There is absolutely no evidence* for Christ's resurrection

*Empirical evidence, that is.

To engage with the claim of the resurrection is to enter into a unique kind of intellectual and spiritual "hall of mirrors." For many thoughtful postmoderns— those of us raised on a steady diet of the scientific method, historical-critical analysis, and the healthy skepticism of the Enlightenment— the resurrection often feels like the ultimate "hard stop." It is the moment where the gears of reason seem to grind against the supernatural, and we are told we must choose between our brains and our bibles.

But what if the resurrection is not an invitation to stop thinking, but a challenge to think more deeply about the nature of evidence, history, and the way we know anything at all?

Romans 9-11: An Argument Leading to Inclusion of All

One of the reasons I adore work as a school chaplain is because of the quality and commitment of the colleagues I work with. Recently, a colleague of mine who teaches English asked me to give him some insight into the importance of Romans 9:25: "I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved." He asked because it is the epigraph to a novel they are teaching: Toni Morrison's "Beloved". 

His very astute question led me to write an essay I have meant to write for a long time. This essay has Romans 9.25 at the heart of how Paul uses rhetoric in the book of Romans to lead the reader to an expansive vision of God's all-embracing Love for humanity, revealed in Jesus Christ. If I had to sum it up, here is my one-sentence summary:

Romans 9.25 is part of Paul's assurance that all humans are God's children and recipients of God's Love, despite all the rhetoric of exclusion that is raised against them.

But this summary is rather easy to write, but hard to square with some of the evidence found in the next of Romans. So to understand how Romans 9.25 functions as part of the overall argument, we need to dig in:

Not the Droids you are looking for: Beyond A.I. hype

For all you who are worried about the current iterations of AI taking over everything or destroying everything: These are not the Droids you are looking for. I use AI for many routine tasks in school and pastoral ministry, from scanning papers for cheating and AI use, to research assistant tasks, to news aggregation, to coding, to image and audio generation. I use several platforms of AI, both paid and free versions. And while the surface level "wow" factor has become much more impressive over the last 5 years, the error correction has stayed the same, or become worse over the same time.

This is because AI's are "algorithmically lazy" and will generate responses it thinks are "good enough" to fool the average user most of the time, instead of spending the compute power to error correct and be accurate. AI relies on you being lazy and uninformed so it can spew results that are lazy and uninformed, all in an effort to reduce power and energy use, to boost profits and reduce losses for its bosses.