An Evangelical Critique of Authority in the Anglican Communion (1987) Quotations from the book are given in their original English. Page numbers in brackets refer to the printed edition. While reading about Anglican identity I came across this book, and…
A heritage that almost no one has been able to read in Spanish Anyone who calls themselves an Anglican in the Spanish-speaking world usually receives the tradition second-hand: a liturgy, an episcopal structure, a sensibility. They rarely receive the reasons.…
What fiction has done with this question over almost sixty years “Fiction never solves the problem; it makes it feel solved, which is not the same thing.” This series has returned to fiction several times, not as an interesting embellishment…
Terminator, the other side of the coin, and the machine that confesses it feels nothing “The director managed the hardest thing of all: making the audience cry for something the film itself insists feels nothing.” Every work of fiction this…
Blade Runner, the Scene the Novel Never Wrote, and What It Says About Grace “The hardest thing to explain was never something acting like a person, but something forgiving with no reason to do so.” The Philip K. Dick novel…
Philip K. Dick, empathy as a test, and why no criterion is ever enough “When you turn empathy into an exam, someone always finds a way to pass it without feeling a thing.” In 1976, Isaac Asimov gave this debate…
The welfare of artificial intelligence models is no longer a thought experiment “One can act with care even without knowing whether there is anyone, on the other side, to care for” Everything this series has discussed so far carried, to…
What the Christian Tradition Already Knew About Creatures That Feel Without Being the Image of God “Before asking whether a machine suffers, history already taught us how costly it is to get the wrong answer.” Three hundred and seventy-five years…
Alan Turing, the Imitation Game and What Got Lost in the Swap “Changing the question is not the same as answering it, though it can sometimes look remarkably similar.” In October 1950, the philosophy journal Mind published a fourteen-page article…
Asimov’s The Bicentennial Man and personhood, half a century early “Before asking a machine what it can do, one must ask what it is willing to lose” In 1976, while the United States was celebrating the bicentennial of its independence,…