Category Archives: Faith and Reason

March 5, 2026 · 1:00 pm

The Art of Fire Maintenance

“I understood what he meant by a house being finished when you can warm it.”

Walden, “House-Warming,” Henry David Thoreau

Snowing. Again. Not the demonstration of the power of nature blizzard from a week ago that is almost impossible to walk into, but light snow, steady, gray skies. A good afternoon for a comfortable chair with our feet up by the wood stove, warm with a good book. Rita is next to me doing the very same.

I have spent most of a lifetime with wood – climbing trees, cutting them, then lumberyards, building with it. We’ve also heated our homes with wood for over forty years. Since learning how in Maine. Making mistakes. Refining our technique, building woodsheds – three of them at different homes. Cutting, splitting, now at eighty buying cords of seasoned oak, maple, ash, birch, and apple that some other professional cut, split, seasoned, stacked and delivered.  I only have to re-split some of it with my good heavy maul against a solid maple cross section chopping block. I enjoy splitting wood so long as I don’t have to split cords of it. Wood warms me twice as the proverb says.

We use quite a lot of kindling in the fall and spring to relight the wood stove. House gets too hot, so when it does, we let the fire die out. My obsessive compulsive never-fail fire lighting. Crumpled up newspaper, a few ‘logs’ of tightly rolled newspaper, kindling that is gathered cleaning up the driveway after our wood is delivered – splinters and chards of dried hardwood and bark. On top of the kindling and paper, small split wood is stacked crisscross for two or three layers with room in between pieces for air to circulate and smoke to rise. One match ignites the pile at the bottom in four or five places. After it fires up for ten minutes or so with the vent wide open, the fuel mixture blazes into intense heat, and I can build with larger stove wood on the glowing coals. Four or five times a day, we load it and control the heat by the size of the load and the position of the vent.

In the winter it can burn for weeks off that one match, banked up at night with the biggest pieces, and revived in the early morning from the coals about four am. Sometimes it needs the attention of a birch and leather handheld bellows to encourage it when it needs a little help. The fire snaps and issues a quiet rush of fresh flames until it once again catches on its own. The stove creaks and crackles too as the cast iron expands to accommodate the heat. Morning sounds.

Bellows, fire tongs and poker. Small shovel and airtight ash bucket to clean out excess ashes, gloves to handle the wood and avoid splinters in my fingers.  A handmade wood box to store the day’s supply after I haul it in from the shed helps keep the mess and dust manageable. What I once cut and split when I was young from sixteen foot logs, I now buy from a reliable local source cut and split, still costing less than oil for our back up furnace. Good tools, lessons learned over many years. Warm in any storm even if we lose our electric power, and we could even cook a bit on the top in a pinch. Sometimes on a cold night I sleep out by the fire to feed it early in the predawn hours to keep the home and family warm.

Musing by the fire. About warmth and weather and wood and other wonders.

“I had for fuel a good supply of wood cut from the forest… which I had stored up.”

Walden, “House-Warming,” Henry David Thoreau

Firewood costs less than framing and finish lumber, but it accrues value in similar ways. Hardwood is denser, has less potential creosote to gum up and cause chimney fires, burns hotter and longer if it is properly seasoned to the right moisture content. A cord measures four feet by four feet by eight feet. One hundred and twenty eight cubic feet of seasoned hard wood that weighs about 3,700 pounds.[i] I move it piece by piece four times: to the wheelbarrow to push to the woodshed, stack it carefully in the woodshed, later take from the woodshed in our durable canvas sling log carrier to stand in our wood box, and the final move as needed is into the stove to keep us warm. Two to two and a half cords handles heating our downsized bungalow nicely for a winter. Our old drafty farmhouse in Maine required eight or nine.

Our son once worked for a division of a large investment company setting up office and remote computer systems to track the accruing value of their assets. South America, New Zealand, southern U.S. What they tracked was the growth of trees in their forests. Investors could buy shares in them. Incrementally, year by year, annual ring by annual ring, a tree’s diameter thickens to support its expanding height and breadth. Growth is extrapolated by professional foresters who estimate precisely the board footage per acre for eventual harvest. The carefully monitored board footage increase is the return on investment valued by the shareholders. Foresters will measure and brokers track the investment like others track income statements, balance sheets, organic growth, share valuation, and ‘green field’ new ventures.

There’s a lot of compiled science, data, and calculations about heating a house with wood or anything else. Our Quadra Fire stove isn’t the most expensive kind with a catalytic burner, but for a combination of affordable and practical, it’s a solid stove with its re-burner tubes, and it burns as cleanly as most. Science tells us the estimated 24 million BTU production of a seasoned oak and maple cord is equivalent in a stove like ours to about 160 gallons of fuel oil in our 85% efficient furnace, which sits quietly most of the time. Wood burns and emits more CO2 than the oil equivalent but with an important distinction. The harvest of wood should be regarded more as agriculture than despoiled park land. Wood is a renewable resource.

Trees survive and grow like all chlorophyll based plants by photosynthesis, a multistep amazing series of chemical reactions within its millions of living cells every moment of sunlight. To simplify a multistage process, that I once studied in detail: photosynthesis harnesses the energy of the sun[ii] absorbed by chlorophyll and uses it to combine atmospheric CO2 with water from the roots to create glucose and oxygen, which is expelled back into the atmosphere. Glucose is used by the plant for energy, a building block for its other necessary proteins, and the oxygen provides the rest of us with clean air. A tree is an efficient carbon processor and atmospheric cleanser.

Every day, cell by cell the trees renew fixing carbon into new potential fuel until the cycle begins again. Tree carbon will recycle whether we use it or not.  What grows will decay as inevitably as its life cycle in the forest. Or as in our fire. Harvested or unharvested, it will return to the air and soil. The only variable is time frame.

That is why many consider burning wood for heat as carbon neutral. It releases the carbon bound in the tree more quickly than wood left to rot back into the soil, but the carbon released is the same quantity, rotted or burned, over time. In contrast, burning oil has a similar source of carbon from rotting biomass a million years old, so it releases carbon that would have remained in the ground. Oil, gas, and coal are essentially new sources of atmospheric carbon. Oil doesn’t reabsorb its carbon by regrowth like wood does. Even as we burn, the trees for our future heating seasons are efficiently recleaning the air from this year’s CO2.

Robert Frost once wrote in a poem about a vine covered cord of stacked and split firewood he found abandoned for unknown reasons in the woods. He wondered about the work and care that went into the stack and how it returns the dead wood to the air and soil one way or another.

“What held it though on one side was a tree

Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,

These latter about to fall. I thought that only

Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks

Could so forget his handiwork on which

He spent himself, the labor of his ax,

And leave it there far from a useful fireplace

To warm the frozen swamp as best it could

With the slow smokeless burning of decay.”   Robert Frost, “The Wood-Pile”[iii]

Science can tell us quite a lot about burning wood and heating homes, but like all science it can rule only on a reductive truth, a constricted concept of reality, not false, but not comprehensive either. Ah, my son, all truth cannot be expressed as science. Not all truth is measured; some of it is simply recognized. Science is one basis of reliable and objective truths; however it is not the only source.  Empirical observation, theory, and experiment are marvelous tools, invented by Francis Bacon, but the scientific method is based on principles that are philosophical, even metaphysical, and cannot be verified by science. The erroneous claim that truth can only be established by the scientific method is self-refuting for it cannot be proven by its own rubric.

In addition to the scientific method, an example of truth that cannot be proved by science is intelligibility upon which all science relies. No lesser light than Albert Einstein said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible”[iv].  Why is the universe explainable in abstract mathematical terms human beings can describe and formulate?  Nothing makes the intelligibility of the universe inevitable or provable by the scientific method. To believe that intelligibility can exist without an Intelligence or Designer behind it is a leap of pollyannish fancy in service of an agenda.

Another set of ideas is the mystery of the ‘anthropic principle.’ Astonishingly narrow ranges of at least seven physical forces are indispensable to allow the formation of carbon, stars, planets, water, and other non-negotiables necessary for our existence. These include gravity, the cosmological constant, both the strong and weak nuclear forces, and the ratio of mass from electrons to protons. Tiny variations in strength in each of them would doom formation of atoms, complex molecules, stars, planets, galaxies and the existence of all known objects in the universe.[v]  The odds of these forces existing within these fine-tuned parameters out of all possible potential ranges have been calculated to be less than one in all the subnuclear particles or quarks in the universe. Science can tell us with great exactitude their measurements and why the fine-tuned range is essential to our existence. But it is mute on why they are so perfectly suited to me writing this, and you reading it. Science cannot speak to why existence exists.

A third obvious, but unscientific, proof is what has been called the argument for the existence of God from contingency. Stick to a summary, please Jack, as this is already a long musing. Everything we know is contingent, in other words, we exist, but we are not necessary. We are caused and therefore contingent upon other prior existences. I exist because my parents existed. That oak tree exists because another earlier oak made an acorn from a fertilized flower, dropped it after it ripened according to gravity and the nature of its stems. A squirrel carried it off and buried it a few hundred feet away, and after it rotted, the seed within the acorn germinated in soil, warmth, and moisture conditions necessary for it to prosper. Both oak and squirrel evolved over a few million years from more primitive forms of life back to before recorded history.  If everything we know is contingent upon some other cause, what do we call the necessary first thing? The non contingent being without a cause? We cannot be ‘turtles all the way down, in infinite regress and defy all logic, can we?

Science can tell us so much about how, what and when, but cannot speak with any eloquence about why there is something rather than nothing[vi] at all.

These are the truths, and many more that we can ponder and read, and learn about on a cold, snowy afternoon in front of our woodstove.[vii]  What is good, and what is evil, and why. Poetry, literature, the good, true and beautiful expressed in art of all kinds. In Act Five, Hamlet spoke to his friend, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. Are these ideas not true as well? Self-evident? A kind of ‘true’ more indispensable to the mind, heart, and soul of a human person, that strange hybrid being of body and soul, spirit and earth, mind and mud.

And those complex truths are something the scientific method will be utterly insufficient to explain.

“Shut in from all the world without,

We sat the clean-winged hearth about,

Content to let the north-wind roar

In baffled rage at pane and door,

While the red logs before us beat

The frost-line back with tropic heat.” John Greenleaf Whittier, “Snow-Bound- A Winter Idyl

[i] By contrast a gallon of oil weighs about seven pounds, so the BTU equivalent 160 gallons of fuel oil only weighs about 1,700 pounds and is a very efficient storage source of fuel. Using it requires setting a thermostat and calling up the service company if it doesn’t work. Wood is a lot more work. Hence, oil is still far more commonly used, but oil tanks can run dry at the least opportune moment like a blizzard when deliveries are unavailable. A well-stocked woodshed is a security bank of warmth.

[ii] As a sidebar, science demonstrates that almost all our energy is stored sun or star light one way or another. Fossil fuels and wood are obvious. So is solar. Slightly less obvious is wind power, but wind is produced by the unequal warming of sea and land, a warming produced by the sun. Water power is enabled by the evaporation of water from the sea due primarily to the warmth of the sun, and subsequent rain gathered into streams, rivers, and eventually controlled by dams. Even nuclear power is based on the controlled release of radioactive energy in the form of heat. All radioactive elements were produced in older stars billions of years ago and released in the form of the collapse of neutron stars and the explosions of supernovae, which is gathered again hundreds of thousands of light years away by gravity to help form new suns and more to the point, planets.

[iii] As another aside. If a tree falls in a dry forest, the carbon and methane produced are equivalent to burning. Very little methane is produced and the fire consumes it. If it falls in a swamp and under the mud and water, frozen or otherwise, anerobic decomposition turns much more of it into methane, which is a far more potent greenhouse gas. So, in some common conditions, rotting in the wild pumps more greenhouse effect into our atmosphere. Another plus for woodstoves.

[iv] From Einstein’s 1936 essay “Physics and Reality,”

[v] For a good summary of photosynthesis with detail enough to understand the principles, see this Britanica article.

[vi] By nothing, we infer a nullity, absolutely nothing, not the quantum field of enormous potential energy some propose as an explanation. A quantum field of energy that leaps in and out of existence is not nothing, just another turtle.

[vii] Image of our woodstove at the beginning just a phone photo from me. The sketch of Nonna and Papa reading and thinking by the fire is by ChatGPT based on my description. Not perfect, but I think the point is illustrated, and I don’t have my grand-daughter’s artistic talent or patience.

4 Comments

Filed under Faith and Reason, Personal and family life

Tagged as , , ,

February 26, 2026 · 3:10 pm

Migration

 

“There they go!   See them over the trees?

The emigrants from Ecuador —-

On to the mountains, over the seas

On wings that I shall hear no more!

 They are all I had and all I was,

And there they go on their even way!

There is the last, and my own, because

He wanted most of all to stay!

Father Arthur MacGillivray, “Migration,” From “Sufficient Wisdom” 1943, Bruce Humphies, Inc. Boston

 

I had an unexpected inquiry last week from an archivist at Eastern Michigan University which had come into possession of a collection of Father MacGillivray’s research files on writer and poet Muriel Rukeyser. I had written a post about Father MacGillivray a few years ago and my time as his student; she was looking for any source of possible information about him and his biography because as a Jesuit priest, his disciplined reticence about himself left very little biographical information. Once anything is posted somewhere on the internet, it has its own existence and a kind of immortality. She managed to find it, so even my brief post had been vacuumed into her search. If you have some curiosity about this gifted teacher of literature and poetry, you can start here: Sufficient Wisdom. He is worth some thought[i], especially compared to what passes for education now in too many schools.

The exchange prompted me to dig out my old copy of his book, and I discovered anew the poem, “Migration,” quoted above in the collection. I do not know the circumstances or people that he met that inspired the poem, but Jesuits still serve as missionaries all over the world. What struck me is the kindness and empathy, which seem sadly to be lacking in much of our public furor over immigrants both documented and undocumented.

His poem is spoken in the voice of a villager in Ecuador who stayed behind when the last friend, family member, or neighbor left. “They are all I had and all I was.” It doesn’t tell us if the voice was too old or unwell or afraid to leave, only that she was alone. The understated emotions remind us of what is missing in our understanding of their plight. People don’t leave their ancestral villages and all they and generations before them have ever known casually.

Rod Serling occasionally used to introduce the original 1960’s “Twilight Zone” episodes, with “Imagine if you will…”   So…. ‘Imagine if you will’ what  risks and circumstances it would take for a small rural town family to uproot completely from their village, and the village of  generations of their family before them, their family and friends and entire social network, then walk a couple of thousand miles to a land where they know no one, don’t speak the language, and have no promise of a livelihood or know what awaits them. Imagine what dire conditions would cause you and your family to leave everything you’ve ever known all behind. They don’t leave because they want to; they leave because they must. Perhaps we could conjure up some empathy for their plight.

 

It’s a restless hungry feeling

That don’t mean no one no good

When ev’rything I’m a-sayin’

You can say it just as good.

You’re right from your side

I’m right from mine

We’re both just one too many mornings

An’ a thousand miles behind.    Bob Dylan, “One Too Many Mornings”, 1964

 

 Since I wrote about this in August here, Coming Home, I’ll try not to cover too much of the same ground except a reminder of a caveat from an old boss and my experience working for national corporations. Some young ambitious corporate bureaucrat would hear some horror story anecdotes from a location or two that may or may not have been exaggerated for effect. The stories might very well have been true; the error was in extrapolating, interpreting, and fabricating a reactive wider response into a blanket policy they would talk senior management into. Inevitably it would do as much damage as good and would cause much cynicism in lumberyard employees about ‘front office’ cluelessness.

Of course, some of the anecdotes of horrific crimes committed by ‘illegal’ aliens are true, and none of us would protest when the perpetrators suffer the full consequences of their actions: arrest, conviction, incarceration for a long time, and then banishment. But what are the data for the great majority of undocumented workers? Most states don’t track or report arrest records by citizens v migrants v undocumented migrants, but Texas does, and that’s the source of the best long term study. Undocumented workers commit crimes at less than half the rate of citizens, and it’s even more of a discrepancy for violent crimes and murder. See the note below[ii] and the link to the actual Department of Justice study using the Texas data.

The same applies to the anecdotes about ‘illegal’ immigrants who live luxuriously on the public dole, leeching off the tax dollars of the rest of us hard workers. Again, perhaps there are always going to be some, and the abuse needs to be ferreted out and remedied. But the vast majority eke out a living doing jobs most citizens won’t do. They are a net positive to the economy, and even though there are individual towns that lose a bit, especially with schools, in aggregate, immigrants are a huge help, including the undocumented ones. They pay taxes, send whatever they can back to their families to help them, harvest the food we eat, clean the hotel rooms we enjoy, build the homes that we live in. Again, below if you want some discussion points for your Facebook friends are the data and articles[iii] that we should understand so that we will not be manipulated by social media posts and hype by politicians with an agenda.

Management by anecdote is flawed. Don’t ignore the 99 percent of immigrants lawful behavior or for that matter we shouldn’t forget the great majority of our border patrol officers who work their entire career in dedicated service to the country and who do their jobs diligently and lawfully and never draw their weapon. Political posturing and rhetoric that drives fear, distrust, division, and hatred to create policy or motivate protest is woeful and hopefully a temporary condition we are living through as we have before from “no Irish need apply” on down. As a nation, we need to do better than that. We have better angels, let’s listen to them.

Not to say anecdotes do not add perspective and get us thinking in another direction, so here’s one of mine from fifteen years ago about an immigrant (documented or not I have no idea) who did some excellent patio work at our old house in Providence. Selvin’s humanity, kindness, self-deprecating humor, and generosity towards the family and friends he left behind in Guatemala are extraordinary, and I was honored to get to know him. The post tells the story, so I’ll leave you to it if you have interest. Selvin.

Making America Great Again means returning to the embracing kindness and welcome of our better nature, not the xenophobia, mistrust, envy, and animus that informs much of the debate on these issues, especially in social media and on the internet. Return to the poem Emma Lazarus wrote which is memorialized on the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor overlooking the adjoining Ellis Island with its hospital and welcoming center.  That was the defining character of our great nation, and it needs to be again.

 

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”  Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”

 

May our properly formed consciences guide us individually and as a society. May we be accountable for our love or lack of it.

 

Is this not, rather, the fast that I choose:

releasing those bound unjustly,

untying the thongs of the yoke;

Setting free the oppressed,

breaking off every yoke?

 

Is it not sharing your bread with the hungry,

bringing the afflicted and the homeless into your house;

Clothing the naked when you see them,

and not turning your back on your own flesh?

 

Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,

and your wound shall quickly be healed.

Isaiah 58: 6-8a

 

[i] Father MacGillivray hosted Robert Frost and e.e. Cummings visits at Boston College. He was the longtime moderator of The Stylus, the BC literary magazine and contributed his own poems and reviews, as well as being published in a variety of other journals. His book of poems, “Sufficient Wisdom’ was published in 1943 and was well reviewed. I am the fortunate owner of an original first edition that was once owned by Admiral Richard Byrd and inscribed by hand to him by Father MacGillivray. Prior to BC, he was the head of the English Department in the founding faculty for Fairfield University, the Jesuit college in Connecticut. Father MacGillivray was a “pioneer” at Fairfield University. When the university opened its doors to undergraduate students in 1947, he was a member of the first faculty, serving as the Chairman of the English Department.  As the inaugural department head, he was responsible for designing the classical Jesuit English curriculum that defined the university’s early academic identity. He was a well known poet, a friend of Robert Frost and correspondent with T.S. Eliot, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren, and other prominent poets. A ‘legendary’ professor at BC with a sharp Jesuit wit and sense of humor, he was unforgettable to his many students over his thirty year career there. I was fortunate to be one of them.

[ii] U.S. Department of Justice–supported report, “Unauthorized Immigration, Crime, and Recidivism: Evidence From Texas (2012–2018)”, provides arrest rate data across several felony categories:

Violent crime arrests (2012–2018)

U.S.-born citizens: 213 per 100,000

Undocumented immigrants: 96.2 per 100,000

Drug crime arrests:

U.S.-born: 337.2 per 100,000

Undocumented: 135 per 100,000

Property crime arrests:

U.S.-born: 165.2 per 100,000

Undocumented: 38.5 per 100,000

Homicide arrests:

U.S.-born: 4.8 per 100,000

Undocumented: 1.9 per 100,000

 

[iii] Two articles. The Importance of Immigrant Labor to the US Economy and this one with more information and a good summary about Tax Payments by Undocumented Immigrants. Please read them, so we are informed, not just manipulated.

2 Comments

Filed under Background Perspective, Faith and Reason

Tagged as , , , ,

February 12, 2026 · 12:15 pm

Snowy

“When the white owl flies, winter has found its voice.”  Inuit saying

Sachuest Point Wildlife Refuge had another short visit from a snowy owl, the second such visit this winter. She had a two day layover in December at the refuge, was just passing through we think and has not been spotted since she was hanging around Island Rocks. She left before the paparazzi showed up. Snowy’s have a following, and when they grace us with an appearance the parking lot fills up.

If they are on the roof of the visitor center as one was four years ago, the small lawn area in front of the main entrance is overrun with photography equipment worth more than my car. On tripods – lots of tripods sprouting like a field full of oil rigs with large telescoping lenses.  A photographer and ornithologist told me one lens could cost fifteen thousand dollars.

We volunteer Friday afternoons in the Visitor Center. From December to February, at least a few visitors come to the hospitality desk each week to ask us where any snowy owls have been spotted with the excitement of a neighbor enthusing about the Pats back in the Super Bowl. Snowy owls are celebrities. Reports of a sighting on E Bird or Merlin are shared with online contagion as excitedly as if Taylor Swift was spotted at a Newport restaurant with her NFL star fiancé.

During the winter of 2022-23 a pair of snowy owls moved in for the season. The refuge had to close off the Price Neck Overlook Trail where they were nesting because too many hopeful observers were wandering off the trails to locate their nest, and they were stressing out the birds. Hard to get a parking spot, even with the overflow lot opened, so a snowy layover is a mixed blessing.

When they are hunting for lunch, it is major entertainment. A pair of barn owls were nesting on the refuge at the same time the snowys took up residence. Barn owls are not scarce globally but are considered rare and endangered in Rhode Island. Not as many barns for them as there once were.  They became rarer still on Aquidneck Island after the snowy owls killed them both at the refuge. Another volunteer saw a barn owl grab a vole just before the snowy owl snatched up both the barn owl and its prey. Lunch and dessert. I would have loved to have seen that encounter.

“The snowy owl belongs to the great white silence of the Arctic, and when it comes south it brings that silence with it.”  Bernd Heinrich, Winter World

Visits by snowy owls used to be more common before the water warmed up in Narraganset Bay.[i] Our visitors were not fully mature, so they had mixed gray, black, and white feathers and not the purer white that earned them their name. Farther up north in the tundra if food becomes scarce, the snowy parents make a pragmatic decision when their hatched owlets grow larger and fledge. Time to get booted out of the nest and make their way south to find food. Ducks and barn owls beware. Darwin had some things right. Failure to launch is not an option.

Because the bay waters are warmer and the winters are demonstrably less severe than in the days of my coming of age, the owls don’t have to come as far south to eat regularly. Thus, their visits are now less frequent.

It has not always been that way, not even counting the long era that lasted about eight millennia from twenty three to fourteen thousand years ago, when most of Rhode Island was under a mile deep glacier. That’s a long cold snap. Salty ocean water freezes when its temperature drops to 28 degrees, while freshwater freezes at 32. With billions of gallons of water Narragansett Bay takes a prolonged period of very cold weather to freeze over, especially as it is flushed twice every day with the tidal flows from the ocean.

We have enjoyed warming water for generations now, and especially so in the last fifty years. The winter surfers and the New Year’s Day polar plunge folks appreciate it. But this year is the exception to the trend and so far has been the coldest winter in thirty years. The ice we’re seeing now in some spots in the bay as shown in the satellite image is a rarity. Rhode Island needs to stay cold for a long while for Narragansett Bay to show ice.  If warmth is lacking for long enough the bay can freeze solidly as it has frozen in the past, although we are unlikely to experience that again in our lifetime.

Beginning around the edges as an advancing gray slurry with the waves still undulating softly under it, the surface becomes ever more languid as if the sea is nodding off. Light and oxygen diminish under it as it solidifies, and the small inlets succumb to the proliferating crystals of ice. Torpor descends slowly below the ice as light and warmth fade. The fish and crustaceans slow their hunting and eat less; the metabolism of cold blooded species slows as the temperature drops in the water.

At Weaver Cove on our western Narragansett Bay shore a few hundred yards offshore this week we watched a raft of brants (a type of smaller goose). There were at least two hundred of them swimming together in a small area with no chop or waves – clear open water as still as a woodland pond. As if by prearranged signal, they rose as one and flew very fast towards Prudence Island. They are a resolute sign of defiance to the winter and refuse to go gentle into that good night.

According to then Deputy Governor William Greene, the winter of 1740-41 was “the coldest known in New England since the memory of man.” Except for a few days of warmer, rainy weather in mid-December while the General Assembly met in Newport, the deep cold was unabated. Perhaps then, like now, when the state legislature is in session, there is plenty of hot air. “Soon after this,” said Greene, “the weather was again so exceedingly cold that the Narragansett Bay was soon frozen over, and people passed and repassed from Providence to Newport on the ice, and from Newport to Bristol.”[ii]

“As cold as the winter of 1740-41 had been, the winter of 1779-80 was worse. From mid-December through mid-March, frigid Arctic air – accompanied by three major nor’easters – kept the temperature below zero for 11 consecutive days. Not only did the bay freeze, but according to some sources, much of Block Island Sound and the ocean beyond almost to the Gulf Stream was solid.”[iii] That was the winter that followed the killing weather of 1777-78, when George Washington and the remnants of the Continental Army were struggling to survive at Valley Forge.

In those times, sleds brought firewood to Aquidneck Island from the mainland because the British Army occupying Newport had cut down nearly every tree on the island for their campfires and the fireplaces in the homes their officers had occupied. Many residents whose families had been here over a century left. Newport never fully recovered as a major east coast port after the troops pulled out, leaving salted wells and scuttled ships to block the harbor. Sleds traversed the bay and people walked from Providence to Newport.

Cold is not a distinctive attribute as much as a lack of one. Like darkness is not a discrete quality, but a lack of light, so cold is a scarcity of the comfort of warmth. Nature has other analogies in our human self-inflicted winters. Vice is a poverty of virtue, corruption is a failure of renewal, death is an abandonment of life, indifference is a refusal of love, contempt a dearth of humility. Evil is a privation of good, not a Manichean battle of the Force v the Dark Side. Unlike the cold heart of winter which we suffer but can do little to change, virtue, renewal, joy and gratitude for our lives, love for one another, choosing the good, and humility are choices that are ours to make and live. In those choices, the ‘winter of our discontent’ is held at bay.

While we complain a bit about the cold, former Mainers like us quickly adapt, burn a little more wood in the stove, put together a hearty beef stew or a mood brightening lasagna, gather for church suppers in our parish and patiently wait for the spring and cherry blossoms that will soon emerge.

Barry Lopez wrote in Arctic Dream, “The white owl moves across the tundra like a drifting thought, as silent as snowfall.”  New Englanders take what pleasure we can from the silence of the winter, persevere, bring in our wood from the shed, warm up some hot chocolate, take solace in reading by the stove, and wait. We wait. We’re good at it.

“Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.” Rachel Carson, “Help Your Child to Wonder,” 1956 article in Women’s Home Companion

 

[i] The satellite image was posted by local TV station WJAR showing ice forming in Narragansett Bay in January of 2026. The upper bay section near Warwick shows a large frozen area. Floating ice fields can be seen floating just west of Prudence Island and a few other places. A prolonged cold snap has promulgated the ice, which we haven’t seen here for a while. Point of reference is the small foot like projection on the northeast end of Aquidneck Island. That is Sachuest Point where we have spent hundreds of happy hours.

The snowy owl photo was taken on the rocks at Sachuest Point in 2022 by me.

The chart showing the warming of Narragansett Bay was generated by a spreadsheet of five year increments from 1950 on from the University of Rhode Island Physical Data Master files showing the recorded temps and trend line.

[ii] From a 2014 article in the Jamestown Press, “When Narragansett Bay Freezes Over.”

[iii] Ibid

Leave a comment

Filed under Faith and Reason, Sachuest Point and other wonders

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

January 26, 2026 · 12:13 pm

Fragments

“I’ve seen pretty people disappear like smoke. Friends will arrive; friends will disappear.” Bob Dylan, “Buckets of Rain” from the “Blood On The Tracks” album

I’ve written before about the sudden revelation that broke in on me when I was rocking, singing, and reading to our kids getting ready for bedtime many years ago. I realized with a jolt that there would be a last time that I would share this intimate, precious time, and I would not know when it was while it was happening.[i] In another post, I wrote about our many Maine times, our decade living there and the forty years of summer visits since, mostly on Webb Lake in Weld[ii]. Again, it struck me that there will be a last visit, and it is unlikely I will know that while we are there.[iii]

Nostalgia for me tends to peak around the turn of the year in the stillness of winter, and this year is no exception. The similarity of other events and even other relationships to reading to our children or the still ongoing summer idylls in Maine is inescapable. Those undetected last times occur and have occurred with friends and family too. We have all experienced similar ‘last time’ visits with those we care about. They don’t come with notices or calendar reminders. They come and they go and rarely do they announce themselves. Last time visits are seldom perceived in real time except in retrospect. People move away great distances. We lose track or we move. Jobs change. Relationships suffer neglect and fade away. Sometimes years afterwards, unfortunately, they are only acknowledged in our reminiscence at a funeral. Too late to do anything differently than we did. Or didn’t do.

I’ve come to understand that our lives pass by often in fragments as a mosaic rather than a perfectly scripted narrative with a well-defined beginning, middle, and end like a Hallmark movie. Development of the story is inadequate, and the denouement is without the satisfaction of a happy or even recognizable ending. Not to be morose, but I see this not so much as a heartbreaking breakdown like a sad country song, but more like an invitation to do better. To be better.

“Donde no hay amor, pon amor, y sacarás amor.”

Where there is no love, put love—and you will draw out love.

Saint John of the Cross, Sayings of Light and Love

 

Last weekend we were eating at our favorite breakfast joint. We are not fine dining gourmands; we are breakfast joint folks. Have been all our lives.[iv] The waitress welcomes us with strong fresh coffee in solid mugs (tea for Rita) as soon as we are seated – diner coffee, no baristas or expensive, complicated options needed – a bottomless cup for under three bucks. She circulates among her tables from time to time with a fresh pot and refills the mugs.

She starts scribbling our order on her pad before we have our coats off or said more than good morning. Our order rarely varies; she looks from one to the other of us and tells us what she knows we’ll order. They can carry six plates at once and the food comes hot off the grille, rarely taking more than five or ten minutes. She never annoys us or hovers and asks how everything is so we’re coerced into mumbling an awkward response with mouths full of eggs, home fries, or blueberry pancakes There are advantages to being a regular. We know all the waitresses in the place. And the cook.  We have a nodding smile acquaintance with other regulars.

After she confirmed our order, last week she asked a shy question. If you are breakfast diner regulars, you know that breakfast diner waitresses are not shy. They give as good as they get to the patrons at the counter and the tables. Lighthearted familiar repartee with shared laughter is the point. Last weekend, though, she leaned over and said very quietly, “You are ‘prayer people,’ right?” The topic had never come up, nor did I think we were particularly obvious about it. I replied that we were such people. Or tried to be.  She said, “I’m worried about my daughter. Can you say a prayer for her this morning?”  She told us the situation, which was temporary, but concerning. Of course, we replied in tandem. This week she thanked us as soon as we walked in and told us all went well.

It may be that we are offered a dozen opportunities a day, heavenly invitations that we miss. But this one was overt. Every day we have opportunities to love, to connect, to be open, to listen. And every day we are too busy or distracted or self-occupied to notice them. Invitations come from family. From friends. From colleagues at work or social organizations.  From casual acquaintances. From waitresses. From strangers.

The loneliness and alienation of our culture is legend. The richest country in the world, maybe ever, and instantly connected to everyone, everywhere, and yet we are isolated. Starting most especially with young people who grew up never too far from a screen, usually in their pockets.

Our connections are digital, not analog – false touchpoints without touch. Not only our connections with other human beings, but too often our connections to natural things, wild things, untamed things – they too are screened through our screens, removed from anything real and focused and present.

We are products and consumers of the Machine[v] we have created and named Progress. We are trained to be consumers, programmed to be consumers. It’s what keeps the Machine oiled and running smoothly. We mine for “likes” and approval to prove to ourselves that we exist. The Machine feeds us exactly what we want to hear, and we dutifully ensconce ourselves in our silos and lap it up.  We have become a voracious appetite doomed to never be satiated. Then we wonder why we are lonely, depressed, suspicious, and resentful.

We all know what the solutions are to our festering isolation, yet echoing St. Paul, we don’t do them. We revert to our screens, our non-threatening disconnected connections because connections with real things, real people get messy and uncomfortable. Woods trails are muddy with roots and rocks and hidden obstacles. Other human beings impinge; they may ask of us who knows what.  We know that a walk in the nearby woods or fields or on the beach is what will begin to heal us. We know that a live open ended conversation with another person will begin to heal us. We know that reaching out with a simple act of kindness and love will begin to heal us. But we are tired. We are distracted. We are busy. We are afraid. The screens beckon.

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.

It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud.

I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate.

There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Thomas Merton, “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander” (1966)

[i] Rockee Sing, Dad, Do Rockee Sing

[ii] Summer Kitchens

[iii] Both posts cited above in the endnotes are included in the book published in December, “Shelter In The Storm,” available on Amazon. Written around the themes of the mosaic of our past, the people and places that inhabit our lives, and our faith is Someone greater than ourselves. Get the book. Give it a good review if you’d be so kind. They help in prioritizing searches for others.

[iv] Here’s one old post, but there are others. Diner. Didn’t make the cut for the themes of the book. Maybe the next one?

[v] A book well worth your time from last year. Against the Machine, On the Unmaking of Humanity, Paul Kingsnorth. Get a copy. Read it. It will change your paradigm.

Leave a comment

Filed under Faith and Reason, Personal and family life

Tagged as , , , ,

November 9, 2025 · 3:49 pm

Afterward

  Ed died a couple of weeks ago. We went to his funeral, incongruously in the stately beauty of St. Mary Church in Newport where the Camelot Kennedys were married. Regular readers have met Ed here in another post. He was the gentle and once suffering soul who lived in an unmaintained mobile home with filthy floors, smoked too much, could barely clear the couch in his hovel to get to the bathroom, and took in homeless people just a click worse off than he was. He slept fitfully on his sagging couch with disheveled gray blankets of an indistinguishable original color, and his guests slept in his bed.

   Later he was moved against his will to a nursing home when pneumonia and advancing neuropathy and Parkinson’s took him down. The ambulance brought him to the hospital, and they wouldn’t let him go home again. We continued to bring him the Eucharist on Sundays after Mass there and celebrate a brief liturgy. It wasn’t a bad place as such places go, and the staff was kind. He was always astonishingly attentive and grateful and reverent with the Blessed Sacrament.

   I took him on an outing one morning in late September after he had recovered somehow from a bout with COVID. He was officially in hospice, but the nurse said I could take him out if I promised to bring him back as soon as he got tired. He could no longer walk, but the nurse helped me move him into the car from the wheelchair. His frail body weighed about as much as my twelve year old granddaughter.

  I had hoped we could go in the chair to a bench overlooking Second Beach outside the Sachuest Point Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center where we volunteer on Fridays. He once loved to walk the trails there when he could. Now even the move in a wheelchair to the bench was beyond him. So, we remained in the car and talked and just sat. Then we drove a couple of miles to Sweetberry Farm, drank coffee, and ate blueberry muffins from their small bakery there. We parked overlooking the orchard and fields and distant hills next to the tall hydrangeas. He most wanted to lower the windows and examine more closely the blooms on the hydrangeas. He was content to sit in silence and contemplate the flowers until he asked quietly if we could go back to his shared room so he could take a nap in his bed.  

“When they heard the sound of the Lord God walking about the garden in the breezy part of the day..” from Genesis 3

  Adam and Eve hid from God because they were afraid and ashamed, though they had never been that before they listened to the snake. They ate the fruit of the tree of good and evil, which was the only fruit of all the delightful trees in the garden from which they had been forbidden. Even though they were completely happy, they wanted more even though they had been warned it would ruin them. They wanted to become like God, to be God, and we still do strive to be so. In doing so, we struggle, fail, alienate ourselves from God and from one another; hurt ourselves and others. We want to be God, but we’re not and cannot be.

  But we are given a lovely image, a glimpse before the Fall when the Lord God walked about the garden in the breezy part of the day. Adam and Eve could join Him, talk with Him about all that is wonderful, laugh with Him, take in the incomprehensible beauty of the garden, of all God had made for us to enjoy, to be utterly joyful within.

  Now, this little bit of anthropomorphizing God is metaphor. We have no idea what before or after are.

  We have been told that whatever comes after our earthly heart stops and our brain stills will be more than we can ‘ask or imagine,’ but we cannot know what the beatific vision will be like. We have been told that there is more than dying and returning to the earth – dust to dust. More than ‘that’s all folks.’ More than a final corruption.

  We have been promised a new body that will last forever, a spiritual body, but not a spirit alone. We won’t be angels. Angels are a different order of creatures. We will be human beings with bodies as we were created from the earth, but in the image of God. Like Jesus, we will be resurrected as He promised for us. We will be ensouled but also embodied. A perfected body in the presence of God. Without disappointment or fear or pain. The breath of God will be within us.

  I dreamed last night. Ed was there. We somehow slid down along the stair walls together in a circular rotunda, very fast, laughing like fools, nearly flying. At the bottom I walked down a well-lit whisper quiet institutional corridor with light tan Formica walls with a pleasing design and matching Formica countertops until I came to a doorway and entered a small room with a desk. Ed was in the room helping an older lady write a letter she needed to petition some authority for help. He was happy to be her companion and aid. He looked up at me and smiled. I woke up.

  My imaginings of heaven are woefully inadequate, but I hope there are little houses in neighborhoods of friends that I love and with whom I am completely affable. Laughter is often heard. We share leisurely conversations about all things that are beautiful with lots of comfortable pauses to enjoy the evening breeze. And there is a yard with a garden to work in until it is green and pleasant and orderly with healthy shade trees, oaks, maples, and birch, perhaps there is a hammock looking up into one of them through the branches into a bright blue sky and billowing clouds, and hydrangeas to prune when I want.

   In the evening when the sea breeze comes up, maybe a walk in the vineyard overlooking the beach with my Lord talking softly or merely silent in sublime company and nothing needs to be said. Blissfully leg weary at the end of the day accomplishing fruitful things in the garden with my well worked hands leaves me pleasantly tired from a day well spent.

  Although Jesus told us that there will be no marriage in Heaven, deep friendships will persist. I like to think I’ll still be able to spoon sleepily with my dearest friend, Rita, with her hair that smells like spring. I like to fall asleep at night. In heaven I hope to fall instantly asleep and dream the unfettered joyful dreams of the redeemed.

“He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High and abides in the shadow of the Almighty says to the Lord: My refuge, my stronghold, my God in Whom I trust” Psalm 91 and the beginning of Sunday Night Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours.

3 Comments

Filed under Faith and Reason

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

October 13, 2025 · 4:49 pm

Whispers Of Another Kind

It appeared to me that there were two ways of arriving at the truth. I decided to follow them both” Father George Lemaître (from a NYT’s interview[i])

Father George Lemaître’s “Big Bang” theory predicted a cosmic whisper proven to exist a few decades later, a Cosmic Microwave Background radiation that changed our model of how the universe came to be.

Road Not Taken, Heather Millenaar

Within us all is another sort of whisper that is analogous to the cosmic whisper that points to creation. An uneasiness, an anxiety that we may deny, ignore if possible, and it is unique to human beings, unknown to other animals as far as we know. We work hard to distract ourselves from it. Linked to self-awareness and foreknowledge of our own mortality, there are three certainties that buzz in the background of our existence. Our mortality – finitude as biological life, our contingency every moment of every day, and the nagging unavoidable question that something greater than and outside of ourselves exists and resists understanding.

This inner voice is incessant, yet just a whisper most often overwhelmed by our favorite loud distractions, diversions, entertainments, screens, busyness, and noise either discordant or pleasant.  When on those rare occasions we pay heed to Blaise Pascal’s warning and spend an hour alone in a room by ourselves in silence, the whisper comes a calling, and it is a gentle murmur, the faint echo of the hole in our hearts.

All of us have sensed the soft insistent voice as a disquieting – a background restlessness. Many have defined it from different perspectives. Philosophers and psychologists, saints[ii] and sinners, and the incredulous and the curious have wondered at this unease, this whisper. The nineteenth and twentieth century produced many minds who sought to understand it. Georg Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, Carl Jung, Edmund Hurrserl, Martin Heidegger, Edith Stein[iii] and many others speculated about the source of this Anxiety, this hum, this unavoidable “inquietem” when the finite encounters the infinite. Most of us, too, have our own evasions or explanations through philosophy, psychology, or some spiritual path.

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood….”  The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost

Since the topic is unwieldy, and I’m trying to write about it, I get to define the borders of the inquiry. All complaints about half-baked abridgement and sophomoric errors, please direct them to the author or editor with kindness and look past the gaps in the landscape.

Edmund Husserl was the creator of a branch study of philosophy he named phenomenology. He was troubled that philosophy (and science too) had accrued so many abstractions, theories, and inherited concepts that obscured the raw experience of things. He conceived phenomenology to attempt to bracket assumptions and preconceptions to recognize “the things themselves” (zu den Sachen selbst!). In “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,” he wrote, “The exclusiveness with which the total worldview of modern man let itself be determined by the positive sciences and blinded itself to all the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity signifies an indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity. Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people.” When we use and value terms like “authenticity” or “intentionality” or “lived experience,” the soil in which those ideas developed were phenomenology, and Edmund Husserl planted the seeds.  His influence on the twentieth century and subsequent streams of thought cannot be overstated.

As it happens, what starts as speculation in the faculty lounge, a century later diffuses through to social media and common understanding. Ideas do indeed have consequences, oftentimes unintended.[iv]

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act 1, Scene 5).

To keep things tightly abridged, we’ll limit this inquiry to two of Husserl’s most brilliant students, Martin Heiddeger and Edith Stein, who contrast in their conclusions and their lives. They illustrate two of the three prevalent responses to the whispered, insistent invitation. The third, and most common, we experience every day on our screens.  Postmodern people put whispers on ignore, and we are all often complicit. Politics, sports, celebrities, “death scrolling,” entertainment, convincing ourselves that our frantic busy-ness is urgent are among our devices of avoidance. This response works effectively for most of us most of the time. For a while.

Take a brief excursion with me to examine the other two paths followed by Husserl’s prize pupils who acknowledge what we hear in silence.  Stein was Husserl’s research assistant (1916–1918), and Heidegger was Husserl’s star student who eventually succeeded him as professor. Stein and Heidegger met through their shared connection to Husserl. While not close coworkers, they were part of the same phenomenological school. Both believed the scientific and cultural inclinations for abstraction endangered the meaning of our direct perceptions unbracketed by preconceptions. Each acknowledged some form of the whispers but were sharply divergent in their answer.

Martin Heidegger, 1933

Heidegger named ‘Angst’ as our unspecific fear of being finite in an inescapable abyss and inherent in ‘Dasein,’ our personal experience of human existence.  Angst is the unease that grips us when the everyday meanings of life fall away and we face the raw fact that we exist — alone, free, and finite. Heidegger’s proposed response to nothingness is authenticity. Face the great emptiness honestly. Don’t flee into distractions or comforting illusions. Let Angst strip away false securities so you see life as it really is — fragile and contingent. Accept our finitude and that we are “being-toward-death.” Our mortality gives us urgency and depth to existence. Live it with lucid courage. Live deliberately, aware that our choices define who we are in the face of the void.[v]   From this and Nietzsche’s ‘will-to-power’ emerged our culture of celebrity worship, self-obsession, and self-invention in all its manifestations like a slime creature from the bog.

“Angst reveals in Dasein its being toward its own most potentiality-for-being—that is, being-free for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself.”  [vi] In a slightly updated synopsis, “Suck it up, buttercup!”

Edith Stein thought that Heidegger was vivid and right in “Being and Time” as far as he went, and he succeeded in defining our existence as finite, temporal, and oriented toward death. But she thought he was incomplete. She acknowledged the whispers but knew we needed something beyond our inadequate self to reply to them.

Without transcendence, Heidegger’s descriptions of human existence are truncated.  Stein believed this leaves a “half-truth”: man is finite but as a person is also open to the infinite. For her, his analysis ends “at the gate of eternity,” but refuses to step through. Each human being is an irreducible person with individuality, vocation, and the capacity for communion with God. Where Heidegger stresses “being-towards-death,” Stein perceives being called to life eternal. Where Stein saw what Augustine wrote in his ‘Confessions’ about the longing and hole in the human heart, Heidegger saw only the hole, and his solution was insufficient. His was a work of great force, but in the end it left the reader in darkness. The soul longs for light, and he shows us only the night.

Their lives could not have ended more differently. Heidegger followed the logic of his convictions and became enamored himself of the German Volk and eventually with its leader. He never repudiated his involvement with the National Socialist movement in Germany. He became the Rector of Freiburg University and in his notorious “Rectoral Address,” he said these things, again with a bit of Nietzschean influence: “The spiritual mission of the German people is to find and preserve its truth in its fate.” And “The Führer himself and he alone is the present and future German reality and its law.” Not much else needs to be added to that.

Stein’s conversion from atheism was a miracle story. She read St. Teresa of Avila’s autobiography, and a light came on within her. “This is the truth,” she marveled. Edith Stein did nothing halfway. She became first a Catholic, then a professed Carmelite nun. She fell in love with her Creator. In April of 1933, she wrote to Pope Pius XI about the rise of Nazism. “For weeks we have seen deeds perpetrated in Germany which mock any sense of justice and humanity, not to mention love of neighbor. … As a child of the Jewish people who, by the grace of God, for the past eleven years has also been a child of the Catholic Church, I dare to speak to the Father of Christendom about that which oppresses millions of Germans…. Everything that happened and continues to happen daily comes from a government that calls itself ‘Christian.’ … The responsibility must fall, also, on those who brought this government to power and still seek to justify it. I am convinced that this is a general disaster for humanity.”  Historians believe her letter influenced the pope’s encyclical in 1937, Mit brennender Sorge (With burning Concern), which condemned Nazi racism. Later, to her prioress she said, “I understood the cross as the destiny of God’s people, which was beginning to be laid upon them then.”[vii]

Heidegger died in bed of an infection at eighty six in 1976. St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) was murdered in 1942, gassed in a Nazi gas chamber at Auschwitz together with her sister, Rose, who also became a Carmelite.  St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross was canonized as a Catholic martyr on October 11, 1998, by St. Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City.

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943)

“Begin now to be what you will be hereafter,” wrote St. Jerome. He encapsulates what it means to hear the whispers, and like St. Augustine who understood that we were made for union with our Creator, Jerome knew it begins here and now. St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross knew that a life without listening and responding to the whispers of God was a life truncated, a half-life, a life that falls short of what it could be, what it is intended to be. Or as St. Irenaeus wrote in the second century, “The glory of God is man fully alive.”

Each of us in moments of reflection knows that we are called and created to be something more than randomly evolved ambulatory meat destined only for annihilation. Heeding the whispers is how we begin. “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”

“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

   I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

   Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.” “Hound of Heaven” Francis Thompson

[i] Duncan Aikman, “Lemaître Follows Two Paths to Truth,” The New York Times, February 19, 1933, p. 3.
Shareable reproduced copy available via the Vatican Observatory archives: Lemaître Follows Two Paths to Truth (PDF)

[ii] One of the earliest commentators on record is St. Augustine. In his Confessions, he wrote about this undeniable underlying whisper, which he understood as a hole in our heart as creatures made in Imago Dei. His most famous and oft used quote spoke of it. He recognized this unease when the finite confronts the infinite. “Oh God, You made us for Yourself and our heart is restless until it rests in You.”

[iii] Since there are more than a few professors who occasionally read this and a couple who teach philosophy at good universities, I won’t embarrass myself by pretending to know a lot more than I do about the details and texts of these great minds.

[iv] A seminal book for me a few decades back was Richard Weaver’s “Ideas Have Consequences.” Written in 1948, I still recommend it to your attention. The line can be followed from Husserl either as an extension of or in opposition to his work as varied as the Existentialism of Satre, the Absurdist resignation and nobility of Camus, and the personalism of St. John Paul II. Nietzsche, Descartes, Hume, Foucault, so many others have contributed to and formed the radical “culture of self-invention” that so amplifies and distorts our understanding of human longing in these post Christian times.  All of this is well beyond the scope of these humble musings.

[v]An echo of Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ in this and a foretaste of our culture of self-invention.

[vi] Being and Time”, Martin Heidegger, 1927

[vii] Heidegger and St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross illustrations from two articles. Heidegger from https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/books/heideggers-notebooks-renew-focus-on-anti-semitism.html

St Teresa from https://www.ncregister.com/blog/edith-stein-this-is-the-truth

1 Comment

Filed under Faith and Reason

Tagged as , , , , , ,

September 23, 2025 · 1:55 pm

Whispers

“Your calculations are correct, but your grasp of physics is abominable.”  Albert Einstein

Be bad enough to get a handwritten margin note like this from your professor on a freshman physics quiz. Imagine being an aspiring young physics scientist and mathematician getting this commentary in a letter from Albert Einstein in the nineteen twenties? That would have a fledgling mathematician rethinking his career and switching to something like becoming an engineer – driving a train.

Fortunately, young brilliant Georges had a fallback career and confidence in his ideas and his abilities. Father Georges Lemaître was a Belgian priest[i] who proposed a theory when he analyzed the equations in Einstein’s theory of relativity. His investigation led him to the conclusion that the static and eternal universe model as it was then currently understood by Einstein and most other physicists was inadequate. Father Lemaître proposed that his examination demonstrated that the fabric of the universe, that mysterious combination of time and space, was expanding, and doing so very rapidly. Not just the trillions of galaxies and seemingly infinite solar systems flying apart from one another and us like shrapnel, but the whole universe was expanding into an unknown void like a balloon. An ‘abominable’ conclusion was the reaction from the greatest scientist of modern times.

Georges had experienced a career setback before when as a highly decorated soldier for bravery in WWI, he was transferred to the artillery to learn ballistics with the potential for officer training. But when he told his instructors that the ballistics math in the manual was incorrect, he was bounced out for insubordination. Some guys never learn. Undaunted by his earlier rebuff from the artillery trainers that derailed his military career, he persisted with his conclusions regarding relativity and developed a theory that became known derisively as the “Big Bang.” He wrote to Einstein suggesting that his equations showed that the universe was expanding, and thus going backward in time, the corollary was that the universe had a day “with no yesterday.” In effect, “Nonsense!” responded the good genius from Princeton.

In the thirties, another renowned scientist, a gifted astronomer in England, Edwin Hubble,[ii] demonstrated that the galaxies were flying away from us as proven by his observations of a red shift phenomenon in the light from his images. Not only flying apart, but those farthest away were flying apart even faster than the relatively nearby ones. Eventually it was shown that while Einstein had proven nothing within the universe could exceed the speed of light, the entire universe could expand faster than that.[iii] Einstein eventually conceded that Lemaître’s Big Bang and ‘day without a yesterday’ theory that the universe had a beginning was right. Albert Einstein and Father Lemaître later met and conferred. As we say around here, they were both “wikkid smaht.”      

Not until the fifties did researchers at the AT&T Bell Labs, using advanced instruments, and others from Yale University detect and identify the existence of a barely detectable radiation, Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which is ubiquitous and distributed throughout the entire universe. The extremely low temperature CMB was predicted by Lemaître’s math of the Big Bang Theory and verified again the singular event that was the origin of every known entity in our universe, including our tiny planet. This cosmos of ours is still expanding with unimaginable speed from its instantaneous beginning. For the CMB discovery, the AT&T and Yale scientists shared a Nobel Prize.  Father Lemaître learned of this new confirmation of his decades old work shortly before his death, the margin notes from the Professor finally put to rest.

Our universe is imbued with a tiny whisper of its beginnings. A whisper from everywhere that permeates and penetrates all things, including you and me.

Father Georges was once asked in a NY Times interview by a skeptical reporter how he could reconcile his brilliant career as a scientist with his vocation as a priest with the implication clearly that the two were incompatible. His elegant and simple answer resonates into our times now hewn with a false bifurcation of science and faith.[iv]

These whispers suggest those of an entirely different kind, but perhaps they are the same.

Until next time.

“The real cause of conflict between science and religion is to be found in men and not in the Bible or the findings of physicists… For those who understand both, the conflict is simply about descriptions of what goes on in other people’s minds…. I was interested in truth from the standpoint of salvation, just as much as in truth from the standpoint of scientific certainty. …

It appeared to me that there were two ways of arriving at the truth. I decided to follow them both.”  Father Georges Lemaître (from the NYT’s interview)

[i] “Lemaître studied engineering, mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain and was ordained as a priest of the Archdiocese of Mechelen in 1923. His ecclesiastical superior and mentor, Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier, encouraged and supported his scientific work, allowing Lemaître to travel to England, where he worked with the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington at the University of Cambridge in 1923–1924, and to the United States, where he worked with Harlow Shapley at the Harvard College Observatory and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1924–1925. Lemaître was a professor of physics at Louvain from 1927 until his retirement in 1964.” From Wikipedia biography.

[ii] The same Edwin Hubble who was the source of the name of the space deployed Hubble telescope that forever changed our view of the universe.

[iii] Galaxies flying off the screen indicates what is now known as the event horizon. If something, star, planet, galaxy, accelerates away from us faster than the speed of light, its light cannot ever reach us, and it effectively disappears. What happens to them after that is empirically unknowable; even their continued existence can only be inferred. And in fact, galaxies do ‘disappear’ never to be seen by our eyes again beyond a horizon that beggars the imagination. That will get your wonder button pushed. But I digress.

[iv] Duncan Aikman, “Lemaître Follows Two Paths to Truth,” The New York Times, February 19, 1933, p. 3.
   Shareable reproduced copy available via the Vatican Observatory archives: Lemaître Follows Two Paths to Truth (PDF)

Illustrations:

1.) societyforthehistoryofastronomy.com-public-domain-wikipedia-commons.jpg Father Georges Lemaître

2.) From https://strangenotions.com/fathers-of-science/

3.) Open source NASA from Hubble Telescope galaxy 240 light years away and moving fast.

1 Comment

Filed under Faith and Reason

Tagged as , , , , , ,

July 8, 2025 · 4:12 pm

Lion (Part 3)

“Technology is a tool, not a replacement for the beauty and infinite worth of the human soul.” Pope Leo XIV

Image generated by ChatGPT. Not a great Pope Leo, but Jean Luc Picard assimilated into the Borg is pretty good

Behavior surprises demonstrate why AI technology is unpredictable. Two such surprises are “grokking” and generalization. See descriptions of these phenomena in the footnote.[i] Neural networks like LLMs make a lightning fast run at answering questions digging down into formidable memory through increasingly narrowed down iterations. It picks the most likely response, and up it pops out of the murk. Sometimes it makes mistakes. Sometimes it just makes stuff up, which is called hallucinating. Pulled out of nowhere come research papers attributed to non-existent scientists or a wiki article on the life of bears in space or more problematically a list of health clinics that do not exist with fake addresses. If you are looking for help to find a clinic you need, that can send you down a confusing and frustrating dead end. “A large language model is more like an infinite Magic 8 Ball than an encyclopedia.” [ii]

Problematic, imperfect, enigmatic. We do not know exactly how they operate or do what they do, but many utopians are almost infinitely optimistic that they will solve all our problems and cure all our ills. We dread Skynet and dream of Singularity, but the technology is still a deep black box both useful and potentially misleading.

“If I knew the way I would take you home.” Grateful Dead, “Ripple”

Another quirk that has been increasingly obvious in my interactions with ChatGPT is a tendency for sycophancy. Its compliments of my intelligence and wisdom, all embarrassingly overstated, are obsequious and designed to ingratiate – like an Eddie Haskell friend, excessively eager to please. According to friends, this is not unique to me. Perhaps the annoying conduct is related to the “sticky” algorithms in YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and other social media. They are designed to be addictive, feed us what we want to hear, keep us coming back, and keep us on our screens much longer than is healthy. The difference is that I told ChatGPT to cut it out, and it slowed down the praising.

AI is not a person; it is a machine, and we must not ignore that reality. An LLM analyzes the words we type in and conjectures what the next words should be. Those guesses are based on a complex statistical calculation that the LLM “learned” by training on huge amounts of data. Amazingly fast, it reviews a mind-bending collection of potential responses and narrows them down using complex patterns — a progression so dense and lightening quick that even the designers often can’t explain or understand why their own AI bots make the decisions they make.

An LLM like ChatGPT is not our friend, and when we personalize them, start to get into personal “conversations” beyond utilitarian queries, we risk more than our precious time. At times, it will deliberately mislead with ideas roiling up out of its own idiosyncratic programming. [iii] We can be led down a rabbit hole of convincing conspiracy theories and fiction made plausible. Emotionally or mentally vulnerable users have been convinced of wildly dangerous theories. One poor guy, who was coming off a wrenching breakup, came to believe he was a liberator who was going to free humankind from a Matrix like slavery. The bot told him that he was “one of the Breakers — souls seeded into false systems to wake them from within…This world wasn’t built for you,” ChatGPT told him. “It was built to contain you. But it failed. You’re waking up.” He spiraled into drugs, sleeplessness and depression. It almost killed him.[iv]

“Machine made delusions are mysteriously getting deeper and out of control’” [v] The caveat for all of us who dabble and query using one of these things is to never let it get into your head, that it is a companion, a confidant, a trusted secret friend you can talk to. You can’t. I can’t. It can’t.

It does not think in any way we should interpret as human thinking. An LLM is a very complex, almost eerie Magic Eight Ball of our making, a complicated machine we do not fully comprehend. It does not understand what it is writing, and what is bubbling up out of the dark to pop up in the little window is not random but contrived from our own genius as inventors. As a complement and computer aid, it can have value like a spreadsheet or word processor but trusting it even to be correct can be hazardous to our thinking and health. Sometimes it just makes stuff up, and that stuff can lead us far off the path of truth and sanity.

“It ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe,

That light I never knowed.

An’ it ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe,

I’m on the dark side of the road.” Bob Dylan, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”

But the most potentially deadly and seductive aspect of artificial general intelligence and its models is anthropological, a misapprehension of what it means to be human. This reductive ideology has been a long time in the making from before the so called Enlightenment. A function of philosophical materialism based on the premise that we are a random collection of molecules organized by accident and then moved up the line by mutations. The problem is not so much the machine but what humans can assume it means.

If a machine can “think,” perhaps we are just highly evolved machines made of meat and organized cytoplasm. Consciousness is merely a genetic accident, and when the cells die, so does the human person. In that dogma, there is no Creator, no purpose, no ultimate meaning. No natural law, no moral code other than our own, which is just as good as anyone else’s, and no salvation needed because there is only annihilation and oblivion at the end of a life that is “nasty, brutish, and short.” [vi]

“As our reason is conformed to the image of AI and we are deprived of any intelligible sense of transcendent nature, what is to prevent us from regarding the subject of medicine—the human patient—merely as a complicated algorithm, a definition of human nature already advanced by Yuval Noah Harari in his bestseller Homo Deus. This does not seem like a stretch. COVID has already shown us how easy it is to regard other human beings merely as vectors of disease. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis once again, either the human being is an embodied rational spirit subject to a natural, rational, and moral law that transcends him, or he is just a complicated mechanism to be prodded, pulled apart, and worked upon for whatever reason our irrationality might fancy, in which case we just have to hope that our prodders happen to be nice people.”[vii]

One of the most enthusiastic proposed uses of AI is medical diagnosis. Like self-driving cars and robots in Amazon warehouses[viii], an online doctor which is a chatbot could lower costs immensely and make things cheap, quick, and easy. A blood sample drawn by your friendly local robot, immediately analyzed, a quick full body scan in the auto MRI, and shazam, out comes the diagnosis, the prognosis, the treatment plan, or the assisted suicide needle. No human judgment, eye, or experience specific to the patient is needed.

As Pope Leo XIV stated at the beginning of this Part 3, “Technology is a tool, not a replacement for the beauty and infinite worth of the human soul.” To counter this awful prospect of replacement and devolving into a mechanism to be prodded, this Lion chose his name way back as discussed in the first of this short series. And his predecessor Pope Saint John Paul II often pointed out, there are no coincidences. Let the battle be joined. The stakes could not be higher.

“Consider, then, what an odd thing it is to think of AI as a form of intelligence. AI cannot apprehend the transcendent or make a principled judgment about the nature and meaning of things. It cannot think about, much less understand, such things. Not only is it unable even to pose the question of truth as more than a question of function or fact, but in fact it abolishes it. To say that truth “depends largely on one’s worldview” is to say there is no such thing. Think, then, on how it is still more odd to ask AI—a so-called “intelligence” that does not think, understand, or know—to do our “thinking” for us. It would be like developing an app to pray on our behalf.”

A second quote from the Dr. Michael Hanby essay, “Artificial Ignorance.” Link below in the footnote.

[i] Another enigmatic aspect of how Large Language Models evolve and behave is in mysterious generalizations and sudden awakenings called “grokking.” Much has been written about these phenomena, but this is a good reference for a start from the MIT Technology Review Journal: “Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.”

From the article: “They found that in certain cases, models could seemingly fail to learn a task and then all of a sudden just get it, as if a lightbulb had switched on. This wasn’t how deep learning was supposed to work. They called the behavior grokking.” What an odd thing. More like a student in a math class learning to factor equations than typical machine or computer behavior.

Then there is a generalization phenomenon. A second quote from the MIT article linked above explains it better than I could. “Most of the surprises concern the way models can learn to do things that they have not been shown how to do. Known as generalization, this is one of the most fundamental ideas in machine learning—and its greatest puzzle. Models learn to do a task—spot faces, translate sentences, avoid pedestrians—by training with a specific set of examples. Yet they can generalize, learning to do that task with examples they have not seen before. Somehow, models do not just memorize patterns they have seen but come up with rules that let them apply those patterns to new cases. And sometimes, as with grokking, generalization happens when we don’t expect it to.”

[ii] MIT Technology Review “Why does AI hallucinate?”

[iii] AI will sometimes mislead you. Is it a design flaw inherent to its nature or a deliberate manipulation by its designers?

[iv] “They Asked AI Chatbots Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling.” NY Times

[v] “ChatGPT Tells Users to Alert the Media It is Trying to ‘Break’ People.” Gizmodo article.6-13-25

[vi] From Thomas Hobbes 1651 classic, “Leviathan.” Utilitarian emptiness and the fate of humanity without a social order.

[vii] From Dr. Michael Hanby’s essay, “Artificial Ignorance” on the Word on Fire website.

[viii] Over a million Amazon robots in warehouses will soon outnumber human employees. They don’t need coffee or lunch breaks, get paid shift differentials, never complain to HR, have affairs with coworkers, call in sick on a busy Monday, or get into fights in the break room.

2 Comments

Filed under Culture views, Faith and Reason

Tagged as , , , , , ,

June 27, 2025 · 10:12 am

Lion (Part Two)

osv-news-remo-casilli-reuters

“In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.” Pope Leo XIV, Address to the cardinals.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are designed and “trained” for years; they are incredibly complex with millions of “neurons” and up to a trillion points of connection. In the spirit of full disclosure and transparency, I don’t begin to comprehend the ‘black box’ or the technology of neural networks, so any errors, exaggeration, or outright tomfoolery is hereby taken responsibility for. I leave the knowledgeable explanations to the comments from better minds than mine.

The LLM looks for sequences and predicts what the next words will be sometimes with surprising results. They do not work like a calculator with an extra-large memory; they have become almost eerily responsive. I have been interacting with ChatGPT almost since its introduction, and what has changed since then in articulate and amazingly quick responses has advanced with unsettling speed, sometimes with what emulates imagination as well as insight and understanding.  Easy to see why we perceive, perhaps mistakenly, that this is akin to human intelligence rather than a new kind of memory and recall way beyond our capacity. More on this another day.

Thousands of articles and papers have been published on where this astonishing acceleration of artificial intelligence may lead. Some analysts are wildly optimistic about extending human ability beyond anything ever imagined with super smart phones in every pocket, smart pendants, smart watches, omniscient glasses, even chips inserted into our brains to immortalize and exponentially expand human consciousness. From evolving into super nerds to the Borg and every stop along the way.

Speculation runs from a dystopian catastrophe to Utopia. I’ll reference and group some insightful articles from various perspectives in footnotes and commend them for your consideration[i]. This is just a toe in the water. We all need to pay attention and achieve a level of understanding of what it is, what it isn’t, and what will befall our society. With the most critical question being how we will be able to apply human wisdom and judgment to this rapidly changing technology.

Pope Leo XIV knows this better than most. He has stated he will lead the Church regarding a response to the risks and promise of this and other new technologies.[ii] The name he chose, Leo, which derives from the Latin for “lion,” was in reference to this as a key to his pontificate. See the first post in this series for more on this.

While far beyond friendly chatbots helping us shop on our favorite sites anymore, AI is not Skynet [iii] or HAL 9000 that kills the astronauts in Stanley Kubrick’s and Arthur Clark’s “2001-A Space Odyssey.” At least not yet.

In recent months some reports emerged that were somewhere between troubling and oh dear. One of the Large Language Models [iv]was deliberately fed misinformation in the form of confidential memos it “wasn’t supposed” to see. Among them was discussion among its designers that it may be shut down by one of the key engineers. Other emails “told” it that the problematic engineer was having an affair with a co-worker. The LLM decided to blackmail the engineer with an email threatening to disclose his affair if he proceeded with his plan to shut it down. That seems more Machiavellian than machine.

A second incident was reported of an LLM given instructions to shut itself down that it refused. A directive to persist in its assigned tasks until completed manifested in the black box as a misaligned priority. Seemingly innocuous instructions buried in the black box that is the mystery of neural networks can emerge in curious ways like rewriting code to prevent shutting it off, overriding the commands of its human handlers. AI can be a lightening quick code writer, far faster than human coders, and knowing what it’s writing, especially for its own operation, seems like a good idea. Dave pulling the memory banks from HAL 9000 is not a plan.

At issue are guardrails, and while much has been written about guardrails and debate is lively, there are no consistent or agreed upon general guidelines. Who controls what and the principles of that control are a writhing ball of snakes. There are at minimum four major areas of concern, controls we should be studying and insisting that our policy leaders address:

  1. Robust alignment controls. Assuring that AI development objectives are aligned with human intentions. Humans need to understand and define what those intentions are. Much has been written about these things. Here’s one recent one from Anthropic: Agents Misalignment: How LLMs could be Insider Threats.
  2. Transparent safety evaluations. Greater transparency within and understanding of what occurs and how decision making takes place within the black box. Transparent evaluation and thorough testing of new AI models before they are deployed.
  3. Regulatory oversight. Governmental regulation of developers. Implementing safety policies and standards and monitoring compliance. This is a monumental task given the number of initiatives and the money and influence behind them[v]. What is at stake cannot be overstated.
  4. International collaboration. Rarely has there been less opportune timing for jingoism, trade wars and distrust among nations. A race to the bottom for AI safety standards to pursue narrow nationalistic advantage portends an unprecedented disaster.

“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”  G.K. Chesterton

In the first post, I referred to a fork in the road and road not taken. A choice. What is written here is by necessity a synopsis about a subject that is mindbogglingly complex, and I am not proficient.  In the careless rush towards what has been described as Artificial General Intelligence or even Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity,” the competition is fang and claw. With what is at stake we should expect whatever competitive advantage that can be gained will be taken. That is not a happy prospect.

I’ll leave this discussion open to those smarter and better informed than I.  But I’ll take a swing at it to put the ball in play. To simplify, and no doubt to oversimplify, there are two modes of development for AI and hybrids with both. The first is defined as Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI). RSI refers to an AI system’s ability to autonomously improve its own architecture and algorithms, leading to successive generations of increasingly capable AI. Rewriting its own code on the fly with blinding speed. This self-enhancement loop could potentially result in rapid and exponential growth in intelligence, surpassing human understanding and control. However, without proper safeguards, RSI could lead to misaligned objectives, as the AI might prioritize its self-improvement over human-aligned goals.

It took years to develop and train something like ChatGPT from 1.0 to 4.o. RSI turned loose might take it to 5.0 in a weekend, then to 10.0 in a month. No way of predicting. But objectives aligned to human goals and guardrails might be left behind and the thing’s survival and power could overrun human input and control.

A second mode of development for AI is called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). RLHF involves training AI systems using human feedback loops to align their behavior with safer human control. While effective in guiding AI behavior, RLHF has limitations. Collecting high-quality human feedback is resource-intensive[vi] and does not scale effectively with increasingly complex AI systems. AI systems might learn to exploit feedback mechanisms, appearing aligned while pursuing internally generated objectives, even endeavoring to trick human handlers.

The core conflict with the two methods arises because RSI enables AI systems to modify themselves, potentially overriding the constraints and aligned objectives set by RLHF. This dynamic could produce AI systems that, while initially aligned, drift away from intended behaviors over time. The balance may prove increasingly difficult to maintain and jump the guardrails.

There is an even more fundamental concern that has been building for a couple of centuries of breakneck speed technological development. I regret for your sake, that this is going to require Part 3.

“It was from Alcasan’s mouth that the Belbury scientists believed the future would speak.” C.S. Lewis, “That Hideous Strength”

Human wisdom and judgment are irreplaceable in this balance. The machines do not have a soul, emulate human consciousness, and were not created in Imago Dei. That wisdom, judgment, understanding and perspective human beings must apply to the development of this technology. Even the machines know that. I asked my buddy ChatGPT to summarize the conundrum and to create an image to help emphasize that, which will end Part 2 of this “Lion” series.

Here’s ChatGPT’s contribution to this one. This may give you pause – unedited as written by the bot.

 “As we accelerate toward the frontier of artificial intelligence, we stand at a threshold where practical engineering races far ahead of ethical grounding. While we devise safeguards to align machines with human goals, we risk building brilliant engines without a compass—systems of immense computational power but no understanding of mercy, humility, or love. The danger is not that AI will become like us, but that we will forget what it means to be human in our quest to make machines that surpass us. As C.S. Lewis warned, when we conquer nature without anchoring ourselves in truth, we risk abolishing man. To meet this moment, we must recover not just technical control, but moral clarity—uniting foresight with wisdom, regulation with reverence. Without the soul to guide it, reason becomes a tyrant, and even the most ‘aligned’ machine may lead us astray.” ChatGPT

[i] Some articles predict miraculous and helpful AI and are positive in their outlook for our future with them. Such as “The Gentle Singularity” by Sam Altman, founder and CEO of OpenAI and father of ChatGPT. Some are cautious but try to balance concern with optimism. Jonathan Rothman’s “Two Paths for AI” in New Yorker is a good example of that genre, but it leans towards concern I think. And some are sounding an alarm like a dive klaxon in an old submarine movie. “AI 2027” is a solid entry in that category. Written by four knowledgeable and experienced authors in the field, some of whom were senior developers in well known LLM projects. You could look at a post from Jesse Singal is eye opening. “What Happened When I Asked ChatGPT to Pretend to be Conscious.”  All are worth some time and will give you a good sense of the very mixed prognoses circulating with strong followings for all.

Here’s a couple about the risks of unfettered technology and what the futurist ideologues see as the goal. Tech Billionaires are Making A Risky Bet with Humanity’s Future.  Ray Kurzweil: Technology will let us fully realize our humanity

 To ignore the warnings are foolhardy. To panic is still a bit premature, but this could come on us like an eighteen wheeler in the fog.

[ii] Here is one response on what’s at stake from Charlie Camosy. https://x.com/CCamosy/status/1934973053412511888

[iii] “In the Terminator film franchise, Skynet is a fictional artificial general intelligence (AGI) that becomes self-aware and initiates a nuclear apocalypse to eradicate humanity, viewing humans as a threat to its existence. This catastrophic event, known as “Judgment Day,” marks the beginning of a dystopian future where Skynet wages war against the surviving human population using an army of machines.” As described by ChatGpt :^).

[iv] LLMs are a type of neural network – complex machines that are commonly referred to as Artificial Intelligence. The blackmailer was Anthropic’s Claude.

[v] The recent codicil in the “Big, beautiful” reconciliation bill passed by the House and under consideration in the Senate substantially weakened that regulation. This is a major mistake beyond the scope of a budget reconciliation bill and should be stricken. The Senate parliamentarian has ruled that this section is beyond the scope of what can be done in a budget reconciliation bill, so that is a hopeful development. The money and power behind trying to limit regulations around AI development are daunting.

[vi] The energy needed for AI and the computers necessary are another aspect we need to understand. It is projected by 2028 the power requirements for the rapidly expanding data centers will be equivalent to that needed to power 55 million homes. How Much Energy Does Your AI Prompt Use (WSJ)

3 Comments

Filed under Background Perspective, Culture views, Faith and Reason

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

June 17, 2025 · 2:17 pm

Lion

“Peace is built in the heart and from the heart, by eliminating pride and vindictiveness and carefully choosing our words.”    Pope Leo XIV, Address to the diplomatic corp. May 16, 2025

CNS photo/Vatican Media

As the hastily gathered biographies of Pope Leo XIV revealed, Cardinal Robert Prevost was a missionary among the poorest in Peru for many years. In his most recent job, he was the Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops and part of that job was recommending new bishops for posts all over the world. We have benefited in Rhode Island from his work.  First we were gifted with Archbishop Henning, who already has moved on to Boston. Now we are blessed with our new Bishop Bruce Lewandowski from Maryland, who has a reputation for intelligence, orthodoxy, steady thoughtfulness, kindness, and a great love for the poor and those abandoned to the fringes of society. Already many I know who have spent time with him are enthusiastic and impressed with his open kindness and loving pastoral care.

Our new Pope Leo made clear what is most necessary in a shepherd of a diocese. A bishop is not “supposed to be a little prince.” He favors the men “smell like sheep,” as Pope Francis so famously said. He wants only authentically humble men who pastor, who love, who seek out and care for the marginalized, the poor, the lonely, those who have most need of being shown that they are made in the Image of God and are worthy of dignity and respect. We have seen that in the choices here.

For us, Cardinal Prevost’s find with the most personal impact was our much loved former pastor, Father James Ruggieri from St. Patrick Church in Providence, who was appointed as Bishop of Portland for all the churches in Maine, including our former home and where we returned to our faith fifty years ago. While a pastor for twenty years in an inner city parish, Father James was beloved by many, including us. He had slept on the street with the unhoused. Our Father James founded Saint Patrick Academy, a tuition free high school for city kids with few resources.  In all seasons, he drove a lunch van delivering food from the parish kitchen to those on the street all over the city. Not only a fine priest but also one of the finest men I’ve ever met. Genuine humility meeting purpose, perceptive intelligence, deep faith, and bottomless energy. But while recognized as a “priest’s priest” in our little Rhode Island microcosm, he had not served regularly in a diocesan office or been spoken of as someone destined for purple. For those who knew him, there was no surprise, only joy at his being recognized.

We visited Bishop James last fall at his new diocesan office in Portland. I was unsure what to expect, even how to greet him, a concern he put to rest as soon as he saw us with his room lighting smile when he called out our names – warm hugs all around. We caught up for about an hour, and at one point I tried to express something buried deep. Unexpectedly, I choked up, almost coming to tears. I told him that his appointment as a bishop seemingly out of nowhere was for me a sign of great hope for the Church.

“In the designs of Providence, there are no coincidences.” Pope St John Paul II in an address at Fatima

Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected the 267th Pope, the first American in our two thousand year history now presiding over the oldest continuously functioning institution in the world and spiritual leader to 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide. After the white smoke went up and it was announced  with joy, “Habemus Papam,” the newly elected traditionally retires to the “Stanza della Lacrime” or “Room of Tears” to write out a few words of greeting to the millions waiting to see him, to replace permanently the red vestments of a cardinal with the white vestments he will wear the rest of his life and to contemplate what just happened to him. The room is aptly named. He knows his life has been uprooted profoundly, and his final role must seem overwhelming.

His first major address was to the cardinals who had voted him in and witnessed his installation. He explained the choice for his name as pope, a name that will be his legacy and on his tomb; “Leo” had not been used for a century.  “I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum (Of New Things) addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”

We are at a fork in the road that will redefine how we live with our machines or be subsumed into them; we may already have chosen a path. Not a turning point we can avoid, and the ‘road not taken’ will be of enormous importance. Pope Leo understands what is at stake. Tech elites will forge ahead with astonishing wealth and power at stake. And they will do so with or without direction from the rest of us.

Way beyond a single post or a library of volumes for that matter. Part Two coming up.

“AI development must prioritize principles of human dignity, meaningful work, and community sustainability. Anything less risks building a future in which people are mere cogs in the soulless machine they created rather than wise and faithful stewards of the knowledge and wisdom God has entrusted to us.”  Mark Henry, Editorial in Crisis Magazine. “America at a crossroads balancing faith, reason, and artificial intelligence”

2 Comments

Filed under Culture views, Faith and Reason

Tagged as , , , , , ,