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Debugging Our Artificial Intelligence

Robots are getting more like humans every day—and if I were a robot I wouldn’t brag about it. An article in The Wall Street Journal this week reported that robots are being endowed with the same kind of “deep learning…

What Kind of Fool am I?

Answering that musical question is the key to wisdom. We must all recognize that foolishness is our original sin. We’re born into this legacy from Adam & Eve and we spend the rest of our lives trying to find our…

Don’t Become Blind to the Divine

God’s love is a forest in which we tend to get lost. Upon entry we’re amazed by its beauty, but just as we eventually take our loved ones for granted, we tend to get used to immersion in love. We…

Fill Your Soul; Leave Your Belly to God.

If the people witnessing the miracle of the loaves and fish in last week’s gospel reading were celebrating their first communion, this week’s gospel is a confirmation. In both the secular and the Christian meanings of the word “confirmation,” an…

Never Let Anyone Off the Hook

This Sunday’s gospel account of the loaves and fishes miracle (Jn 6:1-15) is familiar to many of us, so it offers a good opportunity to take a fresh perspective. When you read it at mass, pretend you’re walking into the…

God’s Empathy is Out of Control

God’s incarnation as Christ was a miracle in many ways, but there’s one in particular we rarely think about. Through Christ God made Himself vulnerable to his own limitless empathy. After all those centuries of guiding his sheep via those…

No Version Control for the Soul

We’re born into this world with full-time jobs. From day 1 we are constantly remanufacturing the best version of ourselves. As Matthew Kelly wrote in his book, The Rhythm of Life, we’re part of a divine engineering process to fulfill…

Ugliness in Our Attics

We humans seem to be better at spotting evil in others than in ourselves. Evil isn’t always dramatic like stabbing or a robbing someone. In fact sometimes the most dangerous evil is banal, or boring, because we don’t even notice…

Sometimes miracles are wasted on us

If someone were to find a cure for alcoholism or nicotine addiction, the media would call it a miracle. What a shame the word miracle has to be associated with man’s tendency toward self-destruction. Diseases that would have never existed…