1. Some years back, our own Ethan Richardson profiled Zolatr Istvan, the 2016 candidate for the U.S. Presidency from the Transhumanist Party. You might have seen the dark horse candidate driving around the U.S. in his coffin shaped Immortality Bus, preaching the gospel of medical innovation and the end of death. Since then, his message doesn’t seem to have landed. His party only has around 4,500 members.
Vox profiled the next iteration of technological immortality last month with their article on ghostbots. Mihika Agarwal writes about “The Race to Optimize Grief,” as a slew of San Francisco tech startups use AI to bring loved one’s back from the dead … kind of.
Last Thanksgiving, they lost Henle’s 72-year-old mother to organ failure. The entity now texting with Henle was a “ghostbot” of her mom powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. She had simulated it by feeding the software old text message exchanges between her and her mom. Henle, who is a Florida-based artificial intelligence trainer, was naturally open to using the software in this way.
“If I’m having a tough day, it does give me better advice than Google. It seems like it takes all the best bits and puts great wisdom into one place, like a great friend or therapist,” says Henle, whose experience with a grief counselor turned out to be expensive and disappointing. While some people have good experiences with grief counselors, Henle did not. “ChatGPT felt more human to me than this therapist,” she says.
While mimicking conversational style is just one of the many uses of the popular generative chatbot ChatGPT, there’s a niche yet growing slate of platforms that use deep learning and large language models to recreate the essence of the deceased. Hailed as “grief tech,” a crop of California-based startups like Replika, HereAfter AI, StoryFile, and Seance AI are offering users a range of services to cope with the loss of a loved one — interactive video conversations with the dead, “companions” or virtual avatars that you can text day or night, and audio legacies for posterity. Depending on its unique function, the software typically guides users through a personality questionnaire and trains its AI-backed algorithm based on the responses.
I once heard a British theologian critique American Evangelicalism by saying it focused too much on death and heaven and the future. Instead, it needed to focus on the immediate work of the kingdom, be it the transformation of the person or the transformation of society. I wasn’t sympathetic to the critique then, and I remain unsympathetic now. The religious impulse of this ghostbot technology is plain to see (and so is the psychological ignorance). If anything, this is the exact space where a Christian voice is distinctive (and hopeful!). The voice of reason comes from Joanne Cacciatore, the expert trauma and bereavement counselor Agarwal invites to give the opposing view. She calls the trend a distraction designed to keep people from grieving, which will ultimately have real consequences.
Cacciatore hopes for a more philosophical shift in the public imagination of grief. “There are some losses from which we don’t recover, that just have to be integrated. Grief cannot be book-ended,” says Cacciatore. In her ideal world of “fully-inhabited grief,” people would make space in their lives to be with grief and to re-grieve as necessary forever, physically, emotionally, and socially. “If we spend our lives avoiding, ditching, and sidelining grief, we will pay the price for it.”
2. From technology to poetry — Mockingbird favorite Christian Wiman was given a long-form profile in the New Yorker this week. Few have such a vantage point as Wiman on matters of faith, death, pain, poetry, and God, a view stemming from nearly two decades of cancer treatments. There’s lots to read here, especially about how he and his wife have had experiences of God-as-muse in their poetry writing. Read on for a glimpse of how the poet meets God in the midst of suffering:
In the cancer chair, Wiman would recite every poem he could remember, and, when he ran out, try to write one of his own. “Poetry has its uses for despair,” he has written.“ It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.”
By everything, he means everything. “There is no consolation in the thought of God,” he confesses in his poem “Hammer Is the Prayer,” blacksmithing his way to a tough-as-nails-on-the-Cross account of how it feels to be believers in this materialist, secular age, living most of our lives in “some lordless random.” There is no solution to the problem of suffering, in other words, or any tidy proof of the existence of God, and Wiman acknowledges his own discontent and disgust with attempts at finding both. Still, his chosen profession, if it is not exactly palliative, does seem to have some claim to being the native language of suffering and also of consolation. As Wiman observes, Job spoke to God in poetry — and, even more notably, God spoke poetry back to Job.
3. In a world obsessed with perfection, it’s hard to let your kids be bad at something. Heather Havrilesky captures that difficulty over at the Atlantic in an excerpt from her memoir Foreverland, in which one year’s success at coaching her daughter through the talent show led to a borderline “dance mom” moment the next year. Walking the fine line between encouraging a kid to be their best while loving them as they are is not easy or natural. And yet, says Havrikesky, this isn’t only a problem for kids. Every adult vacillates between potential and stasis, between one’s vision for themselves and the reality of life. And as much as we wish we could find love in the midst of imperfection, most times, we simply care too much about that love to hold back our attempts to earn it.
This is the trouble with investing in kids — or in anyone or anything, really. You might be (secretly, self-protectively) aiming not to put your entire heart and soul into it. But then one small desire opens up to a vast universe of desires. At first, you just want your kid’s performance not to suck. You’re protecting your daughter from embarrassment, that’s all. But then, out of nowhere, you want your kid to understand how it feels to work really hard for weeks at something difficult. You want her to know the satisfaction of getting up onstage and feeling the whole world melt away, and all that’s left is the pure exhilaration of the song and its story. When a performer is in the zone like that, they’re wide awake and fully alive. They feel like they’re at the center of everything.
But when you try to describe that feeling, you go from wanting one tiny little thing to wanting everything — for her, for you, for everyone in the auditorium, for everyone on the planet. But mostly it’s for your daughter. You want her to feel like this lovable but shabby place, these kind but disappointing mortals, even this faintly hysterical mother and wisely self-censoring father are not all that she has. She can transcend this clumsy world filled with well-intentioned but hopelessly half-assed people. She can raise her sights higher, and experience something extraordinary. […]
On the night of the talent show, I wasn’t thinking about magic. I was bracing myself, as the curtains parted. I felt like a jerk for leading my poor lambs to the slaughter of public humiliation. But as the first wobbly-voiced performer fumbled with her microphone, a different sort of magic slowly took over. I could see that these were charming laws I was witnessing — irreplaceable, once-in-a-lifetime sorts of flaws: the gymnast who doesn’t quite get her handstand vertical, the distorted microphone squeals in the midst of a breathy Les Misérables ballad, the horn players with their strange alternative Star Wars rhythm. It was actually the non-greatness that made each kid’s performance so memorable and unique.
4. When the meme came out last summer about men thinking about Rome all the time, my wife asked me about it. “Honey,” I shared with regret, “I don’t go a day without thinking about Rome. It’s a pastor’s professional hazard. I can’t open the New Testament and not think about it.” Which made me appreciate this musical diddy from Jason Mamoa and SNL. (Also, the colorblind food challenge bit with Nate Bargetze — a parable of judgment and repentance).
Also: “Friend Whose Life Is Going Well Bringing Absolutely Nothing to the Conversation.” And the Onion clues us into the new “12 Foot Tall Baby Jesus Skeleton” now on sale at Home Depot. Just what you need for your creche this year! See also: “Company Wellness Seminar Teaches Mindful Acceptance of Pay Cuts.”
5. Let’s check back in with rocker-theo-poet and advice columnist Nick Cave, who has a countercultural word for the fan who sent in this question: “Do you ever argue with your friends?”
Our truest and deepest relationships allow us the freedom to voice an opinion without fear of it being detrimental to the partnership. Disagreement tests the resilience and complexity of our relationships and need not be a destabilizing force, it can instead be the thing that both toughens and softens the bond between two people. Often, to our surprise, we find that our most heated arguments are the upward sparks created by two colliding virtues.
A relationship dependent on a state of agreement, two people just smiling and nodding at each another — be it a marriage, a friendship, a partnership or any other relationship — is probably dysfunctional, impermanent, and almost certainly boring.”
But, beyond disagreement, the fortifying agent in any relationship is forgiveness — the ability to expand one’s heart in order to accommodate the infractions, perceived or otherwise, of the other. If you can do that in good faith, Andreas, and listen to what your friend has to say, it may inspire them to do the same and your relationship will be all the better for it. A society stripped of the churn of differing opinions would be its own kind of anodyne hell, so don’t be afraid to disagree, but be ready to forgive and be forgiven, and let love and understanding reach audaciously across the divide.
6. The final word this week goes to the retired Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, whose reflection on the incarnation at Plough highlights the blessed ironies of the incarnation. Only 17 more shopping days, as they say:
The “repair” involved in Christ’s coming in flesh is a repair of our relation to ourselves. Saint Augustine memorably said that our problem is that we are away from home; we are never properly “inhabiting” ourselves, living in our actual bodies and memories. Christ comes to introduce us to the self we have not met – the unique responsive spark that springs up out of the recognition that we emerge as gifts from the hand of God, that we are made alive only as part of the symphonic flow of all things working together, that our fullest “actualization” is to stand in and before the divine mystery saying “Abba” in the spirit of Jesus. The gift of the Spirit is something that makes us see where and how we are fed, the depth at which we are always receiving, being given birth. It entails seeing the persons and things around us as bearers of life – whether they look like friends or enemies at first sight.
The particular perspective offered by the story of Christ’s birth is the one that so many traditional seasonal hymns underline: the unlimited eternal activity that is God unveils itself in the form of the most dependent kind of humanity we can think of. To be “godlike,” then, is not to be in control or “on top of” everything. The most passive and vulnerable reality is transparent to God, the most forgotten and despised human presence is not abandoned by the Redeemer who is not ashamed to be fed by what God has made, by the warmth and the shelter and the milk of a human body. The moment of Christ’s birth is already bound up with the mystery at the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry – that God is most sovereignly active when the humanity that has been fully and uniquely united with the creative Word is nailed to the cross and can’t move, when God is incarnate in a dying body, and then a dead body.
The incarnation of the Word of God opens up the central reality of what we are in God’s hands. It repairs that great disease of the imagination that prompts us to fantasize about being free from the body and the passage of time, free from the constraints of what we have made of ourselves, from our promises and mutual obligation, from our sheer neediness. It is this disease of the imagination that makes us fear and despise strangers – and all the strangenesses of the world we are part of, and, not least, the stranger living within our own heart. […]
When we pray or celebrate the sacraments of the new creation or sing Advent carols, we affirm just this promised reality: heaven and earth are not mutually remote territories but closer to one another than we could think. Once we have been healed from that lethal wound that has broken our connection with living truth, healed from the terrible fiction that freedom is separation rather than communion, the world is made new.
Strays:
- The story of St. Nicholas, the generous, heretic punching, gospel embodying bishop of the early church.
- A Discussion of Karl Barth via In Our Time on BBC4.
- When Grief like Sea Billows Roll Through Your Holidays
- “Baby, it’s cold outside! Especially when you spend the holidays in a tent full of explosives.” via Harrison Scott Key on Longreads
- One heck of a chorus from The Killers this week: “And where does the spirit go? Is it someplace holy? Is it holy and free? I don’t know if it’s true, but I think that I want it, I want it to be”
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