Orthodox Christian Articles I Thought Worth Sharing

Fr. John Chryssavgis cautions against confusing intelligence with spiritual understanding at Clergy-Laity Congress AI panel( Huffington Ecumenical Institute) has much that is ignored by AI critics and fans.

Part of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America’s “AI Red Lines in Orthodox Theology” project, supported by a grant from the Future of Life Institute, the panel identified five Orthodox “red lines” for AI: that it must never replace human responsibility, never replace human presence, never be confused with the nous, never reduce the human person to data, and never allow capability to outpace wisdom.

Fr. John opened his remarks by tracing the anxieties surrounding AI to older stories about the limits of human freedom, pointing to the myth of Prometheus and the Book of Genesis. 

“The principal lesson gleaned from such texts is that we are not God,” Fr. John said. “Yet, most of us live as if we are God.”

He described a spiritual dimension to modern technology, calling algorithmic innovation a form of idolatry and cautioning that the companies developing AI are driven by profit rather than the wellbeing of those who use their products.

Fr. John connected this reality to a broader anthropocentrism.

“In contrast to the divine mandate in Genesis for us “to serve and preserve” creation,” he said, “we are developing AI with the assumption that its sole objective is to serve and preserve us.”
“We need to re-learn what it means to be a part—unique and indispensable, but one part—of creation. Otherwise, we will treat the world—both other human beings and the rest of creation—purely as raw material for consumption and exploitation,” Fr. John continued.

Fr. John also warned that AI may usher in newer, faster methods of injustice and discrimination.

“Algorithms—especially those that determine employment, housing, and healthcare—tend to replicate or reinforce already existing and deeply embedded societal biases,” he said. “AI is unlike previous technological revolutions—like the printing press or the television—because it can actually decide whom to help or heal, whom to overlook or hurt.”

Turning to the distinction between intelligence and nous, Fr. John invoked the patristic separation of “intelligence” (dianoia or mathematical thinking) from “intuition” (noesis or spiritual understanding). Artificial intelligence, he said, does not have a complex inner worlds, inner motivations, or an emotional landscape, and thus questions about meaning or hope will never be resolved through it.

Fr. John also offered a measured critique of the recent papal encyclical on AI, Magnifica Humanitas. He observed that its title refers to human greatness rather than the glory of God, and noted that the piece opens with the story of the Tower of Babel rather than with the story of God’s covenant with Noah to preserve creation.

On approaching our creation “in the image of God,” Fr. John argued for balance. Genesis states that humanity is formed in God’s image, he said, but the same text also describes humanity as fashioned “from the dust of the earth,” sharing its day of creation with every other living creature. 

Forgetting we are “inseparably interconnected with nature,” Fr. John said, leads to a distorted sense of human exceptionalism that is, at best, a “half-truth.” 

The Unity of God’s Church and the Orthodox Church (Orthodox Christian Laity)

The recognition of those churches and communities’ ecclesial nature outside of the Orthodox Church’s canonical boundaries compels the Church to be in an unceasing dialogue and collaboration with them, allowing the Holy Spirit to move all into complete unity with Christ. However, recognizing the ecclesial nature of other nonorthodox Christian churches and communions does not sanction, at least for the Orthodox Church, the practice of intercommunion. The Church’s reluctance to be in sacramental communion with other Christian churches—despite the affirmation that they are imperfectly and incompletely members of the One Church of God—should not be perceived as a sign of arrogance, and neither should it be a source of Orthodox triumphalism or self-sufficiency. It does not allow the churches to become complacent with present relative unity and collaboration. It is a painful reminder to all that the unity of God’s Church requires the fullness of the Apostolic faith, life, and witness. Toward this realization, the churches are called to intensify their prayers so “that all Christians may work together so that the day may soon come when the Lord will fulfill the hope of the Orthodox churches, and there will be ‘one flock and one shepherd’ (Jn. 10:16).

Statement on the Occasion of the 250th Anniversary of the United States of America (Orthodox Christian Laity)

It is in this spirit that we call the faithful of the Orthodox Church in America—and, through their witness, this nation—to repentance: repentance for injustices past and present; for the idols of wealth, comfort, and power that seduce every generation; for the divisions and enmities that tear at the fabric of common life; and for the ways in which we have failed to love our neighbors as ourselves. A true commemoration of a nation’s founding is not mere self-congratulation; it is a moment of sober examination, of honest confession, and of renewed dependence upon God.

The Church does not speak this word from a posture of superiority. We acknowledge our own failures—in charity, in unity, and in the fullness of our witness to the Gospel. We, too, stand in need of God’s mercy. But it is precisely because the Church has known the healing power of repentance that she cannot withhold this word from the world she is called to serve.

I think therein is an answer to those who can see only America's wrongs and those who pride themselves on being anti-woke. Acknowledging failures must be followed by the repair of damage done. Ignoring our failures is hubris.

Charmolýpē (“Joyful Sorrow”) as the Antidote to Triumphalism (Public Orthodoxy)

 

There is a Byzantine word that guards this mystery from being turned into propaganda: charmolýpē “joyful sorrow.” The word sounds paradoxical because it is a paradox, not of logic but of spiritual truth. It does not describe alternating moods, as if joy and sorrow take turns. Rather, it names a single, integrated experience: joy that has not forgotten the Cross, and sorrow that has not lost the rose scent of the Kingdom. Charmolýpē is not a decorative nuance of Orthodox piety; it is a discipline of the heart. It teaches us how to celebrate without arrogance, how to hope without cruelty, how to speak of victory without becoming triumphalist.

Triumphalism is a subtle temptation precisely because it borrows the vocabulary of faith. It speaks easily of “victory,” “chosen people,” “truth,” “enemies,” “purity,” “greatness.” It appears in religion, ethnicity, politics, even in the Church’s own self-understanding. Its danger lies in replacing the Gospel’s disarming power with a familiar one: the power to dominate, to humiliate, to rank human beings. It imagines that God’s truth must appear as our superiority, that blessing must look like strength. In such a climate, the Cross becomes embarrassing—a means to something more “successful.” Resurrection is reduced to a trophy, and Christ becomes to a tool.

Our time offers many examples of this drift, especially in heated political cultures where leaders are clothed in messianic language: savior, healer, anointed, the one who alone can fix what is broken. In the United States, this temptation has become particularly visible in the way the President has been portrayed by some supporters in quasi-messianic terms, and at times has spoken in ways that reinforce such a narrative. The point is not to score partisan arguments, but to name a theological distortion: the substitution of Christ with a political image of redemption, where salvation is reduced to the triumph of power and healing to the defeat of enemies. When Christian language is recruited to sanctify domination, the Church is no longer teaching the nations; she is being taught by them.

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 Charmolýpē lives precisely here. Even in resurrection, Christ is humble. Even in glory, He remains the One who poured Himself out. The wounds do not disappear as if they were mistakes. They remain, not as raw pain, but as radiant memory, a witness that love has a cost, and that the cost was freely embraced. This is why Christian joy cannot become arrogant. If the Risen Christ carries wounds into eternity, then the Church has no permission to preach victory as the humiliation of others, or to present God’s Kingdom as a celebration of our strength. To proclaim Pascha truthfully is to proclaim a victory that looks, at first glance, like weakness: a candle flame flickering in the dark.

Relational Authority in the Orthodox Church: The Role of the Laity Within Official Ecclesial Structures (Orthodox Christian Laity)

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Sunday With Floodwaters Receding

 Sunday has been spent submitting stories, going through the email, napping, cleaning, dinner, and setting up future posts.

Such a wild and dangerous life I live. 

The Hillbilly Hellcats persist:  

Scientists mimicking the Big Bang accidentally turn lead into gold | The Independent

I found the racism of my black Irish childhood embarrassing. Now it has given way to fear – The Irish Times is it a curse of humanity to hate one another?

A giant replica of a kitchen cabinet is unveiled in Indiana | AP News

Hoosier Myths and Legends - Episode 7.2: Haunted Ripley County, Indiana

Thucydides’ account of war is as timely as it is misunderstood | Aeon Essays  

How Imperial Japan turned to the sardine to help build a war machine 

 

Submissions:

“Agnes” went to trampset,  Copper Nickel. The Georgia Review and Chestnut Review

 Rat Bag Lit received “Lessons Learned From A Green Meadow”.

Thankfully, no more rain of any appreciable quantity.

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Movies and Theater, Muncie & Anderson; Books Worth Noting; Kit Marlowe Dies, Again

Ball State's Emens Theater calendar: Upcoming Events at Emens Auditorium.

 Anderson's Paramount Theater is showing movies again! A wondrous place to see movies. I wish more of the films rose to the ocassion.

Movies, movies, movies! Anderson's Paramount Theatre offers slate of free famous films (heraldbulletin.com)

I have a beein in my bonnet about Hollywood remaking movies - instead of recycling well-done material into second-rate reboots, why not plunder older IP? 

Other than Warren Williams, Barbara Stanwyck & Joan Blondell being dead?

 

 Books: The Curse of Queen Kelly (Film Comment)

 Bruce Dern ruined Robert Redford's The Great Gatsby for when I read someone saying Bern should have played Gatsby. Yes, that would've been so much more interesting.

‘I turned down Gandhi because I’m terrified of snakes’: the amazing movie memories of Bruce Dern  (The Guardian) 

I have a fondness for Llosa & Irvine Welsh & Téa Obreh & Kit Marlowe: 

I Give You My Silence by Mario Vargas Llosa review – Nobel laureate’s final novel is a love letter to Peru (The Guardian)

When I Give You My Silence was published in Spanish in 2023 its author, the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, rightly predicted that it would be his final novel. He died last year at the age of 89. I Give You My Silence may have been completed with the spectre of death approaching, but there is nothing morbid about this book, which is an eccentric love letter to Vargas Llosa’s native country and, in particular, its music.

Can Nothing Save Us? by Irvine Welsh review – US family saga is a late-career triumph  (The Guardian)

Irvine Welsh’s 16th novel Can Nothing Save Us? comes as something of a surprise. An epic American family saga, it explores a collective emotional malaise at the heart of a great power in decline. This is a bold and ambitious work, in which Welsh deftly shifts point of view with confidence and conviction: his ability to jump generations and to capture the voices and feelings of his disparate cast of characters is at times quite astonishing.  

A History of the Novel in Britain by Philip Hensher review – a masterpiece of criticism (The Guardian)

In his opening paragraph, Philip Hensher declares that a novel not only “tells a good story” but is a good story in itself. We could extend that neat formula to include this book, which is not only a masterful account of fiction since 1719, when Daniel Defoe set Robinson Crusoe down on his desert island, but is itself a wonderful read. There is nothing dreary here; no sense of being back in the seminar room taking notes. Instead it is 600 pages of deep pleasure, an excuse to revisit old literary loves and be reminded of ones that have slipped from view.

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Hensher never falls into crankiness, but he is unafraid to point out home truths. Such as the fact that so much of the pleased-with-itself “experimentalism” of the 1960 to 1980 period was merely a retread of things that had been done better before. Tickled by the clever wheeze of having central characters with no name? Fanny Burney was already doing that in 1814. Keen on using fragmentary collage to signal modernity? That blustery old fogey Evelyn Waugh got there first with Vile Bodies (1930). As for self-reflexivity, that device by which the novelist comments on the process of writing a novel, you should go back to Fielding.

Téa Obreht on Writing a Layered, Intertextual Tale of the American West (Literary Hub) - a delightful writer.

From Marquis de Sade to Grand Theft Auto, a Brief History of Depravity (Literary Hub). I have understood the French fascination with Sade. It seems to fall in line with their admiration of Jerry Lewis. The essay is in good company, Camus started with Sade in The Rebel. I think he was  faker, living in his head, but that might be the point of the essay. He let out all the demons.

Interview with Stephen Greenblatt on the Death of Christopher Marlowe in 1593:

 

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Another Story Published!

 No church. My ride is sick, my stomach is uncomfortable in a way that I want to stay close to home, and it started raining again. Just what Indiana needs.

I had some good news this morning, another story published: Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1861-1984 (Seven Story Publishing).

 It is a consolidation of some of my Indiana factory town stories into one. The ones inspired by Anderson and Muncie; the smokestack is the old Andaconda smokestack repurposed (btw, Anderson knocked that down). KH dislikes the format. He calls it the Our Town version. I would like to hear your opinion, if you feel like reading it.

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Muincie: End of June and Beginning of July

 

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JCO Answers How She Writes a Book a Year

[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.] 

Is it possible Harper's Bazaar asked the one important question of Joyce Carol Oates and no one had before? Check out This Is How Joyce Carol Oates Writes a Book a Year.

Stephen King in his On Writing (a book I recommend, albeit for an odd reason: King publishes how he revises a story) recommends having in mind an audience. Oates offered a similar and different idea:

Who do you write for and why?

I started writing really when I was in high school, and I think I’m sort of writing for an ideal audience. It’s more like telling stories and trying to express the experience of a story as if it was a little movie. I think our lives are one story after another and we’re trying to give voice to that experience. I’m not sure if there’s necessarily a specific audience. I mean, if you had no audience at all, you might still want to take photographs, and you might commemorate something. I don’t have a specific audience, but I would hope to have a literary community.

Do you mean a community of readers or writers or both?

Just that we have a common vocabulary and respect for literature, because there are so many people who don’t. It’s like that community of people who care about good films: more of a community of people who care about our culture.

How she describes a novel may explain one of the many reasons the short story form is difficult for me.

What do you usually start with when you are starting a novel? Is it an image or a character, or is it a sentence or a word?

A novel is a river, with a number of tributaries flowing into it. I don’t think you could write a real novel, a substantial novel, on just one little idea. For me, it’s like a number of ideas that come together, and I kind of conjoin them like characters. You have to have a little family of people. For me, it can begin with a place. All of my writing is set in a real place in my recollection. In The Frenzy, for instance, the first story is very much in New Jersey, down the New Jersey Turnpike, and then it’s on the Garden State Parkway, and then it’s in Cape May with a view of the ocean at a certain time of year, off-season. Very New Jersey.

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Thinking Bourgeois

[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.] 

Somerset Maugham said that it was the middle class that created English literature. I think that was in The Summing Up. I was a teenager with ambitions to be a writer, so it has been in my head for a very long time. What was meant by middle class might have been a bit muddled by me. Or circumstances in my case and time left me too little time left to write after trying to keep a law practice afloat.

But I think, on the whole Maugham was right. The rich are too comfortable in their economic status to use their education to create art. The poor are too desperate to create art, that does not help pay the bills.

Reading Hidden in the Bourgeois by Morten Høi Jensen brought all of this to mind. He is writing about Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.

...And indeed, what could be more bourgeois — as Thomas Mann understands the term — than Hans Castorp’s celebrated epiphany in the famous “Snow” subchapter, that “man is the master of contradictions.” The coexistence of apparent opposites is characteristic of the bourgeois. Werner Sombart, in his The Quintessence of Capitalism, makes the Faustian claim that “two souls dwell in the breast of every complete bourgeois: the soul of the adventurer and the soul of the respectable middle-class man.” A claim that sounds quite a bit like Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger, who, in the eponymous novella, cries out: “As an artist I’m already enough of an adventurer in my inner life. So far as outward appearances are concerned one should dress decently, damn it, and behave like a respectable citizen…” Thomas Mann offers the image of the writer as someone who keeps his office hours and dresses appropriately, whose writing is characterized not by the heat and flame of inspiration but by the cold comfort of thoroughness and industry. “There is much to be said for a wife and children,” Thomas Mann wrote in his diary in 1919, “but given my nature, the decisive consideration for me is that it allows me to hide in the bourgeois realm without actually becoming bourgeois.” As the French writer Bernard Groethuysen observed in 1927, “the bourgeois likes to keep his incognito.” It was Flaubert who originally formulated the contradictory character of the bourgeois when he observed, in a letter, that “one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demi-god.” But it was Thomas Mann in whom this dialectic, the yes and the no of bourgeois culture, found its most prophetic repository. “I have become what I am,” Thomas Buddenbrook, the good bourgeois, tells his brother, Christian, the failed artist, “because I did not want to become like you.” Many years after writing those words, Mann described his enemy Adolf Hitler as “a brother, a rather unpleasant and mortifying brother,” by which he meant that Hitler, like himself, was an artist, only he was an artist gone astray, a good-for-nothing who believed himself “reserved for something else — as yet quite indefinite, but something which, if it could be named, would be greeted with roars of laughter.” Significantly, Mann titled his essay “A Brother,” as though aware that he and Hitler represented two paths for Germany. I have become what I am, because I did not want to become like you. A few weeks after the war, Mann, ever the conscientious artist, confessed: “it is all within me, I have been through it all.”

We have denigrated the middle class for not being cool. Is that not the heart of The Graduate? But it is the middle that has enough education to grasp the world around them. It is the middle class that has enough stability and enough uncertainty to see the wrinkles and twists of reality to have a reason to act. If memory serves, Lenin and Joe Strummer came from the middle class.

And so let us encourage the middle class to create. Preferably in the arts and not in politics.

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