There is so much good happening in the world of theology and the arts. At the end of each week, we’d like to share with you a few of the great things we’ve discovered this past week from around the internet.
Cultural commentator and Brehm-friend Kester Brewin, writing for Adbusters, published an insightful history of artificial intelligence this past week entitled Resisting the Demon: A Hitory of AI in Nine Parts. In the article, Brewin considers what humanity’s serach for AI means and why we may want to be wary of that pursuit.
Religion and technology have always fed from the same fuel. Whether holy spirits or evil demons, what lurks within us is a lust to ascend, to know All Things, to escape our human limitations and failing bodies and become Most High. This desire is the monster within, but one great irony is that through AI we really do risk creating a hell into which we will be unable to stop falling.
Benjamin Dolson, writing for Curator Magazine, reviews the modern ballet Everywhere We Go, a production of the New York City Ballet. Everywhere We Go is choreographed by Justin Peck and scored by Sufjan Stevens.
Peck’s ballet all but abandons the traditional pas de deux, a ballet trope in which a male and female dancer do a “step for two” that often serves to provide shape and narrative. Instead of two central dancers, Peck creates a choreographically dense world with many leaping bodies, none with sustained relationships to one another. This isn’t to say that Peck is operating in the avant-garde, but rather that he is widening the lens so that we can see a little more.
Brehm alumna Tamisha Tyler, writing for Fuller’s blog, considers the ways her writing becomes a Sabbath practice.
This is my Sabbath: the practice of stopping, waiting, and paying attention. Writing has a way of making us pay attention to our lives. It forces us to articulate how we feel, what we see and think. The use of language and grammar gives us the space and boundaries to pinpoint the dealings within us that have no name. In our writing, we too have the ability to look back at our weeks and declare, “it is good.”
Speaking of writing coming out of Fuller Seminary, issue two of the Fuller Magazine published this past week. In the new issue, a variety of Fuller voices consider what it means to claim the moniker “Evanglical” today. The entire issue can be read here. The issue was guest edited by Fuller Professor of Systematic Theology Oliver Crisp, who wrote this in the issue’s introduction:
What of the future? What is meant by the term evangelical appears to be shifting as are many other things in the Christian culture. Where will this movement lead, and what role does Fuller have in the shaping of it at this important juncture in our history and in the life of evangelicalism more broadly? What does it mean to be evangelical today, and what does it mean for Fuller to be evangelical?
The annual Academy Awards occurred last Sunday evening, and while How To Train Your Dragon 2 didn’t take home any awards, this video about the making of the film is certainly worth a few mintues of your time.
Finally, writing for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, Joan Huyser-Honig reports on the scholarship of Cecilia Gonzalez-Andrieu as recently presented at the recent “Who Is My Neighbor?” conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Gonzalez-Andrieu spoke at length on John August Swanson, a favorite of ours as well.
In her keynote, she said that God created each of us with creative potential through which God still speaks. “Our neighbor is one, who as made by God, shares our imago dei, image of God. We are all variations on the same image. Is there anything in creation that is not a neighbor to us? And, what do we do, now that we see?” she asked.