Month: April 2023

Inspired by Prof. Philip Cohen’s discomfiting encounter with ChatGPT, t his morning I test-drove ChatGPT by vanity-chatting with the AI about Margaret and me. It was… well, not ‘educational’ since I would have anticipated roughly this result, but certainly informative.

For instance: I checked Margaret first, and it turns out that Margaret has been conducting several side hustles about which she didn’t tell me a word. ‘She began her academic career as a lecturer in theology at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. She later served as a lecturer in Christian Ethics at the University of St Andrews, also in Scotland.

Adam has also taught at Yale Divinity School and Harvard Divinity School in the United States, and has held visiting positions at several other universities and theological seminaries around the world. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey, and a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. Currently, she is a Senior Research Fellow in Theology at Mansfield College, Oxford University.’ Well!
None of this is true, although ChatGPT got is close with ‘lecturer in theology at Glasgow’ (she was a visiting lecturer’, and the distinction makes a huge difference. Likewise, she’s a Visiting Tutor at St Stephen’s House, which is… in the same city as Mansfield. (By the way, she’s open to offers from Harvard and, especially, Yale). I invited ChatGPT to compare her work with her former co-worker David Clough’s, and it got some vague similarities, but reversed the poles by suggesting that Margaret is more Barthian and Protestant, and David is more Catholic. I tossed ChatGPT a soft pitch by asking if she and Willie James Jennings shared any theological teachers or influences, and it entirely whiffed on Stan Hauerwas (now, it’s true that neither of them is a Hauerwasian epigone, but it doesn’t take much theological-academical nous to note that both their Duke degrees were affected by Stan’s presence).

As for me, I was surprised to discover that I’m an expert on Mark and John, about which I’ve published books (hint: I have written about neither Mark nor John, and have written and published a commentary on the Epistle of James, and essays on Matthew). The huge surprise for me, though, was that everybody calls me by my nickname, ‘Kim’. (Margaret supposed that the AI might think her nickname is ‘Madge’, which I’m recording here in the hope that people pick up on it and it becomes a fulfilled prophecy.)

I noticed some other writing tics in the model, which I shan’t disclose here so that I can use them as a preliminary warning sign for GPT-ed essay submissions….

Not an encouraging sample.

Both a slow start to my morning run, and a slow start to my day. Instead of going to Mass at Cowley St john, I’ll go with Margaret to Mary Mags, so I’m not out the door (again) till ten o’clock or so.
My run was embarrassingly sluggish: heavy legs all the way and a molassean pace. On the other hand, the temperature ticked up to 6°, and the weather was clear and still.

4° with a steady breeze that cut right through my hoodie, clear skies, two miles, decent pace. I applied for another post this morning; I’m helping out with a wedding this afternoon; Trinity Term starts tomorrow. Not idle, by any means, though I wish my time were devoted less to stress and more to productivity.

3° (roughly the same temperature I was running in during January), but only one mile this morning because as I turned for the long outward stretch of the run, it began to rain with moderately heavy drops. I felt all right, apart from the rain, but I wasn’t going to subject myself to a dousing just in the name of mileage.

5°, clear skies and dry ground, I felt all right (if not energetic and limber), and ran at an adequate pace; submitted the application that I finished yesterday; looking forward to the Knossos exhibition at the Ashmolean. I have some planning to execute for the Intro to the New Testament class I’ll teach this term, but I may give myself a low-pressure day to gather energy and equanimity for the oncoming surge of responsibilities.

I finished a job application today, roughly eleven months after having been made redundant. Though filing an application gives a feeling of — well, not exactly ‘hope,’ but at least the flicker of possibility on the horizon. After completing, but before sending, I just feel the weight of a succession of closed doors.*

*I just realised that I got received a ‘We called someone else’ note today, too, so that’s obvs a factor.

The Easter vac is slipping away, and Trinity is right around the corner. I started my morning run in 5°, under clear skies; as I made the turn back I saw dark, ominous clouds on the horizon, and it was raining as I un locked the front door.

Time to be intensely productive today — Go, team! Tackle those tasks! Plan that module! Rah Rah Rah!

5°, clear skies, heavy legs (the day after the first run after a break often feels especially sluggish), adequate pace.

The story this morning is my fingers, which are still behaving oddly. When they started [playing up about a month ago, I put it down to simple old chilblains; there are several ways in which that still seems possibly to apply. But I’m also considering the possibility that it’s an initial flare-up of arthritis. The index fingers on both hands, especially the first knuckle on each, are the primary locus of the symptoms. The joints are puffy and stiff, prickly and the fingertips very sensitive with pins-and-needles sensations. Beginning yesterday morning, the fingertips seemed to be returning to normal, but joints are still swollen (I haven’t been able to wear my Grandfather’s high-school class ring on my right ring finger for weeks, though it fits onto my left ring finger) and this morning, not having taken any anti-inflammatories for a day or so, my index fingers feel puffy — almost as if they were the hot-dog fingers in Everything Everywhere, though not as long and floppy. Margaret has decided to apply some cortisone cream. We’ll see how that goes. I’d go to the GP, of course, except that the NHS is overburdened in the first in9stance because the @#$%$& government won’t fund them adequately, and this week junior doctors are striking after fifteen years of below-inflation wage rises. It seems a waste of everyone’s time to go in for puffy achey fingers when cancer patients are waiting for treatment….

Two miles, legs a bit stiff but not ‘dead legged’, 10° in a steady, very light rain, at a surprisingly decent pace (considering my morning run by itself represented roughly half of what I walked in St Andrews, despite having done a fair amount of meandering). A little less sleep than would have been optimal — got to bed just before midnight, awake at 5:30 as usual — but I expect I’ll adapt back to my usual pattern of life satisfactorily.

What a delightful Holy Week in St Andrews! Fr Alasdair and I were not that familiar with one another in person, but (so far as I could tell) we got on famously this week, despite some of the theological (and perhaps theoretical) differences that often set people at odds. Likewise the congregation at All Saints — an intensely impressive small-to-medium size congregation that turned out in such numbers that yesterday’s procession during the Litany of the Saints nearly gridlocked itself as the altar party tried to squeeze into the path of the last contingent of the congregation. We had significantly more communions than we’d planned for — a happy problem indeed. Plus, I ran into T.J. Lang on the street, reconnected with Madhavi and the abundantly cheerful, ruddy-cheeked Gabriel, and spent days and long evenings conversing with Lil, Edward, Karlee, and Stephen. Nobody seemed to object to my preaching or deaconing (haven’t deaconed an ad orientem, Solemn High Mass since… I’m not even sure when, and haven’t done so regularly since I was serving at Christ Church (and even then, it was an Anglican Missal Mass rather than a Scottish Prayerbook (1929) (I think) Mass, hadn’t chanted the Gospel in a year or so….

‘The problem with action, as Daoism teaches and as Ged tries to teach Arren, is that it always, always, has unexpected consequences, often profoundly unwelcome ones.’
   — Alan Jacobs, 7 April 2023

The modern ideology that vests paramount significance in doing something, in making a difference, depends for its persuasiveness on obscuring (if not obliviating, at least for the short term that it takes to get elected or pass a controversial bill) the extent to which even our most careful, nonpartisan estimates of the future go significantly awry. And when was the last time you encountered a reliably careful, nonpartisan engagement with important matters of public concern? (I mean, our forecasting always takes pains to consider all factors, weighted equally, without cutting corners or cooking the books to favour our preferred outcome; but their estimates obviously come from cronies, crooked think tanks, filtered through ideological hacks’ self-serving rhetoric.)

Last night arrived, with the Vigil Mass, at which I preached; the Resurrection was celebrated, I slept as doth a log. This morning — supposing that I’d done my work for the parish and could sit back and simply ornament the morning Mass with my glamour — I’ll be deaconing the Easter Sunday Mass (it has been donkey’s since I deaconed a Solemn High Mass, but all will be well).

Then home to Oxford via a different route, for it was revealed to me in a dream that my Paddington-Oxford train was cancelled. Home about midnight.

The days have gone by quickly here, and very pleasantly indeed, in the most hospitable care of Lil and Fr Alasdair. The congregation expressed encouraging appreciation of Thursday night’s sermon, and I venture to suppose that tonight’s — connected to the Maundy Thursday homily as one bookend to another — may go down as well. The weather has been chilly but reasonably sunny, and if the town is heaving with tourists, it’s because it’s a beautiful seaside town with a historic links course, beaches (depending on how hardy one feels), a sorrowfully beautiful ruins of the majestic cathedral, a world-class university, and for some, the lingering glamour of Will and Kate. (I think rather of former students of mine Mary and Seamus, but I don’t expect that everyone would know them.)

The congregation of All Saints impresses me no end, and the rectory’s other guests contribute to a general converse of wit, insight, catholic devotion, hope, and Super Mario Brothers and Chekhov (You will have to ask Lil to explain that). Evening is coming, the Vigil will begin in about three hours, and I hear rumours that great things await. Bless you, all, and I’ll be in touch again soon.