Entry 2: A Meditation for the Earth Today is Earth Day. Exactly two weeks ago, in the middle of Holy Week, Holy Trinity Church in Tiverton hosted an Earth Tenebrae for the Endangered & Extinct. (This is the second installment of our Dear Rhode Island Church series.) There’s more info about the service and its meaning at the link above.
Please join with all of us in prayer today: Letter from Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe on Military Strike on Iran – The Episcopal Church Eternal God, in whose perfect kingdom no sword is drawn but the sword of righteousness, no strength known but the strength of love: So mightily spread abroad your Spirit, that all peoples may be gathered under the banner of the Prince of Peace, as children of one Father; to whom be […]
Today I am fasting. It is the transferred observance of the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the day when the Church remembers the children killed by Herod as he sought to secure his position and protect his power. Liturgically, it is a feast day. But this year, I am keeping it instead as a day of penitence and fasting. There are many reasons to fast right now. Across the world, people in positions of power […]
Convention 2025 Sermon Texts:Isaiah 55:10-11Matthew 13:1-9 “Let’s take a moment. Close your eyes and picture a bright spring morning. The sky is blue, the air is crisp and imagine you are standing in a newly plowed field—a New England sort of field—with wet mud surrounding big granite rocks, all lit by a warm spring sun. You have a heavy cloth bag slung over your neck, filled with all sorts of seeds: little ones, big ones, […]
My address to the 234th Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Rhode Island2025 Have Faith 401 — Convention Address A number of years ago, at a meeting of General Convention, I heard that a bishop from Central Africa had said something that has stayed with me since. I was chairing the Legislative Committee on Evangelism at the time, and in the course of our deliberations we were reminded, very quietly, “Conversion is a sovereign act […]
Artificial Intelligence makes an alluring promise: a frictionless life. Already, it is possible to summon almost anything with a voice command or a swipe. A pizza arrives when we want it, wherever we are. Some speculate that soon enough, our personal digital servants will anticipate our cravings before we are even aware of them. The moment we begin to feel a pang of hunger for our favorite slice, it will already be on its way. […]
I was honored to be invited to be one of the Episcopalians invited to this past week’s AI Future’s Conference that was held in Minnesota. It was a rich and ecumenical meeting, with papers delivered, working groups organized and lots of serendipitous conversation. This piece by the Dean of Chapel at General Seminary in NYC provides both an overview and a suggestion of the most generative way people of faith can respond to rapid spread […]
Opinion | Selfishness Is Not a Virtue – The New York Times: (gift link) America has always been a country with lots of Christian citizens, but it has not always behaved like a Christian country, and for reasons that resonate again today. An old error is new. Too many Christians are transforming Christianity into a vertical faith, one that focuses on your personal relationship with God at the expense of the horizontal relationship you have […]
In an article on the BBC website, Pallab Ghosh writes: The danger is how AI and our relationships with it will change us. That seems more immediate than worries about AI going amok.
AI Chatbots Offer Spiritual Answers. Religious Scholars Explain Why: There is something irresistible about hearing that you alone have a connection to something secret or even divine. “AI can infer the preferences and beliefs of the person interacting with it, encouraging a person to go down rabbit trails and embracing self-aggrandizement they didn’t know they wanted in the first place,” explains Yii-Jan Lin, a professor at Yale Divinity School who has written about the apocalyptic […]
