Meanderings, 21 September 2024

We are in the second week of our tour with students to Turkey and Greece. There’s not much in the modern-day city of Athens for the New Testament texts. Corinth, however, has some good finds at its sites.

Photo by Alex Presa on Unsplash

Ryan Burge on big and small counties in the USA:

As can probably be inferred from the prior graph, evangelicals are in the biggest counties and in the smallest ones, too. Between 20% and 25% of the entire population are evangelicals in the smallest 75% of counties. But remember, those counties are no larger than 68,000 people. So all major urban cores and most of their corresponding suburban sprawls are not included in those first three buckets. In the largest counties, evangelicalism plays a less prominent role, dropping to only 14%.

The Catholic Church is basically the opposite of that. It’s pretty small in the least densely populated counties. It averages about 10% of folks in those types of places. But it’s twice as large in those large counties. If there’s anything I will remember from this analysis, it’s that Catholicism is largely an urban and suburban phenomenon.

The mainline is just depressing in this graph. In the most sparsely populated counties, there are more mainline Protestants than Catholics. But as the counties get larger, the mainline plays a smaller and smaller role. When looking at the biggest counties, just 5% of folks are mainline Protestants. There are more people from other faith groups in big counties than mainline Protestants. That’s a recipe for disaster. It’s hard to grow a tradition when your locus of support is in places with very few people.

If this data points to any central conclusion, it’s this: Religion in big cities does not look like religion in rural areas. Rural areas tend to be more churched than urban ones. But religion in heavily populated areas tends to be more Catholic and less Protestant, while the opposite is true in the less populated counties.

A witness from Apalachee’s tragedy: (good going Zach)

Georgia is required by law to hold active shooter drills. When an active shooter arrived at Apalachee High School this week, that training kicked in for many teachers and students there.

In a gut-wrenching account shared widely on social media, Jennifer Carter, who for more than 20 years has taught Spanish at the school in Winder, Ga., described her horrific experience of putting into motion her preparation for a moment she hoped would never come.

“It was the worst 20 minutes of my career,” she wrote in a post on Facebook late Wednesday night, hours after the attack.

The violent attack left two students and two teachers dead and nine others injured. When the attack began, Carter said she initially told the students it was just a drill in order to keep students calm.

“I lied,” she began the post. “I told them to get behind my couches (thank GOD I ditched desks and have bulky furniture!) and be quiet - the more quiet we are the faster the drill will end. I knew it was a lie. I knew this was what I always plan my furniture arrangement for every year. My kids were able to just hide and not panic for over 10 minutes.” …

In July 2023, a state law mandating annual active shooting drills went into effect. It requires schools to report their completion of the drill by Oct. 1 each year. According to a February report from PBS, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, 13 states don’t require frequent active shooting drills in schools.

Carter’s post elicited strong responses online, many from people who held her story up as an example of an all too common threat teachers and students face around the country.

“We simply cannot accept this is a normal part of life. Something has to change,” read a post from Zach Lambert, a pastor, sharing Carter’s words on X.

Landon Benson, who commented on Lambert’s post, said: “Every single teacher feels this. Like a gut punch. I find myself scanning rooftops when I’m outside. I consider 'where will we run from out here in the field? How would I get their attention when they are far from me? How quickly will we all react?' almost daily.” 

Last year, the school named Carter teacher of the year.

Katie Kresser and the external and internal gaze:

I think human beings are built to want to impress someone. To please someone. To get approval. It’s there, palpably, in everyone’s eyes, if you know how to look.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this – nothing at all. It’s built into the tripartite structure of the Trinity, wherein Father and Son gaze upon each other in pleasure forever in a movement that is the Holy Spirit. We are made in the image of God. We long for the same kind of perpetually approving gaze God enjoys within Himself.

Image makers of all kinds instinctively know this, and they have known it for millennia, though they may not have had words for it. The history of art is strewn with their manipulations. Thus a giant portrait of Mao Zedong hovers at the entrance of China’s Forbidden City. Thus late Roman emperors made colossal statues of themselves gazing down through the slanting light of vaulted basilicas. And thus medieval Christendom was sprinkled with supposedly miraculous portraits of the “true face” of Jesus, looking out plaintively from panels, cloths and frescoed walls.

But I think this external, material collection of gazing, authoritative faces is only a faint echo of a much larger spiritual one. That’s because all of us, I believe, toil under the gaze of internal faces, appraising and judging, whose approval we perpetually seek. And most of these faces are not from God.

Ted Gioia has interesting thoughts about AI:

But it’s going to get even more interesting, and very soon. That’s because the next step in AI has arrived—the unleashing of AI agents.

And like the gods, these AI agents will give us everything we ask for.

Up until now, AI was all talk and no action. These charming bots answered your questions, and spewed out text, but were easy to ignore.

That’s now changing. AI agents will go out in the world and do things. That’s their new mission.

It’s like giving unreliable teens the keys to the family car. Up until now we’ve just had to deal with these resident deadbeats talking back, but now they are going to smash up everything in their path.

But AI agents will be even worse than the most foolhardy teen. That’s because there will be millions of these unruly bots on our digital highways.

[SMcK: He has eleven predictions/warnings, opening with this:] 1. Stop worrying about AI taking over. It’s the people who own the AI who pose the biggest threat.

I still hear foolish predictions about some big computer taking over the world—like that scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Sorry, but it won’t happen that way. Those big Sumo-sized computers aren’t the threat. It’s the people who own them you need to worry about. That’s why most of the debate about the threat coming from AI is worthless.

Yes, there is a threat. But it’s very much a human-driven one. Psychology and game theory will tell us more about how this plays out than any tech knowledge.

In fact, tech people may be the least prepared for these changes, because they’re still thinking in terms of software code, not human behavior.

[and ending with this:] 11. AI will create an existential crisis of epic proportions, as all the dividing lines that are foundational to society—between reality and deception, truth and lies, fact and error—collapse.

This is not a small matter.

People have been warned, but they still can’t conceive how bad it’s going to get. Even their own reality as human beings will be under attack. Soon we will all be seeking personhood credentials, and forced to create “safe words” to use with family members to prove our very existence.

In the old days, existential crises were reserved for French intellectuals sitting at their Paris cafés—but now the angst will go mainstream.

Most people don’t worry a lot about the difference between truth and falsehood. They think that’s just a matter for philosophers or priests or dreamers. All they care about are results.

But those hard-headed folks (who are typically no-nonsense empiricists) will be the most shell-shocked by what’s coming down the pike. Their cherished empirical reality is about to collapse.

Most of this drama will have played out within the next 24 months. But it will be a wild ride.

In the meantime, hold on to the real. You’re going to need it—and it will be the ultimate scarce resource in the interesting days ahead.

Mary Beard, about Jane Harrison, which is in some ways about Mary Beard!

In​ 1921, Jane Ellen Harrison, the maverick Cambridge classicist and celebrity public intellectual, was introduced to the crown prince of Japan when he came to receive an honorary degree from the university. She revisited this occasion a few years later in her memoir, Reminiscences of a Student’s Life. ‘If you must curtsey to a man young enough to be your grandson,’ she wrote, ‘it is at least some consolation to know that he believes himself to be God ... The prince was good enough to say his own royal name to me two or three times, but alas! I forgot it.’ This was a typical Harrison response: wry, more than a little patronising, and – as Daniel Mendelsohn puts it in his introduction to a reissue of Reminiscences – ‘spiky’. ‘Hirohito’ was the name she insisted that she couldn’t (be bothered to) remember.

By the time of this royal visit, Harrison had long been well known as a Cambridge – and national – pioneer. In 1874, she had been one of the earliest students at the newly established Newnham College and, in a classic case of that elite English over-confidence in their ability to rank people, she had been lumbered with the reputation of being ‘the cleverest woman in England’. That reputation did not bring instant success, for at the end of her Cambridge undergraduate course she was passed over for a teaching job at Newnham in favour of a much safer (and meeker) candidate. But after a couple of decades making her name in London, lecturing at the British Museum, travelling in Greece and trying her hand at amateur dramatics and journalism, she returned in 1898 to her old college as its first ‘research fellow’. She became in effect the first professional, salaried female academic in the country, in the modern sense of the word ‘academic’ – a frontline activist in research and publishing, not merely a teacher, mentor and backroom helpmeet. She was the first woman in Cambridge to give lectures on university property, almost half a century before women were formally awarded degrees there; and she received honorary doctorates from the universities of Aberdeen and Durham.

Her academic fame came largely from two weighty books: Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) and Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912). In these she upturned the traditional view of ancient Greek religion as a rather staid, almost statuesque form of cult, with its flowing white robes and strumming lyres. Instead, she exposed beneath the surface a much more violent, ecstatic, even ‘primitive’ (as she saw it) religion, which – she claimed in Themis – was best understood through the lens of Durkheimian anthropology (as she signalled by the word ‘social’ in the subtitle). Many details of these arguments have not survived later scrutiny, and her enthusiasm for a decidedly unnuanced version of Durkheimian theory, to which she was a very early convert, outdid even Durkheim himself. One of Harrison’s problems was that she never knew when to stop, and she was occasionally prepared to fudge the evidence to fit her theory. That said, the old stereotype of Greek religion collapsed under her onslaught. No scholar since has been able to ignore the religion’s wild, irrational and bloody aspects. It was for academic among other reasons, no doubt, that she was sometimes nicknamed ‘Bloody Jane’.