Category: Technology

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Generative AI for Universalism

Explainer graphic as sample of generative AI

I’m more than a little suspicious about generative artificial intelligence: a mix of feelings about slop culture; the devaluation of mental work; the risks both to property rights and open culture; the risks to our economy; and the pressure on our environment, among others. Do the risks outweigh the opportunities? And will it assemble fantasy facts and spurious citations? Better to look, and review than wonder and let my imagination wrongly overvalue or undervalue it.

But where to begin? A few months ago, I used ChatGPT and a couple of image generators, but everything was vague or too uncanny. I came across a video produced by Google’s NotebookLM today, and thought I’d give it a try — with Universalism, of course.

My first attempt used a short prompt about the Winchester Profession. NotebookLM proposed a set of authority documents — one from one of my own sites — and I filtered out a couple of suspicious sources, but all the rest were denominational-adjacent. The results were disappointing, and the podcast-style audio was absolutely eerie. Because of the sources, Universalism was compared and contrasted with Unitarianism, which I hadn’t mentioned and attempts to filter Unitarianism out failed. The products reminded me of pamphlets — and a telling of liberal religion — that neither speaks to me, nor looks (as best I can tell) like the UUA today. If anything, it reminded me of pamphlets from twenty to fifty years past. Not useful.

So I asked for “Christian Universalism and not Unitarian Universalism” and this coughed up more theological sources: both patristic and current writers in a group I think of as neo-Universalist. The sources made the outcome, naturally enough. Generated audio and video is peppered with informal uses and verbal ticks which by definition is unnatural. I have a study guide that I’ll need to examine closely.

But this graphic looks pretty good to me. But Universalism historically has suffered a labor shortage, and the right tools may make more possible for its future, so worth more exploration and an examination of the risks and benefits.

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“Link love” for a more humane web

Parallels exist between a more sustainable church, and a more sustainable web: one that not only takes less electricity and fewer resources to run, but allow more privacy and portability of data. And are less addicting by their nature. Some solutions mean looking back — to blogs like this, and to “link love” that highlights good ideas in place of an algorithm — and other point (uncertainly) to options like federation.

Kris De Decker is my favorite writer about finding low-tech solutions for current problems, and I eagerly read new articles at his Low-Tech Magazine when they appear. He recently appeared in presentation “Back To The Future Of The Internet” where he and others deal with the sustainable (environmentally and personally) web. It’s linked from his more frequently updated side project, No Tech Magazine:

https://www.notechmagazine.com/2024/08/back-to-the-future-of-the-internet.html

And if you want to reach me (and get updates of this blog) through the federated web, follow me at @Wells.

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Simple, low-cost tips for video services

While some people go bird watching, I go denomination watching, especially during the annual meeting season. When I learned about the Primitive Methodist Church, I knew I had to browse their websites.

They are a small denomination with congregational polity (unlike most Methodists) and a focus on practical mission initiatives like a school for ministry, a campground and a investment/loan fund. Little wonder then that their National Mission Board suggestions for video production — posted at the start of the pandemic — are low-cost, high-impact, briefly stated and practical. An admirable list, and the suggestion “DON’T record with the camera pointing UP at you. No one wants to see up your nose” made me laugh out loud.

What a joy it would be if every denomination had such useful information. Worth emulating.

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Requests open for UniversalistChristian.net

I’ve build some of my sites, including hymnsofthespirit.org, universalistchristian.net (documents) and universalistchristian.org (original writing and perhaps more) using the Jekyll static site generator, but I’ve let them go so long that I’m having a hard time refreshing and adding to them. Did Jekyll change, or did I just forget how to use it?

Either way, I’ve decided to relearn it but that’s taking more time than I thought. I’ll post updates, but in the meantime can you go to those sites, and especially UniversalistChristian.net, and let me know what you would like to see added?

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Quickly-made presentations

Some day I’ll go into my document processing workflow, but I have a workshop coming up and that’ll call for a presentation. That’s the theme today. It won’t be a “PowerPoint” — that semi-genericized term for meeting-killing, over-engineered presentation visuals — mind you, but a set of slides that exist as a PDF file, that are much easier to put together.

First, the text, like almost all of my work products, is set down in Markdown, a simple way of marking-up text to use as-is, or to post-process into other formats. (For those in the know, I use Github-flavored Markdown, an extended version.)

For the production of the slides, I use the beamer class within LaTeX. LaTeX is a hoary and rather difficult typesetting engine. commonly used in the hard sciences and mathematics.

But I want something easier, so I use pandoc, a command-line tool that processes a Markdown file through beamer to get the PDF output. Try pandoc through a web interface; beamer tranformations don’t work though.

“The Easiest Way to Make Presentations! (Pandoc + Markdown)” (Luke Smith)

Confused yet? This video should clear it up, and if that doesn’t appeal pandoc has other presentation options. and since it has found a vital place at the core of my document workflow, I’d recommend try it in any case.

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Cleaning up UniversalistChristian.net

One of the problems of writing about Universalism so long is that when I search the web about something I don’t know, I often find something old I wrote or transcribed, but had forgotten about. Or sometimes, something I’ve written about but have neglected.

I’ve been thinking about how the Universalists viewed elders (the church office) much like I wondered about deacons last year. That lead me back to the 1790 Philadelphia Convention, its Articles of Faith and its Plan of Church Government. Oh look: the page has typographic and styling errors. I need to work on that.

It and Universalist Christian Initiative (UniversalistChristian.org) need a general refresh. I’ve not touched either in three years, and that also means relearning the engine that generated them, Jekyll.

But it’s not just a clean up job, or a polity dive. I’d like to know more about the church building the Philadelphia Universalist had (an interesting story in its own right) and more about a shadowy minister from what are now the far exurbs of Washington, D.C.

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UUs and the lost web

I regularly engage in “magnet fishing” on the web, but instead of old bicycle frames I hope to find connections to resources that might not otherwise be found. In this case, it’s for my current research but other times I’ll Google a fragment of the Winchester Profession. You’d be amazed what that scares up: sometimes a community church with a forgotten Universalist antecedent, or even more frequently in a church’s statement of faith, a phrase surviving like a fragment of DNA in a wholly un-Universalist congregation. Perhaps it just sounded nice at the time.

Today’s find hearkens to my own past. As a technically-savvy middle-aged gay man… I’ve seen things. Things in plain text, on a green CRT terminal. Here’s a bit of the internet that’s been untouched since 1997.

http://www.qrd.org/qrd/orgs/UUA/uu.txt

That’s the Unitarian Universalist Resource Page from the Queer Resources Directory and I hope it never changes or dies. I recall it from way back. Was it on Gopher (HowToGeek.com) then? Perhaps. (Warning: 1990s web styling.)

Note that uu.txt isn’t a webpage. Indeed, this file surely had a presence online, and on the internet, before it was on the web even though we tend to make those terms synonymous today. Internal references to mailing lists, anonymous FTP (file transfer protocol), bulletin boards, mailing lists and technologies of the same vintage — and the fact the file isn’t in HTML — make me think it had been around for ages, but that this was the end of the line.

But what a handy resource! Drawn together in a single file (large by the standards then; hardly a blip now) see have a window into the program of the UUA and affiliated bodies in the late 1990s. So not ancient history; I was either in my last year of seminary or a new graduate when this file was last touched, and already making my first proper web pages.

What does this file say today? First, it reminds me of the all-in-one manuals Universalists published in the nineteenth century, but more about them later. It also reminds me that you can create effective tools in resource-constrained environments. Did you notice how quickly it loaded? That’ll lead me to low-resource online worship, which I hope to pick up after I get a handle on my March 5 sermon.

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Discord?

By discord, I don’t mean the unsettled state of being, but the community and communications application, so commonly used in gaming. Trying to get a sense of who uses it, and who might use it apart from gaming. I’ve used it in Esperanto and some religious settings and it seems to a lot of promise, even thought it is mostly unknown to adults of middle-age and older.

What has been your experience?

Context: Their site.

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Non-Subscribing Presbyterians have new website, services online

I was watching some Holy Week and Easter videos from Non-Subscribing Presbyterians in Ireland. I have known about them for decades but have never seen one of their services. Be sure to see and the several videos by the Rev. David Steers, including his effective use of a litany to create a moment of worship, here for Good Friday, and the Easter service from Killinchy, led by the Rev. Philip Reain-Adair.

Killinchy, where is that? I went to the website of the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland, and saw that it had been completely revamped. Congratulations!

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Communion and COVID-19: the remaining options

So, communion. I’d better start writing down these thoughts before the pandemic chips all the options away. I’d like to show there are options for regular, Maundy Thursday and Easter communion services.

My thinking has gone from we can be especially hygienic, to perhaps we can hold the service outside, to perhaps we can have walk-by distribution with social distancing and now I don’t think any public, in-person service is likely to be safe by Easter. Safety in distribution has long been a communion ethical concern, especially among Protestants, so this isn’t exactly a new thought. And even if we (collectively) don’t refrain, it’s possible civil authorities might stop any meaningful gathering.

If I can, I’ll show some of my influences later, but as of March 26, 2020, I think these are the best options for a communion service to minimize risk for communicants and presiding ministers. Please comment, because I’ll spell out the effective conduct for those options that grab your attention.

There are four likely options:

  1. The pastor, and perhaps any other ordained ministers of the church, presiding over communion at home, praying for the congregation and informing them of this.
  2. The church having a service of spiritual communion by phone or video conference; that is, a guided visualization which expresses the desire for communion, using the rite (text) for communion, but without the elements or any physical artifacts. It may also take on elements of a eucharistic fast, paradoxically, to stir desire and make the consummation (the return to normal communion practice) that much richer.
  3. The church having a “purely symbolic” communion service, by video conference where participation by the laity in by observation and prayer. The presiding minister (who might broadcast from home or church) might or might not commune by mouth.
  4. The church having a distributed service where communicants provide their own bread and wine, and are led remotely by the minister. More akin to some prayer breakfasts, but with people at home. This assumes the “lowest” ecclesiology of any option.

#1 needs no special technology as such. Only #3 absolutely requires a video broadcast. #3 and #4 are not mutually exclusive.

I can hear you saying “I don’t like any of those.” Fine, but these are the options I can think of, unless you count “don’t do it” or “risk infecting your people” as good options, and I don’t.

Please comment and, as I said above, we can work though the details. (Don’t comment minimizing the pandemic because I will delete those.)