I have been imagining this Advent as a time during which I will hold my breath for a season. But I do not want to just hold my breath. I’d prefer to breathe. So I’m investing some time now asking myself a very basic question: how do I want to live while the unknown is coming? I cannot control the weather, but I can weather it.
Gather the books that are feeding your soul, the ones that make you think or laugh or cry. Share them with friends, online or in person. Reading is a communal activity as much as it is a solitary one, and there’s so much joy to be found in the shared love of a good story.
Clearly the massacre in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919 had a racial component, one for which all of us should repent and work for reparations. But Elaine, and Memphis, and so many other moments in our history, are also and just as much about the violent repression of workers as they are about race.
It’s helpful to think of AI as a mirror. Although human beings are not entirely like AI, AI is modeled on us. So when we observe AI and how it functions, rather than othering AI, it can be fruitful to accept such observations as existential challenges to our own way of being. Observing AI at work offers an opportunity for self-reflection.
Mitri Raheb’s latest book forces me to re-appraise my own Christian assumptions from the ground up, not just about Palestine and the most recent escalation of a longstanding practice of settler colonialism, but about my own complicity in settler colonialism here at home, and the ways all of that complicity and blindness is intrinsically related to how I’ve read the Bible and believed as a Christian.