I had the opportunity to preach yesterday for Reign of Christ Sunday. Reign of Christ Sunday is one of those liturgical moments that admittedly makes me a little nervous: I like the idea of putting Jesus first, but it really, really depends on what we understand by Jesus. (I’ve been writing on this for a while, it looks like.) So, I decided to take the opportunity to invite members of my congregation to reflect on who Jesus is for them and what it means to put that Jesus first. Here’s the sermon text:

A few hours after presenting at AECT on Thursday morning, I hopped on a plane to Salt Lake City, so that I could attend the 2023 conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion—especially the sessions associated with the Mormon Social Science Association. I’m giving three presentations today and wanted to include my slides here for anyone else who’s interested: I’d be happy to talk more about any of these!

In his closing sermon at the 2019 Community of Christ World Conference, prophet-president Steve Veazey asked a guiding question for the church:

Are we moving toward Jesus, the peaceful One?

It’s pretty clear from the formatting of this question—and even clearer from its translation into French and Spanish, the other working languages of Community of Christ—that Veazey’s phrase “the peaceful One” is meant to describe Jesus as a being who is inherently peaceful and who exemplifies peace for the whole world. However, I’ve long enjoyed entertaining a different interpretation of Veazey’s wording—one that I know wasn’t his intent but that I think has some value to it.

This is dumb and worrying. The CEO of Gab has been promising to develop “based AI,” but he’s a bit player. Musk has the resources and influence to make this a bigger problem.

I don’t know enough about OpenAI to evaluate these concerns, but I think these questions are important. The power of AI means that the companies that control them are also in a position of power, and it’s important that we treat them critically. That said, while I do think making LLM code open source is probably better in the aggregate, it isn’t without concerning drawbacks: The minute it was released under an open license, I’m sure Gab’s Andrew Torba would be considering how to make a homebrew version that can’t be content moderated.

Good reporting on a scary but important subject. I’ve been collecting Gab blog posts to eventually study some of this Christian nationalism.

I read Torba’s blog post last week but hadn’t been aware of the context. Interesting read.

I didn’t know Fuentes was also using “Christ is King,” but it’s a favorite of Gab’s Andrew Torba, too.

I’m not going to link to it, but I am fascinated by a recent post on the Gab blog where Andrew Torba announced some new features to help Gab users push back against research on the platform. Not only do I have two or three ongoing projects using Gab data (one is in the very, very early stages and—ironically—uses Gab blog posts), but some of what Torba wrote also aligned with some of the (fortunately mild) trolling my co-author, Amy Chapman, and I have experienced because of my work on the far-right-influenced DezNat hashtag in Mormon Twitter. So, I thought I’d write up some of what stood out to me in the post.