Rescued Climbers Relied Too Much on AI

 Rescued Climbers Relied Too Much on AI

Political Issue: should we have clear signs and policies about behavior on public land. Recently I went down to Headlands Beach which has an annual sand sculpture display. This year there was a sign warning that defacing public artwork was a 5th degree felony and could face a $2500.  In all the previous years the art displays had been almost totally destroyed probably by kids who think that half the fun of building sand sculpture is destroying them after wards. 

We need to have clear signs and policies about things like camping and hiking on public land. They probably need to have some legal consequences if people are going to pay attention to them. Otherwise, many people may assume that getting into trouble doing these things is all part of the fun of doing them.

And of course, we also need to have clear signs and policies about the use of AI. Otherwise blaming misadventures on AI will also become a part of the whole experience.

Legal Issue: How do people go about finding out about their legal responsibilities before doing things? Especially given the myriad of possibilities: situations, laws, policies, etc. 

On Justice and the Lindsay Clancy Trial

 I hadn't been paying a super amount of attention to the Lindsay Clancy trial.  I just thought it was a tragic situation.  But it had been going on for nearly six weeks, so impossible not to read some things about it.  I thought this article on the America site was good. The title sums it up :

We are expecting too much from the Lindsay Clancy trial - America Magazine

And I think it is true that we are expecting too much from the trial, if the aim is perfect justice. 

New Liturgical Season of Creation?

Liturgy has always been a living growing entity. Before the invention of printing, liturgies varied from place to place. Manuscripts traveled from place to place. Much of our holy week liturgies were formed by pilgrims coming back from the Holy Land, e.g. the Palm Sunday procession.

 We may be witnessing the evolving of a new liturgical season of creation, beginning with September 1st and ending with the Feast of Saint Francis on October 4th. 

BELOW IS A DRAFT OF A POST FOR MY "WEAL" WEBSITE. A SELECTION OF LINKS AND TEXTS THAT I WILL ORGANIZE BETTER. 

WE SHOULD BE CREATIVE AT THE GRASSROOTS LEVEL IN FORMING A SEASON FOR CARE OF CREATION

FOR EXAMPLE, LABOR DAY RATHER THAN SEPTEMBER 1 OR A SUNDAY SEEMS AN IDEAL DAY TO CELEBRATE THE CARE OF CREATION.

FROM THE BEGINNING THIS HAS BEEN AN ECUMENTICAL PROJECT.  THE MODEL OF THE ANGLICAN CHRISTMAS EVE SERVICE OF NINE LESSONS AND CAROLS SEEMS IDEAL. 

I PROPOSE A SERVICE OF LESSONS AND SONGS AROUND THE THEME OF CARE OF CREATION.

WHAT SCRIPTURE READINGS WOULD YOU INCLUDE? The Genesis account of the creation from the Easter Vigil seems an ideal beginning.

WHAT SONGS WOULD YOU INCLUDE? In the Lessons and Carols service, there is a beginning carol, and more than one carol per reading. Some of the carols are chosen to be used each year and sung by the congregation. Some are sung each year by the choir because they require more technical virtuosity. Some are new each year. The Season of Creation international committee has a theme for each year. This year it is flowing water from Ezechiel. What songs about flowing water would you include this year?  

WHAT PSALMS WOULD YOU INCLUDE?  I am thinking of nine psalms about creation which would precede the Service of Lessons and Songs of Creation. It would cover the assembling of the community.  Similar criteria to the songs above including some songs about water for this year.

As an undergraduate I took an anthropology course on childhood and society at the University of Washington in Seattle. The professor had done his research on native Americans in the Northwest. He was deeply impressed by their ritual creativity in song and dance. He attributed this to the fact that young people on the periphery of the assembly were encouraged to imitate their elders who led the assembly. That meant by the time they became leaders they had a whole repertory of song and dance to use creatively. I had already experienced several forms of the Liturgy of the Hours and resolved to let it unfold naturally in my life as I experienced more music and ritual. Anthropologically I think we all have the capacity to be liturgically creative.

POPE LEO WILL CELEBRATE THE NEW MASS FOR THE CARE OF CREATON SHORTLY AFTER NOON TODAY. CHECK OUT THE YOUTUBE VATICAN WEBSITE

LIVE | Pope Leo XIV’s Holy Mass for the Care of Creation | September 1, 2026

EWTN Live Mass & Devotions

Scheduled for 12:20 PM Eastern Time

Pope Leo's Homily at Today's Mass for the Care of Creation

Actually, a good summary of the Season of Creation!

Liturgy as a living entity

 I thought this article in NCR was interesting, especially since I lived through the liturgical reforms of Vatican II: 

Pope Leo says Vatican II's liturgical reform was 'necessary' for lay involvement | National Catholic Reporter

The impetus for liturgical reform and more participation of the laity was already happening well before Vatican II.  During the later 1950s, and 1960s, when I attended grade school, the nuns who taught us were already implementing the "Dialogue Mass", in which the students learned and recited the responses said by the servers. The responses were still in Latin, and the students had the English and Latin daily missals to follow.  Of course this wouldn't have happened without the consent of the pastor. 

There were even places where the priest said Mass facing the people, though I think this was "ex officio" not formally permitted yet. 

One thing that was very noticeable with the changes of Vatican II was a greater emphasis on the Scriptures, with the three year cycle which we observe now.  Before that, it was a one year cycle, with more repetition of readings, and fewer Old Testament readings. 

Of course it was a learning curve, and some people didn't like the changes at first. But it seemed like people got used to it, and the vernacular liturgy was well received. But not everybody was on board, including now some younger people who would have had no memory of the "before times".

From the NCR article:

Bonus track: a homily I didn't give yesterday: Uniting under Peter

 For the second month in a row, I prepared a homily I didn't give.  In fact, I prepared two I didn't give.  I am going to share one of them here.  

You may recall that last month, I wasn't happy with what I had prepared, so I completely rewrote it, very shortly before I was to give it.  

This month, the circumstances were different: I was scheduled to preach; but I also was scheduled to serve as a deacon with a visiting priest. We get quite a few visiting priests on weekends these days, as our large-ish parish (2,800 registered families) only has one priest and we have five masses scheduled every weekend.  At least in our parish, and I think at other parishes, it is considered the courteous thing to do to give the visiting priest the option of preaching at masses for which he's scheduled.  Our rota of visiting priests is fairly stable so I know most of them, and so on deacon preaching weekends, it's not uncommon for me to work out with the visiting priest ahead of time which of us will preach. 

But in this case, the visiting priest was new to me and to the parish.  He is an instructor at the seminary, which suggested (to me, anyway) that he is sharp and might have some interesting things to share with our congregation.  So I quickly deferred to him.

Here is the one I came prepared to give:

It's time to say who I am

I gave this brief homily yesterday.  That day's readings, the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A, are here.

This homily was meant to tie into a special occasion: at the mass at which I preached, we baptized a 14 year old young man who had been receiving private instruction.  During the homily, I addressed him ("Jared") directly.  I kept the homily quite brief so the mass+baptism wouldn't run too long.

Too few babies and too many old folk

Recently two subjects come up repeatedly at news sites---the decline in births and the rapidly increasing popuation of elderly and their care needs. They allude also to the "sandwich" generation - middle aged people still working, still raising kids, still seeing to their children's educations and aso caring for their aging parents. The articles about caring for aging parents are heavily focused on the crushing experience of caring for parents with advanced dementia/Alzheimers. The Catholic church has spent millions fighting legal abortion for more than 50 years, to little effect. Now the church is battling another morally challenging issue--assisted dying. This article asks some good questions--what is the Church, not just the institution but THE church—the laity, the parish—going to offer those who see no viable course to escape non-stop pain and suffering other than death?

 https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/guest-voices/beyond-saying-no-church-s-answer-assisted-suicide 

ChatGPT Explains Certain Memory Problems

 There are certain phenomena I see over and over again living here in the Old Folks Home. I asked ChatGPT to help me understand some of them, and I thought the response might be of interest to others. Here's my question and ChatGPT's response. 

My Question

I am curious about the behavior of some of the people in my assisted living facility. There are a number of people whom one would judge, from dealing with them, aren't too far mentally impaired. But when it comes to meals there is a curious phenomenon. For each meal we have two seatings. Breakfast is served at 8 and again at 9, lunch at 12 and again at 1:00, and dinner at 5 and again at six. There is assigned seating and so you eat with the same people at every meal. Now, there are some people who eat dinner at 5, and then they show up for the 6 o'clock seating and are sometimes get very angry when they are told they have already eaten. At other times, they don't seem to be bothered at all. I wonder what goes on in their heads. Do they remember from one day to the next that this happens frequently? Don't they know when they arrive at the second seating that the people they eat with every day are not at the table? Could they be given some kind of note taking device that they could refer to to track for themselves whether they have eaten or not? As far as I can tell, their memories seem to work reliably for other purposes. Is there some reason they can remember many other things, but fail in specific tasks again and again? 

ChatGPT's Response

Yes. What you are describing is quite plausible in people with mild or moderate cognitive impairment, and one of the most striking things about memory disorders is precisely their unevenness. A person can seem perfectly lucid in conversation, remember many facts, recognize everyone around them, and yet repeatedly fail at something as seemingly simple as remembering whether they ate dinner an hour ago.

The key is that "memory" isn't a single mental faculty. Different systems handle different kinds of remembering. Someone may retain old memories, vocabulary, social skills, familiar routines, and recognition of people remarkably well while having much more difficulty forming and retrieving memories of recent events. Eating dinner at 5:00 is an event that has to be encoded as something like, "I ate tonight's dinner about 45 minutes ago." If that memory doesn't get firmly encoded, then at 6:00 there may simply be no accessible memory of having eaten.

Funeral rites in Illinois

 So many priests and bishops live lives that are so different than the lives of lay Catholics that they are often completely tone deaf. Hence the distorted théologies about contraception, marriage, and women.  So they come up with rules surrounding the most important events of people’s lives  that drive people out the doors. They did it with marriage prep, and marriages in the church are at historic lows. .  Now it’s not weddings, but funerals.  Infant/ child baptism rules are also extremely burdensome from based on what I was told  about the requirements for the two grandchildren who are baptized Catholics. More reasons among dozens to allow married priests and ordain women priests. They understand real life better than these cold- hearted celibates. 

https://www.ncronline.org/news/illinois-bishop-bars-family-eulogies-same-day-vigils-under-new-funeral-policies

The sedevacancy

No, I'm not talking about the SSPX. It's about Mitch McConnell's Senate seat.  Wasn't today supposed to be the deadline when a special election could be scheduled to fill McConnell's seat unless they could prove that he would be able to fulfill his duties? So far, crickets.

Kentucky governor Andy Beshear has repeatedly asked for McConnell's staff to confirm his actual condition. Some commenters have said he should just march into McConnell's hospital room and verify  what is going on. Which of course he legally can't do.  Not to mention it is not even known at this point which hospital or rehab facility McConnell is in.

My take is that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats want to change the status quo.  The Republicans, because they might lose a special election, or Thomas Massie might run as an Independent, and win. The Democrats, because with McConnell missing in action, it's one less Republican in the Senate.  In any event someone else will be elected in November, McConnell's status notwithstanding. I haven't heard that the Democrats have a candidate yet. They would be well advised to concentrate on that.

My peeps

I feel solidarity with NPR listeners today.

Dr. Fauci and Rand Paul

Heather Cox Richardson had a good piece yesterday on the Rand Paul vs Dr. Fauci congressional hearing. I copied part of it below, and have some comments of my own at the end: 

 July 29, 2026 (Wednesday)

"And so, Republicans are devoting themselves to serving red meat to their MAGA base, ginning up sound bites for distribution on social media. "

"On the menu today was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the 85-year-old former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who, serving in that capacity for 38 years, advised seven different presidents of both parties. President George W. Bush awarded Fauci the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in creating the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has saved an estimated 26 million lives. Trump named Fauci to the President’s Coronavirus Task Force in January 2020. "

A what-if on the 2024 presidential election

Could Kamala Harris have won the 2024 election if Joe Biden had resigned the presidency at the same time he relinquished the party nomination?

Bonus cut: the homily I didn't give today

In my previous post, I posted the homily I gave today, focusing on the first two parables in today's Gospel reading.  But up until late last night, that was not the homily I had planned to give today.  This one I'm posting below the break is the one I had worked on (more to the point, struggled with and fought) for quite a few hours this week.  It's based, not on the parables of Jesus in the Gospel reading, but on the prayer of King Solomon from today's first reading (readings are here).

Before I went to bed last night, I put the finishing touches on this one, practiced giving it, and printed it so it would be all ready to bring with me to the early mass this morning.  But I never loved it.  And I woke up at about 5:30 this morning with the conviction that, if I had enough time, I would redo it.  I had to drop one of my children off at work at 6 am.  That gave me about 50 minutes to draft a new homily.  That is not the recommended way to create a homily!  But I had been ruminating on the readings for days - more than a week - so I wasn't really starting ice-cold. So the new homily just came pouring out through my fingers on the keyboard onto the laptop screen.  I was able to type it out, edit it and print it within a 45 minute window.  I'm quite sure I had divine help getting that done. Then I put on some church clothes and headed to church, arriving in time for 7:30 am mass.  I didn't have time to practice it beforehand, which is not optimal.  But I think it worked out okay.  I gave it again at the 9:30 am mass and I think it was a little stronger that time. 

Here is the one I didn't give.  I'd welcome any comments. My own take is: it is more like a post here at NewGathering than a homily.  I'm glad I changed my mind.

All in

This is my homily for today, the 17th week in Ordinary Time, Cycle A.  Today's readings are here.

Are Independents Having a Moment?

 Recently Joe Manchin launched the Independent Leadership Council, an initiative to recruit and support independent candidates across the country.  

From an article on MSN:

Midterm elections 2026: Five independent candidates to watch amid Joe Manchin's new political push

The Conformity Gap - Catholics

 This came in an email this morning from Ryan Burge  that is relevant to the discussion of original sin and baptism.

“There’s a running joke in American religious life that goes something like this: ask ten Catholics what the Church teaches on a given issue, and you’ll get eleven different answers. It’s meant to be affectionate, a nod to the big-tent nature of a tradition that has managed to hold together nearly a billion people across wildly different cultures, languages, and political contexts. But like most jokes, it contains more than a little truth.

Original Sin

 There is a group on Facebook that discusses the books and ideas of Fr. Richard Rohr.  It is not a group sponsored by Rohr or the Center for Action and Contemplation, but just a place where those interested in his insights and ideas can converse.  There was a post today that caught my eye because I don't agree with the Augustinian understanding (official church teaching) of original sin.  I accepted all of it when I was a kid, and was well into adulthood before I really began dissenting from the many christian and Catholic teachings that don't make sense to me, such as atonement theology, transubstantiation, and original sin (among others).  This was the lead comment in the FB group today. Thoughts?

Several years ago, i attended a church that was doing an infant dedication, and the pastor offered an interesting suggestion.

He asked his creative arts department to design "onesies" for the babies, with the following printed on the front:

Dιɾƚყ Rσƚƚҽɳ Sιɳɳҽɾ

And on the back:

𝗣𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵 𝗠𝗲 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗚𝗼𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗹

What do you think of this idea?

If YOU were the Creative Arts Director...

What would you have printed on the front/back?!

[Note: most in the audience that day cheered loudly, while I became a little sick to my stomach. They likely hadn't read Immortal Diamond, or anything else by Father Richard... and they need to]

Pope Leo's Sesquicentennial letter to Americans

While looking for something else today, I ran across this letter from Pope Leo to the American people on the occasion of our 250th annivesary.  The letter, which is pretty short, is here.  

I don't think there is anything controversial about it (although I could be wrong - I'd be interested in folks' thoughts about it).  Here are my random observations, below the break:

What to make of the Graham Platner situation?

As I am sure everyone knows by now, Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for the Maine Senate seat occupied by Republican Susan Collins for 30 years, has ended his campaign.  A drip-drip-drip of revelations of problems in his personal history has become more than Democratic leaders and donors can stand, and they have prevailed upon him to step down.  

I confess I am not sure what to make of it.