The ancients recognized seven activities as arts: History, Poetry, Comedy, Tragedy, Music, Dance, and Astronomy. Each was governed by its own muse, each had its own rules and aims, but all seven were united by a common motivation: they were tools, useful…
Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’ — Mark 8:34 It wasn’t until after downloading the Insight Timer that I realised how vast…
In a post-pandemic world marked by increasing cost of living and ubiquitous home streaming services, trips to the movie theatre have become for many a nonessential, nostalgic pastime, but the release of Barbie and Oppenheimer has reinvigorated casual theatregoers and film enthusiasts alike. Despite…
Clinton Collister and Dan Rattelle, eds. An Outcast Age. Little Gidding Press, 2022, 54 pp, £11.95 paperback. As the second anthology of Christian verse edited by Clinton Collister and Dan Rattelle, the poems of An Outcast Age draw on historical figures or…
Contrary to what we like to believe today, humans quite easily fall into obeying others, and any sufficiently advanced AI is indistinguishable from God. People won’t necessarily mind taking their marching orders from some vast oracular computer. —Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm1 If…
Recently, there has been much controversy about AI-generated ‘art,’ resulting from the recent developments in Generative Neural Networks (GANs)1 and subsequently a popularization of image generators based on Machine Learning algorithms, such as DALL-E from OpenAI.2 A number of philosophical…
In July of last year, Google engineer Blake Lemoine broke his confidentiality agreement with his employer by publishing his conversation with LaMDA, an artificial intelligence entity or bot that he and his colleagues created. It has been reported that he…
What is the difference between a concert programme and a liturgy? As the planner, and one of the performers in the Transept 2023 music event “Enfolding Sounds” (a concert? a meditation? an encounter?), I’ve found myself troubled by this question.…
My piece for the Enfolding exhibition, a series of drawings called ‘Fig Tree’, was born out of a desire to communicate visually some of what’s lately been roiling around inside and outside me. The initial inspiration came last autumn while…