book. I may have to revisit that section in text. There’s much of interest in here—I just need to find a way to sit with it more effectively.

Almost a year ago now, Stephen C. at the Mormon blog Times and Seasons wrote a post asking what might be an “extinction-level event” for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There’s a lot of interesting speculation in the post, but the passage that I copied down at the time was this one:

Of course, the truly fatal circumstance is if the President of the Church stopped believing in the truth claims. (I suspect this is kind of what happened to the Community of Christ). In that case, pivoting towards a more allegorical or symbolic interpretation of the Church’s truth claims would be absolutely fatal to the long-term vitality of the institution. Sorry, but the President of the Church has to believe that there were Nephites.

1,200 deaths is an enormous tragedy. What does that make 25,000 deaths?

So. so gross.

Mormon theology doesn’t really do incarnation. Latter-day Saints believe in an embodied God and that (nearly) all humans will be resurrected to perfect bodies after this life and inevitable death. Latter-day Saints are also not Trinitarian and see Jesus and God the Father as more distinct than most Christian traditions do. Between those two beliefs, Jesus’s taking on a mortal body is not really a big deal—it’s kind of par for the course for any human, whether or not they are the Savior of the world. Perhaps because of that contrast, incarnation has been one of the most interesting things for me to think about as I’ve evolved my own theology with my transition out of institutional Mormonism over the past few years. What does it mean for a God that transcends fleshy, imperfect existence to take on mortal form and live among us? I’ve really enjoyed exploring the implications of that reframing (even though, when pressed, I’d probably describe my understanding of God is largely non-theistic and my Christology as pretty low).

My political views have shifted a lot over the past decade, and I think my attitude toward Macron demonstrates that pretty well. When he was first elected, I was pretty excited. I was fed up with the American right but not ready to identify with the left, and the idea of a new centrist party emerging out of nowhere was inspiring.

In the years since, though, I’ve moved steadily leftward—not least because Macron has demonstrated the ways that centrism tends to cede ground to the right on important issues. It’s been disappointing to see.

Generative AI has a digital labor issue, and we aren’t paying enough attention to it.

Grant Hardy is doing great work with the Book of Mormon. I don’t see the text the same way that he does, but I’m deeply grateful for what he’s contributed to new readings of it, and I’m glad I have a copy if this.

It surprised me in this interview to learn that the LDS Church forebade a reprinting of the semi-official study edition Hardy had recently worked on. I found that to be a tremendously helpful text, and I’m glad I have a copy since it’s apparently doomed to go out of print.

Even if AI would be beneficial for humanity in the aggregate, it’s important to ask how that benefit would be distributed.

Yeah, but don’t worry, this is definitely the only way that generative AI will be used to overwhelm us with useless content.

Good for Platformer.

As usual, I find Masnick’s recap of this recent nonsense helpful in terms of summary and interpretation.

Kind of like the Spong book I recently finished, I enjoyed this book, but I think I would have gotten about as much from a condensed version. I’ve gotten to a point after nearly a decade of this kind of reading that I don’t need to be eased into a lot of these arguments and just want the crux of them. I think the academic in me (though this is certainly not my area of training) also wants more sources and footnotes. Nonetheless, it was a really helpful book despite my impatience with it.

I’ve wanted to read this book for a while, but Doctorow has really sold me on it.