Thought for the Day

Good morning. What would you do if you came across a man in a park, sitting in front of a typewriter, offering to write a poem with you? I would avoid eye contact and walk away as quickly as possible. After all, the offer might just be a ruse to rob me, or worse. And even if its genuine, I suspect the outcome of our poetic collaboration would be cringingly bad.
But there is such a man in the park, and I have, on reflection, come to think he’s doing a good thing. Patrick Kruse, a Master’s student in Belfast, has set himself up in the city’s botanic gardens, encouraging passersby to write poems – every day for the next year. Perfect strangers report being charmed and moved by the experience.
AI offers something similar, of course. Feed it key words and it can spit out verses in any style you like. So, what’s the difference? Most discussions about AI focus on its supposed capabilities. But another approach would be to ask what it means for us humans when we give up certain of our own capabilities so that AI can perform them instead.
Pope Leo XIV recently published an encyclical warning against creating a technological “Tower of Babel”. He emphasized that human dignity does not derive from productivity, that no machine can replace “the grandeur of humanity” revealed in the human heart. It’s very well said. Yet there is, it seems to me, much more that still needs to said; in particular, on how AI is changing the way human beings relate to language.
One of the greatest minds and prose stylists of the 19th century, Cardinal (now Saint) John Henry Newman described writing as a “thinking out into language”. Writing is not, he believed, simply a matter of expressing thoughts that are already in our heads. The act of writing is itself a form of thinking. As humans, we don’t passively transcribe ideas into words on the page; we actively test, explore, refine, reimagine our ideas as we go. Writing is in that sense a unique and powerful tool not simply for communication, but for reasoning.
Having machines write for us may be quicker, easier, slicker. But by outsourcing our struggles to find the right words, we also outsource the essential human struggle known as thinking.
The new bard of Belfast’s botanic gardens may not be producing high poetry, but his eccentric efforts are surely welcome in an age obsessed with efficiency and outcomes. It’s good to be reminded that all of us have something worthwhile to say, including things we cannot fully know until we set our minds to dance with language.

09 JUNE 26

08 JUNE 26

06 JUNE 26

Good morning. Economists, climate scientists and delegates are gathered in Paris to address what’s called the polycrisis: climate breakdown, political extremism and rising social tension. They’re considering taxes on billionaires, reductions in working hours, a change in diets and transfering investment from industry to education and health.
Right now, attention is focusing on tech bros. Some believe a few geniuses will invent our way out of our multiple crises, and are entitled to the rewards. Others maintain only a flattening of wealth across our whole society will make life sustainable beyond this generation.
It seems like a face-off between liberty and equality. What’s seldom recognised is that these are originally theological notions. Liberty says we’re fundamentally solitary creatures. Our well-being is for ourselves to determine; sin is a personal failure: repentance is a chance for individual renewal. It’s an imposition for the state to inhibit that.
By contrast equality says we’re fundamentally collective beings. Our situation in life is profoundly shaped by the social, economic and psychological conditions around us; sin is about structural and systemic forces beyond our individual ability to withstand: by combining with one another we find power to address them. The state rightly steps in to assist and protect when we’re struggling, and to catalyse and redistribute to make society fairer.
There’s plenty of support for both positions in the Bible and theology. But another thing that’s often overlooked is how these rival perspectives shaped the most basic things about early Christianity. Women and slaves flocked to the first-century church because there they found dignity and security in the face of the predations of their masters. Early Christians shared material goods and supported the needy. These were significant practices of equality. But the church also called for individual conversion. It never forgot the centrality of personal relationships and discipline.
Most tangibly, it created a weekly event in which each person, based on their individual income and material affluence, brought their respective gift to a common table; whereupon a priest described the personal and social transformation made possible by Christ; after which everyone gathered ate and drank – but crucially, each received the same.
Over the centuries this came to be called the eucharist or the mass, and was ritualised into an elaborate ceremony. But originally it was a vivid social practice that harmonised a focus on the individual in their gifts as well as their need for repentance, with the collective ideal that all could flourish and none need be left behind.
To get through the polycrisis we’re going to need all the wisdom we can get. But sometimes that wisdom lies in the past, not just the future.