Bill McKibben, The Guardian; Pope Leo has stirred awake a progressive Christianity. It can rise again
"I hope that this fight – between the clergy and ICE, between the pope and the president – continues, because it’s providing a theological education to the public at large."
David DeSteno, The New York Times; Anthropic Wants Claude to Be Moral. Is Religion Really the Answer?
"In a public statement of its intentions for its Claude chatbot, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic has said that it wants Claude to be “a genuinely good, wise and virtuous agent.” The company raised the moral stakes this month, when it announced that its latest A.I. model, Claude Mythos Preview, poses too great a cybersecurity threat to be widely released. Behind the scenes, Anthropic has been trying to shore up the ethical foundations of its products, working with a Catholic priest and consulting with other prominent Christians to help foster Claude’s moral and spiritual development.
Anthropic’s intentions are admirable, but the project of drawing on religion to cultivate the ethical behavior of Claude (or any other chatbot) is likely to fail. Not because there isn’t moral wisdom in Scripture, sermons and theological treatises — texts that Claude has undoubtedly already scraped from the web and integrated — but because Claude is missing a crucial mechanism by which religion fosters moral growth: a body."
, Observer; The Catholic Priest Who Helped Write Anthropic’s A.I. Ethics Code
"Father Brendan McGuire is writing a novel about a disenchanted monk and his A.I. companion. He’s doing it with Claude. That detail—a Catholic priest using Anthropic’s chatbot to explore questions of faith and artificial consciousness—tells you something about where Silicon Valley’s moral reckoning has arrived. McGuire, 60, leads St. Simon Catholic Parish in Los Altos, Calif., a congregation that counts some of the Valley’s A.I. researchers among its members. Earlier this year, he and a group of faith leaders helped Anthropic shape the Claude Constitution, the set of guiding principles governing how its A.I. behaves.
He is not, in other words, an outside critic. He is something more complicated: a true believer in both God and technology, trying to hold them in the same hand. “I left the tech industry, but it never really left me,” McGuire told Observer...
McGuire wasn’t Anthropic’s only religious collaborator. Bishop Paul Tighe of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education and Brian Patrick Green, a technology ethics director at Santa Clara University, also reviewed the Claude Constitution. Green and other Catholic scholars recently filed a federal court brief supporting Anthropic in its lawsuit against the U.S. government, which challenges the company’s effective blacklisting by the Pentagon after it refused to allow its A.I. systems to be used for autonomous warfare or domestic surveillance. The brief praised those ethical limits as “minimal standards of ethical conduct for technical progress.”...
Anthropic says its engagement with religious voices—part of a broader effort to engage a wide variety of communities to keep pace with technological acceleration—is only a beginning. The company plans to expand outreach beyond Catholic institutions to other religious leaders going forward."
Lauren Jackson, The New York Times, Believing Newsletter; On James Talarico: The Democratic Senate candidate is campaigning on his faith.
"James Talarico has been taking classes to become a Presbyterian minister. And he wants you to know it.
At packed rallies, on Joe Rogan’s show and to his nearly two million Instagram followers, Talarico is constantly repeating his religious bona fides. He cites Scripture from memory and uses it to give theological answers to political questions. Even his campaign slogan has biblical roots. “It’s time to start flipping tables,” he says, referencing Jesus’s wrath in response to corruption at the temple in Jerusalem.
I’ve been watching Talarico for months, and I’ve been most struck by how deft he is at fusing philosophy with policy. He speaks often about compassion, care and even love. Not as a lofty ideal, but as something urgent. Something measurable.
“I believe love is a force as real as gravity,” he said in a long interview that aired on “The Ezra Klein Show” last week. “Love to me is the most powerful thing in the universe. It is not weak, it is not neutral, it is not passive. It doesn’t paper over disagreement.”"
Joseph de Weck , The Guardian; Our king, our priest, our feudal lord – how AI is taking us back to the dark ages
"This summer, I found myself battling through traffic in the sweltering streets of Marseille. At a crossing, my friend in the passenger seat told me to turn right toward a spot known for its fish soup. But the navigation app Waze instructed us to go straight. Tired, and with the Renault feeling like a sauna on wheels, I followed Waze’s advice. Moments later, we were stuck at a construction site.
A trivial moment, maybe. But one that captures perhaps the defining question of our era, in which technology touches nearly every aspect of our lives: who do we trust more – other human beings and our own instincts, or the machine?
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously defined the Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” Immaturity, he wrote, “is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another”. For centuries, that “other” directing human thought and life was often the priest, the monarch, or the feudal lord – the ones claiming to act as God’s voice on Earth. In trying to understand natural phenomena – why volcanoes erupt, why the seasons change – humans looked to God for answers. In shaping the social world, from economics to love, religion served as our guide.
Humans, Kant argued, always had the capacity for reason. They just hadn’t always had the confidence to use it. But with the American and later the French Revolution, a new era was dawning: reason would replace faith, and the human mind, unshackled from authority, would become the engine of progress and a more moral world. “Sapere aude!” or “Have courage to use your own understanding!”, Kant urged his contemporaries.
Two and a half centuries later, one may wonder whether we are quietly slipping back into immaturity. An app telling us which road to take is one thing. But artificial intelligence threatens to become our new “other” – a silent authority that guides our thoughts and actions. We are in danger of ceding the hard-won courage to think for ourselves – and this time, not to gods or kings, but to code...
With all the benefits AI brings, the challenge is this: how can we harness its promise of superhuman intelligence without eroding human reasoning, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of liberal democracy itself? That may be one of the defining questions of the 21st century. It is one we would do well not to delegate to the machine."
GREGORY A. SMITH, Pew Research Center; Religion Holds Steady in America
"Pew Research Center polling finds that key measures of religiousness are holding steady in the United States, continuing a period of relative stability that began about five years ago.
The shares of U.S. adults who identify with Christianity, with another religion, or with no religion have all remained fairly stable in the Center’s latest polling.
The percentages of Americans who say they pray every day, that religion is very important in their lives, and that they regularly attend religious services also have held fairly steady since 2020...
So, what is happening with religion among young adults today? Some media reports have suggested there may be a religious revival taking place among young adults, especially young men, in the U.S. But our recent polls, along with other high-quality surveys we have analyzed, show no clear evidence that this kind of nationwide religious resurgence is underway.
On average, young adults remain much less religious than older Americans. Today’s young adults also are less religious than young people were a decade ago. And there is no indication that young men are converting to Christianity in large numbers."
David Smith , The Guardian; ‘Trump is inconsistent with Christian principles’: why the Democratic party is seeing a rise of white clergy candidates
"He grew up on a farm in Indiana, the son of a factory worker and eldest of five children. He studied at Liberty, a Christian university founded by the conservative pastor and televangelist Jerry Falwell, and recalls wearing a T-shirt expressing opposition to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.
Two decades later, Justin Douglas is running for the US Congress – as a Democrat.
He is among around 30 Christian white clergy – pastors, seminary students and other faith leaders – known to be potential Democratic candidates in next year’s midterm elections, including a dozen who are already in the race. While stressing the separation of church and state, many say that on a personal level their faith is calling them into the political arena...
Douglas is a county commissioner looking to unseat Republican Scott Perry in Pennsylvania’s 10th district. But he was previously the lead pastor of a growing church that allowed LGBTQ+ individuals to participate fully in its community; over the course of a year, this developed into a huge bone of contention and in 2019 Douglas eventually lost his licence. He had to find a new house and go from one job to three jobs including driving an Uber and CrossFit coaching. He started a new church that is still operating today.
Douglas recalls: “I paid the price for standing with the LGBTQ+ people. I would do it again. It taught me that doing what’s right is often costly but always necessary, and everyone deserves to be safe, respected and fully included. That’s not a religious belief. It’s a human belief that I have.”
James Talarico, a Texas state representative and a 36-year-old part-time seminary student who has amassed a sizable social media following – has become an unlikely standard-bearer in the Democrats’ 2026 Senate primary.
In a series of social media posts, he deploys scripture to champion the poor and vulnerable while castigating Republicans for what he casts as their drift towards Christian nationalism and corporate interests. He asked in one: “Instead of posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom, why don’t they post, ‘Money is the root of all evil’ in every boardroom?”"
Doug Bock Clark, ProPublica ; God’s Chief Justice: Paul Newby, a born-again Christian, has turned his perch atop North Carolina’s Supreme Court into an instrument of political power. Over two decades, he’s driven changes that have reverberated well beyond the borders of his state.
"Few beyond North Carolina’s borders grasp the outsize role Newby, 70, has played in transforming the state’s top court from a relatively harmonious judicial backwater to a front-line partisan battleground since his election in 2004.
Under North Carolina’s constitution, Supreme Court justices are charged with upholding the independence and impartiality of the courts, applying laws fairly and ensuring all citizens get treated equally.
Yet for years, his critics charge, Newby has worked to erode barriers to politicization."
Mark Landler , The New York Times; First Woman Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury
"The Church of England announced on Friday that Sarah Mullally, the bishop of London, will become the 106th archbishop of Canterbury, making her the spiritual leader of 85 million Anglicans worldwide and the first woman to lead a church whose roots date back more than 1,400 years.
Bishop Mullally will succeed Justin Welby, who resigned from the post last November after the publication of a report that said he had failed to pursue a proper investigation into claims of widespread abuse of boys and young men decades ago at Christian summer camps.
A former cancer nurse who served as the chief nursing officer for England, Bishop Mullally, 63, is a vocal exponent of the rights of women in the Church of England. She has served as the first female bishop of London since 2018."
Michael S. Rosenwald , The New York Times; Margaret Boden, Philosopher of Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88
"As a philosopher of AI, Professor Boden was often asked if she thought that robots would, or could, take over society.
“The truth is that they certainly won’t want to,” she wrote in Aeon magazine in 2018.
Why? Because robots, unlike humans, don’t care.
“A computer’s ‘goals,’” she wrote, “are empty of feeling.”"
Ruth Graham and Elizabeth Dias, The New York Times; Some Protestants Felt Invisible. Then Came Bishop Budde.
"It was the first Sunday since a fellow Episcopalian, Bishop Mariann E. Budde, delivered a sermon that many observers heard as an echo of passages like the one from Luke. Speaking at a prayer service at the National Cathedral in Washington the day after President Trump’s inauguration, she faced the president and made a direct plea: “Have mercy.”
After the service, Mr. Trump called Bishop Budde a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater” in a social media post. His foes immediately hailed her as an icon of the resistance. But for many progressive Christians and their leaders, the confrontation was more than a moment of political catharsis. It was about more than Mr. Trump. It was an eloquent expression of basic Christian theology, expressed in an extraordinarily public forum...
“A plea for mercy, a recognition of the stranger in our midst, is core to the faith,” Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe, the Episcopal Church’s top clerical leader, said in an interview. “It is radical, given the order of the world around us — it is countercultural — but it’s not bound to political ideology.”...
The clergy members addressed it directly in their sermons, too. At Church of the Transfiguration, the associate rector, the Rev. Ted Clarkson, acknowledged to the congregation that aspects of the bishop’s sermon might have been “hard to hear.” But “mercy is truth,” he said, “and I expect a bishop to preach the truth.” (Bishop Budde preached on Sunday at a church in Maryland.)...
Bishop Budde’s message seemed to be resonating beyond the usual audience for Sunday sermons.
Her most recent book, “How We Learn to Be Brave,” was listed as temporarily out of stock on Amazon Friday afternoon. At that time, the book was No. 4 on the site’s list of best-sellers, 11 spots above Vice President JD Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.”
The publisher of Bishop Budde’s book, Avery, an imprint of Penguin Books, was scrambling to reprint “a significant number of books,” said Tracy Behar, Avery’s president and publisher."
Eli Tan, The New York Times; At the Intersection of A.I. and Spirituality
"For centuries, new technologies have changed the ways people worship, from the radio in the 1920s to television sets in the 1950s and the internet in the 1990s. Some proponents of A.I. in religious spaces have gone back even further, comparing A.I.’s potential — and fears of it — to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century.
Religious leaders have used A.I. to translate their livestreamed sermons into different languages in real time, blasting them out to international audiences. Others have compared chatbots trained on tens of thousands of pages of Scripture to a fleet of newly trained seminary students, able to pull excerpts about certain topics nearly instantaneously.
But the ethical questions around using generative A.I. for religious tasks have become more complicated as the technology has improved, religious leaders say. While most agree that using A.I. for tasks like research or marketing is acceptable, other uses for the technology, like sermon writing, are seen by some as a step too far."
