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.
Tens of thousands of Marshallese live in diaspora in the United States. Our own church has discovered that sharing space with our Marshallese neighbors has helped us grow spiritually while providing safe space for a displaced people.
Inasmuch as Christians are a “people of the book,” we need to ask ourselves how being “people of the Internet” can still be an intellectual and spiritual practice that forms us in productive ways.