I liked this one a lot! It's about how most of us have lived in some relationship with invisible actors.
Bonus points for the author not presenting the (correct) argument as a counter-narrative to secularization theory.
I appreciate what Pope is saying, though it’s worth remembering that he and other leaders of European national churches refrain from political SPECIFICS. It’s a norm they all follow.
Which ultimately makes them mostly harmless to the status quo. And that’s how politicians prefer them, too.
This story smelled wrong from the start and I'm glad the report has been retracted.
Don't get me wrong: big cities in the USA, too, continue to experience population level secularization. I study the public discourse. It sometimes corresponds with what is actually happening, sure.
Remeber the HBO's Silicon Valley series episode, where one co-worker was "outed" as a Christian, at that was the point of the whole episode? Things have changed a lot since mid 2010s, at least in terms of public discourse.
There are no "stupid questions" with a chatbot, which apprantely can be pretty powerful.
Been reading a lot of user comments and media discourse on religion-associated AI (godbots and such). Users seem to exhibit the same brutal honesty we all have with search engines (e.g., "my son has a weird rash on..."). A machine can seem "safer" and "more anonymous" when seeking spiritual advice.
Nothing surprising about MAGA attacking scientific journals, but it's more worrying when an NYT reporter is doing it. Attacking leading journals in their field, no less.
What a great piece.
This also reminds me SO much of the anglophone, very online, ostensibly anti-imperialist/leftist talk at the early stages of Russia's attack on Ukraine, where Ukraine was (very offensively) portrayed as a Western proxy, pushing borders eastward on the US's/NATO's behalf.
Rubio's colonialist far right 101 speech in Munich also included a reference to global warming policies as a "climate cult".
www.state.gov/releases/off...
Hence, I'm again linking our article on what people try to do with such language.
This whole teenager social media ban is a distraction. The actual topic is the regulation of large social media companies in a way that actually does something.
You see lot's of support for ICE among the European far right, if you follow individual MPs in social media.
Of course they support him -- even if his foreign policy has been a disaster for their respective countries. Trump does a lot of things at home they can only dream of.
Excerpt from a scholar's recent publication of 'rules' for Islamic studies academics. #58 advises that reading al-Ghazali does you fiftyfold more good than reading theorists of religion #59 is a weird adaptation of Jack and Jill where theory and method fall down the religious studies hill...
The fact that people in my field look at theory as unrigorous will never cease to irk me, even if I agree that knowing the sources backward and forward is the ultimate foundation. More is more.
You dream of EU leaders standing up to the US.
EU leaders cannot even leave X.
This is basically the view of the world that Plato sets out to refute in the Republic. One of the core questions asked therein is: why do powerful people think the mere fact of them exercising dominion makes it good for them to do so? Sure, you *can* get away with stuff if you're powerful - so what?
Short comments from me in The Guardian. Regarding the one Finnish Christian you might have actually heard about, her trial, and her international support from ADF and the like.
If you ever feel the AI tempting you to generate some research paper text for you, thinking that you'll get away with it, consider this.
It will probably be easy to detect an LLM from 2025 in 2030, when someone mass-scans all scientific publications. You will be caught eventually.
Our criticism of religious literacy is out.
Open access.
Took some time (hence, data stops at 2023) and not everyone was happy, but here we are.
We do not advocate for the concept of religious literacy, but we do suggest a way forward *if* one would like to consider it as a viable concept.
If you're curious about the extremely racist Finnish far right politicians, who you might've seen in the news shoving fingers in their eyes, I've written about them in a couple of places.
For example, in this anthology:
Oh, and Europe is not really seen as an ally here anymore. It's more like a problematic soup, where, if "patriotic" forces (i.e. the far right) are cultivated enough, they might be able to save themselves.
This new White House publication about Europe echoes European far-right talking points almost verbatim.
There are quite a few big budget Hollywood films about Jesus, but very little video game counterparts.
So, is the problem that "press X to carry the cross and dodge a Roman whip" would be perceived as dodgy?
I was thinking about this meme from 2014.
It became viral due to its tonal blunder. A standard video game mechanic of prompting "press button to do X" did not fit a funeral scene.
In general: is the difficulty of "gamifying the sacred" a reason why there's e.g. so few mainstream Bible games?
New thematic issue of Approaching Religion is out, open access.
It's titled "The Witching of Art History—How to Approach Women, Art and Esotericism."
I guess this is an example of political secularization. Whereas in the 80s, the US conservative stance on D&D was to critique it as devil worship (often by students on liberal campuses), now D&D needs to be "defended" from liberals wanting to make it more inclusive. Demons no longer the issue.
