Abandoning Latin – “The Vatican has announced the most far-reaching overhaul of its internal administration in a quarter of a century, with Pope Leo XIV approving two major regulatory texts that will reshape daily life inside the Holy See.” Vatican ends routine use of Latin in sweeping overhaul (The Catholic Herald)
Figuring Out Fernandez – “Though they are reasonably unlikely to be breaking out in song anytime soon, Vatican types may be looking at Fernandez’s troubled tenure as DDF head and wondering: ‘How do you solve a problem like Fernández?’” (Crux)
The Concept of Celicity – “Before the early eighteenth century, there was no suggestion that the peoples we now know as ‘the Celts’—the Irish, Scots, Welsh, Bretons, Cornish, and Manx—had anything to do with the Celtae or Keltoi of Classical writers.” Who Are the Celts? (St. Austin Review)
Unaware of Despair – “People can get used to most anything. Even the abyss may be rendered tolerable—or, for that matter, luxurious … ” Walker Percy’s Pilgrimage (First Things)
Distorting Institutional Missions – “Anyone working in a university today knows the mood: dashboards, key performance indicators, rubrics, and assessment grids—the sense that what gets measured has quietly replaced what matters.” From Revelation to Self-Cultivation: The Theological Transformation That Created the Modern University (Church Life Journal)
Ephemeral Human Life – “We lived in a whirlwind of loss: First the minds, then the bodies of our parents were gone, and all we had left was a bunch of furniture and boxes of stuff.” The Bad News (The Lamp)
Suspected Money Laundering – “The deeper question is whether the Church has fully internalised a truth it proclaims but sometimes struggles to practise: that transparency is not a threat to the Gospel, but a servant of it.” What leaked recording of Vatican official discussing FBI probe reveals (The Catholic Herald)
Polygamy in Africa – “One struggles to find almost any attention given in Una caro to the family issues facing wives and children most hurt by polygamy.” With address of polygamy, Vatican flunks early test of synodality (Crux)
Doorway to a Cloistered Monastery – “A beach day, a thick manuscript, and five years of quiet access turned into a book that lets the world step inside a hidden monastery.” Behind the Grille: How a Cloistered Nun’s Manuscript Changed Everything (Words and Pictures by Jeffrey Bruno)
No Hagia Sophia Visit – “The primary reason for the omission is the delicate shift in Hagia Sophia’s status from a secular museum back to an active mosque in 2020.” Why Pope Leo XIV Will Not Visit Hagia Sophia (The Greek Reporter)
AI Tops Billboard Chart – “The number one song ‘Walk my Walk,’ by the artist Breaking Rust, was 100% generated by AI.” Artificial Music for Artificial Ears: AI Rocks the Jukebox (The Washington Stand)
(*The posting of any particular news item or essay is not an endorsement of the content and perspective of said news item or essay.)
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@ Figuring Out Fernandez
An essay worth reading if only for the humor. But the trouble is there’s no Von Trapp family to send him to for rehab. It’s up to Leo XIV to find a suitable new venue for him. Although Leo seems perfectly satisfied.
Change to the old Francis I guard seems unlikely, Pope Leo further eradicating Latin usage in its omission from Vatican documents. In that regard despite his mentive visage Leo XIV is becoming less inscrutable and more predictable. At least our venue is clear. Increased sanctification
@ Unaware of Despair
Kierkegaard’s proposition that most don’t realize their despair sets the tone for a tour de farce, as distinct from tour de force. It’s not difficult to assume most are living in despair when you’re aware. As was Kierkegaard. Otherwise he wouldn’t describe everyone’s unwittingness.
When we possess a prejudged agenda sweeping generalities that contain parcels of truth we may interpret at length the template of the clueless. Life does have moments of near death that awaken a sense of life indicating one’s otherwise somnolence.
What essayist Valiunas actually brings to fore by dissecting and psychoanalyzing Walker Percy’s Pilgrimage is that absence of a living faith in the risen Christ ensures despair known or unknown. The reason is the convinced realization of our existence.
@ AI Tops Billboard Chart
To say we live in weird times is an understatement (essayist Jared Bridges). Triumph of the Fake world. Let’s keep attentive that AI exists only because we’ve created it with resource data that’s derived from us. If AI is now the enemy of self awareness and humanness like sage Pogo said, We’ve found the enemy, It’s us!
What then? We’ve finally discovered a way to become contented zombies. The more we contribute to the data bank the less we’ll have to do. Soon we’ll be handing out Pope Francis’ dreamed of universal salaries [probably bitcoins] so we’ll all be free of the tyranny of responsibility. Outfits like Beaches and Sandals will be overbooked year-round.
Virtual reality, unless we become blessed with a radical traditionalist pope, will be achieved by the Synod elitist Group 9, making it easy for all to be inclusive simply by response to our smartphone transmitted invitation to respond yes to being nice to eachother. It’ll all be easy. But deathly boring.
I am seldom baffled by human vanity. Sin is the root of it all. But I am stretched to the limit in trying to understand why most seem to view AI as real, to believe that computers can possess self-understanding and make value judgments. They are purely contingent devices. Electrical circuits don’t have values and never can have values about anything.
AI is really another form of both vanity and exoneration. If machines can be construed as possessing a material nature of existence, then it is easier to believe existence for us is both accidental and contingent to these accidents. Those preferring to conceiving themselves as machines can escape accountability for the evil that they do.
But I have hope that there might be a positive unintended consequence to AI. God is always brilliant at revealing our vanity to us. The stupidity of AI based presentations is becoming more and more obvious. Perhaps this might inspire more to reconsider materialism and search for greater meaning to existence.
Yes Edward. We’re replacing our rational faith in God with the “human vanity” that we can create better. A form of prideful worship that will likely lead to the domination of the human intellect by the very technology we expect to increase our freedom.