Adam Gopnik reviews Charles Taylor’s new book, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment.

Victoria Emily Jones has a nice piece on New Mount Pilgrim’s Maafa Remembrance window.

Sailing to Byzantium: an exhibition of work by Olga Bakhtina.

Alfonse Borysewicz on art and transcendence.

Tyler Cowen’s discussion with David Bentley Hart is excellent. Here’s a taster: ‘There are people I know, in fact, people near here in Notre Dame, who are all terrifically intent on trying to revive a dying Christendom, because they think that would be the revival of Christianity in the West. They ally themselves to these reactionary figures like Victor Orbán. Whereas my ideal of what would be a brighter future for Christianity would be the final eclipse of that kind of conflation of Christianity with the interests of a particular civilization or culture or nation. I believe that’s a perfidious corruption. So, bright in what way? I would say that in many ways, the brightest future for Christianity may consist in the death of many of its institutions and of much of its cultural power’.

Mike Watson offers a defense of the Frankfurt School.

The Australian Association for the Study of Religion (AASR) has issued a CFP for their annual conference (29–30 November, in Canberra) on the theme ‘Thinking Religion in Place’.

Worthwhile piece by Eric Naiman about ChatGPT, reading Dostoevsky, writing [sic] essays, and the banality of ideas: ‘Users of ChatGPT don’t need the “heavenly bread” of intellectual freedom and individual authenticity; instead they want the grade and the degree that will lead to various forms of material bread after graduation. …. Readers of [The Brothers Karamazov] should understand that every time they use ChatGPT they are burning Christ at the stake’.

Excellent piece by Brian Boyd on Why We Need Amistics for AI: ‘Beneath a veneer of debate over how we should apply universal principles to novel technologies, our tech fights are a power struggle over who gets to count as “we” and who is left out — over who will rule whom. The result is that we often wind up going down technological paths unreflectively, seeking only pleasure and profit — and then are surprised to find things we don’t like. We also sometimes fail to go down technological paths whose ends we would have liked. We had better unlearn this habit, because a historic technological breakthrough is here in the form of generative AI. If we wish to decide together how we can use this breakthrough to live well, rather than having it choose for us, we must learn the practice of Amistics. … If we are to live well with AI, we must recognize and emphasize this level of ethical formation that is neither individual nor universal, not zero-sum but free-range. To act for the common good requires a community that understands its shared ends and goals. We must find ways for politics to enable meaningful decisionmaking to take place in actual communities and cultures, rather than in higher, more abstracted contexts’.

Speaking of the interwebs, I learned last week, via a Google search, that my father died last year. What a strange and estranged world we live with.