Comment Magazine

Back when I didn’t believe in God, I did a lot of church shopping. I was trying to figure out which denomination of atheism I could have faith in. There were so many to choose from! Marxists, Freudians, existentialists, the hard-core science types like Richard Dawkins and the rationalist philosophers like Bertrand Russell. In my Fatherless mansion, there were many rooms.

As a first assignment in an introductory class I was teaching at a big Midwestern university in the early 2000s, I asked the students to describe their relationship with language. Just a page, I told them, and gave no other instructions, anxious to see what these undergrads, my first students, could tell me about the medium I was about to devote my life to. One freshman wrote about growing up in a family of avid readers.

Who counts as human? More precisely, who counts as the kind of human to whom I owe obligations, and who, when encountered, elicits a response of care? Conversely, who lies beyond my circle of concern? And how should I respond to them? Are they strangers to be hosted, enemies to be feared, or barbarians to be civilized or enslaved? Since Diogenes the Cynic, different humanisms have attempted to answer such questions through appeals to a universal humanity.

There was a fish on my walk today, camouflaged at the edge of the water line. He moved imperceptibly, barely visible to the naked eye between the algae-covered leaves and twigs. When the current shifted, his body shivered and swayed forward. In the span of several minutes, he steadily followed the curve of the shoreline without moving a muscle. Each gust of wind propelled his small body forward, forward. When I stepped to follow him, he darted and was gone.

A Laity Lodge Order of Prayer, Psalm Recitation, and Song Guide: Steven Purcell A morning office in the spirit of Laity Lodge: the psalms recited, the day named, the body of the room joined in song before the work of the festival begins. Visio Divina via Rembrandt and Rubens Guide: Irena Dragaš Jansen A guided practice of slow, prayerful seeing: two of the great painters of a divided age serve as our teachers in attention, contradiction, and the eye that searches for grace.

When I was a child in the 1970s, my parents told me what thousands of other Jewish children of that era heard: “If you get lost, look for a house with a mezuzah and ask for help.” They were referring to the little case, containing a portion of Torah, affixed to the doorways of Jewish homes. For Jews, the mezuzah—based on the biblical command in Deuteronomy 6:9—is an outward marker of identity. It says one of “us” lives here, so this place is safe.

Over the past decade, most of our public debates about the role of technology in human affairs have focused on a set of interrelated technologies: the internet, social media, and the smartphone. The questions and challenges these technologies present are hardly resolved, but with the emergence of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT in late 2022, attention suddenly turned to artificial intelligence and the large language models (LLMs) that underwrite them.

At the Berlin Exposition in 1896, they called it Kinderbrutanstalt, or “child hatchery”: live infants on public display in newly invented incubator technology from France, a neat row of glass boxes pumping out vital heat for tiny humans. Any walker looking for spectacle and education could observe these small children presented as an experiment in public science, showing off the incubator as a sign of promise for personal and civic health.

On a recent Sunday morning, my five-year-old daughter asked me why she had to go to church. She didn’t feel like going. I explained that because God made her, she belonged to God, and though God had given her to our family, she still belonged to God, and he wanted her to go to church.

The world was spared my ever becoming a folk singer. Though the patterns of agonized effort are still installed in my vocal cords and the arpeggios haunt my fingers, I never had the voice for it. Recently, reminiscing over those early ambitions, I popped a few stanzas of a song I wrote in the 1990s into a new AI music generator, just to see what would happen.