One explanation someone offered for why ChatGPT imitated me so poorly (as shared in my recent post) was that it did not in fact have my words as part of its data set. I read an article on Gizmodo that suggested that this was unlikely to be the case. I decided to check, but was distracted by a pop-up window saying that the AI had been upgraded with better skills for verifying information. So I decided to ask it about... Read more
Imagine a world in which there are no church buildings. There are no formally organized online communities to sustain religious faith but only grassroots connections made by likeminded people. As a member of a religious minority, this might not be a speculative future scenario but real life. I have seen among the Mandaeans how young people in different parts of the world have connected online, even as their local Mandaean community might have fractured along lines of disagreement, dividing a... Read more
A press release about my latest book, now available for free: The Bible and Music. PALSave Textbook Creation Grant program releases first open textbook, “The Bible and Music” What do works like Handel’s “Messiah” and Bach’s “Passions” have in common with contemporary songs like Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” or Kendrick Lamar’s “How Much a Dollar Cost?” Like much of the world’s favorite music, these songs draw inspiration from biblical stories, and a new, free and open textbook published by the Private Academic... Read more
A conversation I had on Facebook Messenger recently with fellow New Testament scholar Sara Parks included this quip from her: (We can’t all be James McGrath and be running 25 James McGrath AI clones on round the clock global servers, all writing, podcasting, blogging, interviewing, teaching, and researching, ya know) My reply was to post 26 identical laughing emojis. But the exchange resonated with something I’d been hearing a lot lately, namely that if you ask ChatGPT to imitate a... Read more
Here’s the flyer for a talk I’ll be giving at Georgia College and State University on February 28th. Here is the blurb for the talk: Google gives you a million results, with ones paid for by advertisers at the top. ChatGPT writes grammatically perfect and even compelling prose yet is prone to make things up. The computer on Star Trek, on the other hand, gives terse answers that seem far too brief to be useful and lack nuance and complexity,... Read more
I have quoted, commented on, reviewed, and in other ways engaged with Carl Sagan here on the blog in the past. Today I’m sharing a recent comment of mine on Facebook in response to someone who had been pushing back against his classic axiom “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” He said it more than once, but this time it was in a meme in the context of a larger quote from his 1980s TV series Encyclopedia Galactica: “What counts is... Read more
I attended a lunchtime talk here at Georgia College by Dr. Cynthia Alby, who has published quite a bit about ChatGPT recently. It was so helpful as I think about what I do and don’t want to do with it, or want students to do with it. One key takeaway point is that you can plug something you wrote into ChatGPT and ask it to polish it, and you’ll get it back with grammatical improvements much as you would from... Read more
A lot of people have written already about the recent case in which Hamline University decided not to continue to employ an adjunct art history professor, Erika López Prater, after a student took offense at her showing (with due warning in advance) of a Medieval Muslim work of art depicting the prophet Muhammad. Prater is now suing Hamline. Below is my effort to articulate my stance on the matter. Inclusivity and respect on the one hand, and freedom of expression/academic... Read more
I have been meaning to write this post ever since I read New Testament scholar Suzanne Nicholson’s article for Firebrand magazine on human sexuality and same-sex relationships. When a scholar whose work you deeply respect even when you disagree with it makes an argument that you disagree with, it seems appropriate to take some time to reflect, and then to seek to respond in some way. Nicholson’s stance is that the truly loving thing for Christians to to do is to... Read more
A while back I shared a possible reconstructed Baptist source for the Christian infancy stories about Jesus. That’s “Baptist” as in the group around John the Baptist, and not a modern Christian denomination by that name, just to be clear. The more I have thought about it, the less likely it seems that Matthew and Luke would each have independently chosen different things to borrow from there. More likely, in my view, is that the followers of John crafted stories,... Read more
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