A couple of weekends ago I took part in the practical part of a street photography workshop. The workshop also featured two online video meetups either side of the physical meetup to here about street photography from the tutor’s perspective, and then an opportunity to share photos and experiences with the others on the workshop.
The workshop was run by Dave Simpson (www.davesimpson.org) and was excellent. Low key enough for an introvert like me, but social too. Nice to meet some new people, enjoy their company, and see what they were interested in photographing.
At the physical meetup, we had a couple of hours together in downtown Auckland, starting with the Latin American festival in Aotea Square, walking down to Britomart via High St, watching the demonstration there, then over to the Viaduct Basin and Winyard Quarter, and back up Albert St. A good walk with time to explore different locations along the way.
After the meetup we were asked to pick around 10-ish photos from the walk to share with each other. These are my selections.
Definitely learnt a lot from Dave and the others on the workshop, as well as looking at familiar parts of the Auckland in new ways.
The streets of Wellington are one of my happy places. The combination of years spent walking them in high school and when working after university, as well as living in the Wellington region for my early years means that I feel completely at home there. I support the sports teams from here, love the hills, harbour, the wind, and buildings, and bleed black and gold if you cut me.
One of the dominant features of West Auckland are the series of high tension power lines that run from pylon to pylon across the suburbs – across rivers and creeks, over residential properties and schools, alongside motorways, and through commercial and light industrial areas. Taking electricity generated down south to the north of the North Island, the wires hum and crackle through the visual landscape of the west, causing distress to some, annoyance to others, and concerns over property prices and public heath. It’s been a feature of local news and politics for the 25 years or so, I’ve lived in West Auckland.
Really pleased to see my article “The Hasty Contemplative: the spirituality of street photograph” is out now in the latest issue of Refresh: Journal of Contemplative Spirituality (Summer 2023). It’s a brief exploration of my experience of photography as a way into spiritual formation and wellbeing. In the article, I talk about some of the people that have influenced my connection of these things.
When I started this blog post series a year or so ago I had no idea where it would end up, but after 12 posts it feels like time to have a little bit of a breather. So links to the set down below if you want to catch up.
Photography quite naturally lends itself to feelings and expressions of nostalgia, where nostalgia might be seen as a deep or wistful yearning or desire to reconnect or return to some imagined past. The spiritual life can often becomes nostalgic as one looks back at times when perhaps God felt closer, faith more real, and things more certain or black and white. Nostalgia also connects us back with people and places, though what we remember or imagine may bear little resemblance to the reality of those times, people, and places. Photography engages with nostalgia, I think, in two ways.
Way back four years ago, I posted the first part of what I thought would be a series on robots, artificial, and theology. I guess life got in the way of that but given I’m doing some writing on AI at the moment and that things like ChatGPT and Bard are all the rage, it’s time to reboot the series and jot a few more thoughts down. First up, though, check out the original 2019 post which sketched some of the early theological and religious thinking on AI and robots.
One of the things that I think has generated widespread discussion about artificially intelligent systems is that people see them as transgressing boundaries that we believe make us distinctly human. The ability to understand colloquial language, create artistic works such as images and music, solve mathematical problems and many other things can be disturbing – perhaps in the same way that Copernican astronomy or Darwinian evolution relocated humanity’s place in the universe.
Gregory R. Peterson, Minding God (2003)
Many of these anxieties can be traced back to particular understandings of the essential core that defines human beings, sometimes called the locus humanus (cf. Gregory Peterson’s Minding God: Theology and the Cognitive Sciences (2003): 124ff). Typically, this is denoted by a set of attributes that human beings alone are said to possess, such as the religious concept of an immortal soul, or a collection of psychological attributes such as reason, language, consciousness and self-consciousness. Any creature or creation that demonstrates these types of behaviour seems to have transgressed some indeterminate boundary and entered into the domain of human beings.
This is further exacerbated by various understandings of human personhood present at any one time in broader society. In a parallel conversation to artificial intelligence concerning genetically-modified organisms, Celia Deane-Drummond, Robin Grove-White, and Bronislaw Szerszynski, made this point some 20 or so years ago. Here different understandings of what it means to be human, including genetic understandings, are pressured by the human ability to manipulate what is seen as immutably defining nature.
It seems conceivable that the intensity of current controversies around genetically modified crops and foods arises in part from the fact that, in their regulation in the public domain, conflicting ontologies of the person are making themselves felt in the politics of everyday life.
Celia Deane-Drummond, Robin Grove-White, and Bronislaw Szerszynski, “Genetically Modified Theology: The Religious Dimensions of Public Concerns About Agricultural Biotechnology,” Studies in Christian Ethics14, no. 2 (2001): 27.
Perhaps one of the most unsettling things people find about these computer systems is that they seem, at times, to be more human than humans (or even super-human). Whether or not consciousness is actually manifest, the intelligent artefacts may perform as if they are conscious, leading some to assert, such as Ray Kurzweil that:
Sometime early in the next century, the intelligence of machines will exceed that of humans. Within several decades, machines will exhibit the full range of human intellect, emotions and skills, ranging from musical and other creative aptitudes to physical movement. They will claim to have feelings and, unlike today’s virtual personalities, will be very convincing when they tell us so.
Ray Kurzweil, “The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine,” Scientific American Presents 10, no. 3 (1999): 56.
This potential relationality, in whatever form it might appear, prompted Matt Rossano to comment on how thinking about community might be a starting point for engaging with artificial intelligence from the context of religion. He says in a 2001 journal article:
The purpose of the preceding sections has been to establish both an empirical and a scriptural basis for the ways that religion and the brain are intimately interconnected with community. Religion evolved in service to community cohesion and stability, and this is well reflected in the expressions and teachings of sacred scripture. As the brain evolved, it provided the capacity for individuals to engage in complex social interactions and relationships. If community is of central concern to both religion and the brain, then when searching for a firm moral basis on which to judge the emerging technologies of artificial intelligence, religion should concentrate on the consequences to community. Put bluntly, a purpose (maybe the purpose) of the human brain is to allow for the establishment and maintenance of long-term relationships with other human beings. The success of these relationships is critical to individuals in their singular interests for happiness, success, and security; and it is critical to human societies at a broader level so that they can be stable, supportive, healthy environments in which individuals can thrive. Religion has traditionally been one of the frameworks upon which a healthy adaptive society has been constructed. A concern for maintaining healthy communities should motivate religion to a thoughtful, bold, and widely defensible critique of the advances and potentials of AI.
Matt J. Rossano, “Artificial Intelligence, Religion, and Community Concern,” Zygon 36, no. 1 (2001): 65.
So while many of the questions that have emerged in the past year might seem novel, they have been considered over a reasonable amount of time. The difference is that much of the technology has moved from being a thought experiment to being partially realised. For those seeking to explore how their faith connects to this world, there is a lot of work to be done at both academic and popular levels.
In it, Tan comments on how gaming connects in many ways to the transcendent – both in experience and in how all things, including human creations, sacramentally bear the imprint of God.
Games nonetheless render something more than mere entertainment, which keeps consumers returning again and again to the console. The stretching of reality, the visceral high drama and sometimes sensory overload into which players are thrust suggests that the appeal lies in an experience that transcends the mundane. For Bosman, games can pull the player out of his mundane context and put him in touch with the sublime, something so incomparably great that it extends beyond the range of what our avatars could deliver, and what players can comprehend.
Tan. “Playing for Eternity.” Humanum Review, no. 2. (2022)
Tan notes several other authors and edited collections writing in this area, both theologically and generally concerning religion. I’ve included those and some others below. And in a shameless plug for something I’ve written on video games, transcendence, and pilgrimage, I’ve noted that below too.
Garner, Stephen. “Sacred Pilgrimage in Playful, Digital Spaces.” In Sports and Play in Christian Theology, edited by John Tucker and Philip Halstead, 93-108. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2020.
I first came across Mark Millar’s American Jesuscomic book series back in 2009 (See Greenflame: American Jesus) and then picked up the trade paperback, American Jesus: The Chosen, a year or two after that. I seem to remember reading it while I was lecturing the Bible in Popular Culture course at the University of Auckland. I found it an interesting if somewhat disturbing story about a boy who thinks he’s the second coming of Jesus Christ (and the plot does imply that) and then finds out he isn’t and it’s much worse than that.
I filed the trade paperback away with some other BibPop comics not realising that it was the first part of three story arcs. In 2019 I saw by chance in the comic store that the second story arc, American Jesus: The New Messiah, that of the actual incarnation of the second coming, was being published, so I collected the three issues of that. I didn’t find that story too interesting, and it felt like the filler to get to the third part of that story.
Book 2
This week I finished reading the third story arc, American Jesus: Revelation, and again while it was interesting, I don’t think it trod too much new ground in the broader Bible and Popular Culture landscape. There is the climactic final battle between good and evil played out between the incarnation of Christ and the Antichrist, though with a few twists in that tale. Millar’s solution to that battle has a passing nod to the church father, Origen, who argued that all rational creatures including Satan would be offered one final chance to repent and turn to God at the Eschaton. Whether Millar knew about this is unclear, but that could be behind what turns out in the story. The story does play with the trope, common in other similar media (e.g. the film, Legion (2010); the Phantom Stranger comics (2012-on); and even in the Lucifer comics.), where God learns something from the freedom human beings have to love. That plays a key role in resolving of the story in American Jesus.
Book 3
So overall, worth reading as an example of how biblical material is reinterpreted in popular culture, and comics in particular, but I think the overall story feels too uneven and stretched. I wonder if it might have worked better as a four or five-part comic arc rather than nine parts.
