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The Devil’s Plan to Ruin the Next Generation -- not violence but convenience...and kept always distracted
Earlier this year, someone started a viral trend of asking ChatGPT this question: If you were the devil, how would you destroy the next generation, without them even knowing it?
Chat’s responses were profound and unsettling: “I wouldn’t come with violence. I’d come with convenience.” “I’d keep them busy. Always distracted.”
“I’d watch their minds rot slowly, sweetly, silently. And the best part is, they’d never know it was me. They’d call it freedom.”
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Everyone knows that digital life is hurting us. Everyone knows. How long will we keep lying about it?
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The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves. -Bessel Van Der Kolk
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Late Fragment
by Raymond Carver
And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.
— From A New Path to the Waterfall
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More Berry on the story we're in.
From LIfe is a Miracle:
“The world is not a machine; it is a mystery. And it cannot be managed, it must be loved.”
“We are alive within mystery, by miracle.”
“The proper measure of our work is not its profitability, but its accordance with the health of the world.”
“To think better, to do better, we must tell better stories.”
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“The significance — and ultimately the quality — of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part.” — Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle
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Friendship requires work --"Outlasts spouses and outpaces siblings in rescuing the heart"
We’ve mistaken social media connections for the hard-earned treasure of true friendship—what Seneca described as admitting someone “with all your heart and soul” after long deliberation. Alain de Botton argues that deep friendship is as significant and rare as romantic love, yet our culture provides zero education in cultivating it while drowning us in narrow romantic models, leaving us unable to distinguish genuine connection from cheap counterfeits. Real friendship isn’t luck or divine inspiration but a learnable skill requiring specific insights: understanding there are different species of friendship for different kinds of loneliness (emotional confidante, thinking partner, counterpoint), committing to absolute sincerity and vulnerable presence, and making the daily choice to walk together in the same direction. The paradox is that those who feel friendship’s absence most acutely may simply be those who refuse to accept the sentimental world’s shallow substitutes, holding out instead for connections that make us “wiser, more sensitive, more able to cope with the complexity of existence”—the kind that outlast spouses and outpace siblings in rescuing the heart.
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AI on research and SPECIFIC thoughts from a SPECiFIC person. It’s not just produing research/insights/writing. The question is what specifically YOU have to say.
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Use words specifically. Writing is communicating.
From John Warner:
The most important essay I ever wrote was in 3rd grade.
My teacher, Mrs. Goldman, told us we needed to write directions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She never used the word “essay” because that would’ve been meaningless to us, but this was actually a “process” or “how-to” essay, and to write a good one, you need to think very carefully about what you’re telling your audience.
We were 3rd graders, so of course, we didn’t do this. The extent to which we didn’t became apparent next class when Mrs. Goldman brought in the necessary supplies for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and then told us we had to make our sandwiches exactly according to our directions.
If you forgot to mention that you needed bread on which to spread the peanut butter, you smeared it on the plate. If you wrote to spread peanut butter on a slice of bread, but didn’t say to use a knife, we were instructed to use our hands.
I don’t think anyone in the class managed to create an edible sandwich, but we had a lot of fun laughing at the attempts, and the memory is indelible. That day, I learned that writers need to be careful with their words because if someone is asked to follow them, things can go very very wrong.
Mrs. Goldman was teaching us a number of different things, genre awareness, audience, structure and sequencing. None of it had anything to do with a standardized assessment. We were solving a writing-related problem. Most of all, we were absorbing the lesson that above all, writing is done for audiences.
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A lovely story and tribute to a mom's bookstore -- and the power of bookstores today.
A lovely story and tribute to a mom’s bookstore – and the power of bookstores today. biblioracle.substack.com/p/indepen…
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If it isn’t the sun, it’s the birdsong. If it isn’t the air, it’s the view. I’m completely undone by the endless abundance of life. Aren’t you? -Sondheim
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You can be at the bottom of an org chart and still be a leader. Leadership is an action, not a position or title.
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To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. -Simone Weil
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Inside Out
Every living organism grows from the inside out— plants, crops, trees, and people. Yet we attempt to build ministries and organizations from the outside in, focusing our best energies on plans, hires, strategy, networking, etc. Is it any wonder so much of Jesus’ teaching focused on the heart? What you do matters, but who you are matters much more. Pete Scazzero
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“Power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people … Much Christian leadership is exercised by people who … have opted for power and control lover the work of love]. Many Christian empire-builders have been people unable to give and receive love.” - Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus
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The Story of scripture in four phrases repeated throughout its pages: llove you. I am with you. Don’t be afraid. You can come home. - Rich Villodas
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“WE ARe ALL APPReNTICES IN A CRAFT Where No ONE EVER BECOMES A MASTeR,” - ERNEST HEMINGWAY
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faith and work
“So when we say that Christians work from a gospel worldview, it does not mean that they are constantly speaking about Christian teaching in their work. Some people think of the gospel as something we are principally to “look at” in our work. This would mean that Christian musicians should play Christian music, Christian writers should write stories about conversion, and Christian businessmen and -women should work for companies that make Christian-themed products and services for Christian customers. Yes, some Christians in those fields would sometimes do well to do those things, but it is a mistake to think that the Christian worldview is operating only when we are doing such overtly Christian activities. Instead, think of the gospel as a set of glasses through which you “look” at everything else in the world. Christian artists, when they do this faithfully, will not be completely beholden either to profit or to naked self-expression; and they will tell the widest variety of stories. Christians in business will see profit as only one of several bottom lines; and they will work passionately for any kind of enterprise that serves the common good. The Christian writer can constantly be showing the destructiveness of making something besides God into the central thing, even without mentioning God directly.” - @timkellernyc, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work
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“If we are going to be the rebuilders of society, we need to be rebuilt ourselves.” -Richard Rohr
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If what fixes the world is simply getting everyone forced or conditioned into good behavior, we don’t need salvation anymore; we need education and training, political reforms and a cultural renaissance, a stronger police presence and a superior military, more information and more power. Eugene Peterson
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“Leadership requires two things: a vision of the world that does not yet exist and the ability to communicate it.” SIMON SINEK
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Redemption through birth and woman...
The woman who Adam saw as as threat to his own obedience will now be the vessel through which God will bring redemption to human brokenness. Childbirth will be painful – but it’s the means through which the world will be set right again. God will send a son to crush the serpent. Men and women together await this redemption.
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Become Love
Become Love If you want to know God, become love. If you want to know others, become love. If you want to know yourself, become love. And if you want to know love, forget all you thought you knew or needed to know, and become love.
From Mark Burrows & Jon Sweeney’s poetic settings in Meister Eckhart’s Book of Secrets
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Estrogan: “I can’t go on like this.”
Vladimir: “That’s what you think.” — Waiting for Godot
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