Boredom for Dummies (and everyone)—partly a repost

Detail from Japanese Pearl Harbor attack plan. Source.

First, a few words about our latest war.

When I heard the first news bulletins about the 2026 Iran War, I couldn't help thinking about Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, that "dastardly" attack that happened while negotiations between Japan and the USA were still underway. U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull expressed his sense of betrayal very plainly to the Japanese negotiators.

The U.S./Israeli opening attack on Iran also happened during a period of active negotiations, facilitated in good faith by Oman.

I'm sure you have as much access to good analysis and commentary on this war as I do, so today I don't plan to say more here. I'm just aware that there are people alive at this moment, in Iran, Lebanon, Israel, perhaps the Gulf states, and beyond, who will not see tomorrow. May God have mercy on them, and on us.

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Wess Daniels (from Reedwood
Friends Weekly)

Last Sunday afternoon, Reedwood Friends Church here in Portland, Oregon, hosted C. Wess Daniels (biography) for a fascinating afternoon advertised as a session on "The Practice of Silence as Resistance in an Attention Economy."

It turns out that one of the themes that Wess has bravely connected to the topic of silence is boredom.

Boredom.

He's been thinking about how to attract more Guilford students to silence as a topic and as a practice ... and not just the Quaker students. Furthermore, he's certainly not hiding from the topic of boredom. He's not defining "boredom" as a danger for budding practitioners of silence, but boredom as a part of something good! Boredom as a superpower! 

Maybe it's best if I let  Wess explain it himself. Here are two of his blog posts that contain some savory hints of the content he shared so engagingly with us last Sunday:

Let’s Get Bored Together: The Practice of Silence and Resisting the Attention Economy. (February 26, 2023)

A Shot of Light - Getting My Head Above Water. (September 5, 2025)

By the time we met on Sunday, Wess had some other interesting stories to tell from his experiences with students—for example, when he asked them to interview trees.

All of this reminded me that I wrote about "boredom for dummies" back in October 2017, just after our final trip to the USA from Russia. Here it is:

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The Amtrak Empire Builder.

... I don't have time for those who don't know what time is.

These words from Boris Pasternak came back to me during the long, slow hours we spent on Amtrak's trains from New York City to Chicago, and then from Chicago to Portland, Oregon.

To tell you the truth, I really needed those long, slow hours of sitting by the train window and letting time carry me into my future. In my last weeks and days in Elektrostal, time went by with dizzying speed, and my mind struggled to keep up, storing up impressions and sensations against the uncertainties of that future. It's likely that we'll never live in Russia again. (Yes, we hope to visit, but even that is uncertain. In any case, I don't think we'll ever again be residents.)

We are learning about gravitational waves rippling through space and time, thanks to Albert Einstein and the recent LIGO observations. For most of us, it's not news that time also seems to be experienced in waves, now compressed and now just dragging along. I love living in the moment, but slow moments, and stretched-out periods where time nearly seems to stop, are equally precious to me.

In a moment of unguarded boastfulness, I once said that I was never bored. That claim didn't stop me from preparing for the transatlantic flight and the train trip by loading my Amazon Fire with episodes of Doctor Who and the Vietnam War series, along with two novels, two books of theology, a history of Protestant missions, and two autobiographies—by Norwegian politician Gro Harlem Brundtland and American astronaut Scott Kelly. But much of the time, day and night, I just watched the country scroll past the window. I felt no pressure to savor or memorize or store up—I just let the planet be the planet and me be me.

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Boredom is not a problem to be solved. It is the last privilege of a free mind.

These words open Gayatri Devi's essay on boredom, published on the Guardian Web site about two years ago. Her essay seems to assume a definition of boredom as a state of discontent resulting from lack of external stimulation. (Dictionaries, on the other hand, often seem to focus on boredom as a state resulting from the wrong kind of stimulation—tedious, repetitive, uninteresting.) She rightly recommends not curing boredom by reaching for new sources of stimulus, such as the ever-handy smartphone. Instead, she recommends "metathinking"—in a sense, observing yourself as you slide into boredom, considering what makes you bored, "how your mind responds to boredom, what you feel and think when you get bored."

I would just add a couple of things that are, maybe, already implied in Gayatri Devi's advice:

• Learn to enjoy your own company. This doesn't mean to give yourself a free pass on everything that might appear on a Fourth Step AA inventory -- but look beyond your imperfections to the whole of yourself, the person whose God-given mind is capable of thought, reflection, observation, intention, reconciliation, synthesis of old and new ideas, and so much more. That apparently empty period of time, whether it's at on a slow train or in line at a bank, is just a golden opportunity to get to spend some time with your complicated self. (Learning to enjoy your own company is a good step toward confronting temptation and addiction. God loved you into being, as Anthony Bloom said, so it's time to look at yourself with God's loving intention in mind.)
• Reframe slow time as prayer time. You can ask God or your own memory banks for prayer concerns that you may have forgotten or just heard about or that simply beg for your attention. Devi mentions Wordsworth's daffodils; you might instead choose or form a short prayer along the lines of the prayers I mention here....

Make me an instrument of your peace.

Yes.

Lord Jesus, have mercy.

I want to dwell in you.

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Back in 2011, I wrote about reading Pasternak's words about time as I sat waiting my turn at the bank branch in Elektrostal.

(End of repost. Original is here.)

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John Kinney speaks to Spokane Friends on abundance and scarcity.

Elizabeth Glass Turner calmly considers American evangelicals and the Epstein files.

Luis Parrales: The raw experience of love restored writer Christopher Beha's faith, or at least the possibility of faith. "Beha’s response is to describe himself as 'a skeptical believer'; for him, moments of certainty commingle with moments of doubt." Such restorations have happened to other writers, too.

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Also at Reedwood Friends Church: Last Wednesday we welcomed musician Dann Pell and his resonator guitars for a wonderful evening of music.

Some of his songs reminded me of the bard tradition in Russia, though in Dann Pell's case, there is an amazing balance between the poetry and spirituality of the lyrics and his intense and often intricate fingering.

Dann is from Exeter Friends Meeting of Caln Quarter in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. He's originally from Chester County, which, a lifetime ago, I knew well....

Don't miss a chance to hear him yourself, or invite him to your meeting or church. Here's a video that gives you a better sense than my words could.

Convergence in the Trump era

Back when I was first interested in Russia and the Soviet Union, in my mid-teens, physicist Andrei Sakharov proposed a new twist on Marxist determinism: that, among other factors, the demands of industrial management, the rise of consumer demand, and the danger of nuclear annihilation would cause the great rival superpowers to take on each other's better traits and eventually converge. The resulting societies would feature both rational economic planning and freedom of thought.

Sakharov did not live to see much of the "end of history" phase and the idealists' disappointments in both superpower camps—both with their individual fragilities and their discontented peripheries. The year 2000 featured secret bargains, manipulations, dangerous theatrics, and general confusion in both Russia and the USA, with Vladimir Putin and George Bush ending up on top. Not exactly the convergence that Sakharov had in mind.

In both systems, the neocons (creatively defined for my purposes!) relatively quickly demanded the right to define reality for the rest of us. Putin arguably was ahead in this development, as he and his allies slowly but surely extinguished independent media and built the cult of the indispensable leader. "Putin is Russia, and Russia is Putin," proclaimed Vyacheslav Volodin, currently speaker of the State Duma, in 2014. And since that year, just in terms of government process (setting aside the ultra-nationalist intellectuals and church leaders who are his favorite influencers), Putin alone is the stubborn owner/driver of the war in Ukraine.

The USA's equivalent developments, although far less linear and absolute (we did elect two Democrats in those years), have reached the point where Donald Trump can assert to a journalist that "MAGA is Trump" and that, in starting yet another war, he faces no opposition in true MAGA.

In this Russian bookstore, someone put the Constitution
in the fantasy section. (Originally used here.)

Both of these countries' constitutions nominally have power distributed among several branches. In Russia, the legislators and judiciaries go through the motions of their jobs but, when the stakes involve the interests of those at the top, they see no point in resisting.

Our situation may be less bleak: the judiciary still displays some independence, but the president's party's majorities in both houses of the U.S. Congress mostly continue to fall in line. In the present case of Iran (and Israel and most of the Persian Gulf states), what the president wants is what he gets. Iran is, of course, just the most recent target of U.S. bombs and artillery in the past 13-1/2 months, after Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, Iran (June 2025), the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, Syria, Nigeria, and Venezuela. In almost every case, Trump gave the orders personally and did not deign to invite Congressional consent. And now he supposedly gets to decide personally who will be the next leader of Iran.

One of the lonely critical Republican voices in Congress, representative Warren Davidson of Ohio, points straight to the constitutional illegality of Trump's process, as reported in The Guardian:

Make no mistake, Iran is an enemy of the United States. As our military engages them, they do so justly. [sic] Unfortunately, they are not yet doing so constitutionally.

For some, this debate will be about whether we should even be fighting in Iran. For me, the debate is more fundamental: is the president of the United States, regardless of the person holding the office, empowered to do whatever he wants? That’s not what our constitution says.

In fact, the U.S. Constitution, and most Republicans' unwillingness to defend it, is at the heart of several of today's crises as we transition from a republican democracy to a personalist authoritarianism. Due process and equal protection of the law came into the Constitution after a terrible Civil War, but today's legislative timidity in the service of throwing out immigrants is shameful. So is the attempt to organize a permanent governing majority through federal legislation, when the Constitution makes it clear that the states are to make election rules.

In 1967, a group of anthropologists contributed papers on war at a conference of the American Anthropological Association. The resulting book, War: the Anthropology of Armed Conflict and Aggression, opened my eyes to the possibility of studying war as a human behavior just like many others, subject to the same disciplines of observation and analysis totally apart from the myths, justifications, and deference it usually gets in real life. One of the contributors proposed that societies are usually either in a "relaxed" state or a "mobilized" state, and anthropologists should study the process by which a society goes from one state to the other. A respondent pointed out that, in modern conditions, most of society can remain in a "relaxed" state while specialists conduct wars on our (supposed) behalf, often without ever seeing their opponents, not to mention the collateral damage. To me this raises a question that I hope you can help me answer: how do we mobilize, not in favor of war, but in favor of our Constitution, before our "relaxation" becomes utter and permanent passivity?

Or, as one of our Moscow friends used to say to us, ironically, "Welcome to Russia!"

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Related: "The Cult of Personality and its Consequences."

Living without lying.

A special brand of patriot.

The Bible, MAGA, and a new mission field.

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OK, so Kristin Du Mez has some evidence we've not all fallen into a complete stupor.

Conor Friedersdorf wants to know who the USA is at war with right now.

Sojourners Faith and Practice Forum ... a forum for "civic discipleship."

George Lakey on the relationship between prayer, aging, and getting arrested. (Part of a wonderful series on "Aging and Quaker Spirituality.")

Nigel Biggar proposes nine intellectual virtues, and the costs of neglecting them. Thanks to Faith on View for the link.

Please read this lovely tribute to Bishop Seraphim Sigrist, whose passing I noted with great regret on February 12.

Ukraine's Pacifists in a Country at War. (One of them is a faithful participant in this weekly meeting to pray for peace, whether or not his electricity is working.) I encourage you to include them in your prayers.

Speaking of Friends World Committee (previous link), the Section of the Americas has opened up registration for its annual sessions on Saturday, March 21. This year the sessions will be 100% online.

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Once again, another version of "Scratch My Back." I've presented this one at least twice before, but it takes me back to Chicago like no other.... Illinois Slim does the chicken scratch.

"Speak, Memory"

A couple of weeks ago, my therapist suggested that I write down some of my early memories, grouped chronologically. Maybe later we can discern some trends and common causes.

The task became easier when I reached the age of 14, when I began writing a daily diary, which I continue to this day. Still, I have memories from before that age ... many of which came back to me since I began assembling the list she suggested.

Source for portrait

Judy is a volunteer at a charity shop in our neighborhood, and she primarily works with their used books. Coincidentally, the same day I accepted this memory-list assignment, Judy brought home a copy of Vladimir Nabokov's remembrances, Speak, Memory, which includes some of his earliest childhood memories.

Here's one of those memories:

Several times during a summer it might happen that in the middle of luncheon, in the bright, many-windowed, walnut-paneled dining room on the first floor of our Vyra manor, Aleksey, the butler, with an unhappy expression on his face, would bend over and inform my father in a low voice (especially low if we had company) that a group of villagers wanted to see the barin [that is, the master of the estate, Nabokov’s father] outside. Briskly my father would remove his napkin from his lap and ask my mother to excuse him. One of the windows at the west end of the dining room gave upon a portion of the drive near the main entrance. One could see the top of the honeysuckle bushes opposite the porch. From that direction the courteous buzz of a peasant welcome would reach us as the invisible group greeted my invisible father. The ensuing parley, conducted in ordinary tones, would not be heard, as the windows underneath which it took place were closed to keep out the heat. It presumably had to do with a plea for his mediation in some local feud, or with some special subsidy, or with the permission to harvest some bit of our land or cut down a coveted  clump of our trees. If, as usually happened, the request was at once granted, there would be again that buzz, and then, in token of gratitude, the good barin would be put through the national ordeal of being rocked and tossed up and securely caught by a score or so of strong arms.

In the dining room, my brother and I would be told to go on with our food. My mother, a tidbit between finger and thumb, would glance under the table to see if her nervous and gruff dachshund was there. “Un jour ils vont le laisser tomber,” [“One day they’re going to abandon him,”] would come from Mlle Golay, a primly pessimistic old lady who had been my mother’s governess and still dwelt with us (on awful terms with our own governesses). From my place at table I would suddenly see through one of the west windows a marvelous case of levitation. There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawling in midair, his limbs in a curiously casual attitude, his handsome, imperturbable features turned to the sky, Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the first and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.

I love this piece of writing, which combines a child’s lack of full context with our childhood tendency to make fanciful associations, like the similarity between his levitating father in his wind-rippled white suit with the angels on cathedral ceilings, which he might have noticed during a funeral liturgy.

My home in grade school years. (Second floor, left.)
Source: Google Maps, 2011.

In my family, such memories would have been unlikely to occur. We lived in an apartment building, not an aristocratic estate, and levitations of any kind outside our second-story windows would have been very hazardous. Furthermore, any mention of religion was strictly forbidden in our home, as I mentioned in this post a couple of years ago, so I would not have made any connections with angels on a church ceiling. 

As I recalled in that post, I have a vivid memory from grade school, when our teacher asked us why we should be afraid to talk about God. (This was before the prayer-in-school controversy that began in 1962.) I found myself sitting there, strangely tongue-tied, and thought then that I would never be able to use the word “God” out loud in public. Still, I was fascinated that people who appeared normal could have such a discussion at all. It was as if God had very temporarily levitated above the windowsill of our schoolroom, as Nabokov’s father had when his tenants had lofted him into the air.

Another time that God briefly hung in the air in my childhood was when I found a Gospel tract on the floor of our building’s lobby. The author described something resembling what I would now call a conversion experience. This new believer had so fallen in love with the Lord that, in his daily walks in the city, he would go out of his way to pass churches so that his hungry eyes would see the name “Christ” on the church buildings.

A little later, but long before my personal conversion, I used to listen to a Sunday night church service on my favorite top-40 rock station, WCFL, the voice of the Chicago Federation of Labor. Normally, I would be listening to that station to hear Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs sing “Wooly Bully” or “The Hair on my Chinny Chin Chin,” or Herman’s Hermits sing “There’s a Kind of a Hush All Over the World Tonight,” or Tommy James and the Shondells’ unforgettable classic “My Baby Does the Hanky Panky,” or Wilson Pickett’s oh-so-suggestive “In the Midnight Hour.” Among my favorite memories of sheer escapism was the sublime chaos of Ron Britain's unique style of DJ'ing. I still remember this particular broadcast.

I also relied on WCFL for broadcasts of Chicago White Sox baseball games, via the voices of announcers Bob Elson and Red Rush. I dutifully recorded results in my diary, and was especially happy when my favorite relief pitcher, Hoyt Wilhelm, got credited with a save.

Source.  

But Sundays at 11 p.m., something different was on the air. It was the weekly service of the First Church of Deliverance, with the warm, magnetic personality of the Rev. Clarence H. Cobbs leading the service. Years later, Rev. Jesse Jackson called Clarence Cobbs his “spiritual father.”

Obviously, I kept my being part of Rev. Cobbs’ radio congregation a secret from my family. I attended the First Church of Deliverance while in bed, listening with my little single earphone, with my head under the blanket. I loved the church's theme hymn, “Jesus Is the Light of the World,” which was my first exposure to Black Gospel music. I also remember "Jesus Is a Healer," "How I Got Over," "I'm going to Make It," and "Let Us Sing 'til the Power."

What really intrigued me was the pastoral prayer for “the sick, the shut-ins, the bereaved, the incarcerated, and all those who love the Lord.” Although I did not know intellectually whether I was included in those last words, they always gave me a distinct tingle.

My oldest memory of this kind was from sometime between the ages of two and four, during the years I lived with my mother’s parents in Stuttgart, Germany, before my parents came to claim me and take me to my new home in Chicago. I was sitting in my grandmother’s lap in our home at Robert Bosch Str. 104, and she was teaching me how to tie my shoes. And while she was doing that, she was talking to me about the Good Shepherd. I clearly remember that this was how she talked about Jesus. I like to think that these experiences of God rising into my field of vision for just a short time despite the obstacles, formed a golden thread that usually ran below the surface of my life until the day I came to know that I could trust that very same Good Shepherd, and eventually led to my being willing, even invited, to write and talk about God in public.

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Source.  

I used some of this essay in a sermon at Spokane Friends Meeting last Sunday. One of the slides I used that morning during the sermon was this painting by Willem Drost, sometimes interpreted as being a portrait of Timothy (recipient of New Testament letters from his mentor, the apostle Paul) and his grandmother Lois. I can't help associating it with my own grandmother, thanks to whom I caught one of my first glimpses of God.

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Related posts:

Radio shorts

April shorts

A song of quiet trust

"The devil doesn't like it but it's down in my heart."

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Out of the many books on aging, Nancy Thomas has a specific recommendation.

(I continue to recommend John Yungblut's On Hallowing One's Diminishments for the specific aspects of aging he deals with. I wrote about that pamphlet here.)

Comments on the fourth anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine ... from Heather Cox Richardson, and from Jeremy Morris. The latter writes about the typical errors of commentators on Russia and Ukraine, and summarizes what he himself got right and got wrong over the past few years. As usual, his dense prose rewards careful reading.

Meanwhile, Timothy Snyder says that Donald Trump is "failing at fascism."

Collaborate or collapse: Matt Hisrich points to a possible new path forward in an era of shrinking markets and closures in higher education.

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Top three Winter Olympic teams judging by medals, snipped from this page.

This past weekend the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy came to a close. Team Norway, as usual, did their  (my) homeland proud. Among the other statistics describing the Norwegian triumph, I noticed something nobody seemed to comment on: Norway got 41 medals with a team of 80 athletes, while the USA got 33 medals with a team almost three times as large, 232 athletes. Here's The Guardian's rather routine analysis of Norwegian Olympic success. Timothy Snyder writes about watching the Olympic Games in Ukraine.

Now that I've got Norway's triumphs commented on, I can return to my usual conceit of being a citizen of the whole planet.

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First Church of Deliverance is on the air! This recording takes me back to my teenage memories of listening secretly to these broadcasts. "Lift up your heads! Don't be afraid!"

Are you serious?

Heard last Sunday, describing the USA's current presidential administration:

"These are simply not serious people."

Our visit to Berkeley Friends Church last Sunday included several intense conversations after the meeting for worship, on all sorts of subjects. That's when the "serious people" comment came up.

It made me think: what do we mean by "serious people"?

Serious: Octavia Spencer on playing God in The Shack.

About fifteen years ago, our Moscow Friends Meeting needed a new place for our weekly worship gatherings. Misha Roshchin and I were the clerks of the meeting, and we scouted out several possible locations. As we approached one of them, we had been having a light-hearted conversation, but then Misha reminded me that we were shortly to meet the head of the organization whose space we were hoping to use for our events. Time to quit the banter: "She needs to see us as serious people." ("Солидные люди....") By the time we entered her office, I think we were paragons of dignity, or close to it.

My working definition of "serious people," which I'm very eager for your help in refining, would include these features:

• people who approach life, work, and relationships thoughtfully, with a sense of purpose, responsibility, and depth
• their humor is disarming and perspective-setting, sometimes a bit self-deprecating, but never insulting or demeaning
• they clearly want to bless their communities rather than serve themselves or a narrow segment of those communities
• they are ready to advocate for and commit to their promises, and have the competence to make those promises believable
• they are known for their trustworthiness, their refusal to "feign certainty" (see "Dea Cox and the 'people strategy'") and their willingness to acknowledge mistakes.

In the context of leadership, whether local or national, we need serious people, to build in seasons of growth, to provide and demonstrate stability when things are shaky, to anchor us in crisis ... and to lead with candor and transparency at all times.

Does this mean the rest of us can coast? Not at all. It is up to us, the people, to retain the ability to spot and choose serious people for positions of responsibility, to expose lack of seriousness, and to demand reform or replacement. But is that happening?

I fear that many of us have long since figured out that "these are not serious people," that it is apparently useless to apply the old standards of seriousness to them, and we are therefore not sufficiently shocked when those people keep behaving incompetently at best, with industrial-scale cruelty at worst, and with utter disdain for elementary ethics most of the time. Barack Obama frequently points out how much trouble he would have been in if he'd done anything at all as president to politicize the Justice Department, for example, but now we have already become accustomed to the daily wreckage that unserious people are doing to our government.

In today's atmosphere, it's not surprising when some Trump administration critics mimic that lack of seriousness, expressing their understandable dissent with insults, exaggerations, premature conclusions, rude caricatures, classism, and intellectual laziness. It's a time of crisis; we need to lead ourselves with the same degree of seriousness that we demand from leaders.

Note: By "not sufficiently shocked," I do NOT mean flipping over into stupid forms of outrage, however self-gratifying that might be. Biblical realism should already have prepared us that outrages will happen, but when they do, they must be confronted.

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In checking to see whether "serious people" was an adequate translation for the phrase Misha used in Moscow ("Солидные люди...."), I enjoyed revisiting a couple of other translation posts I've made in the past: "kind"; "normal"; "untranslatable words." For more fun along these lines, read Adrian Wanner's The Bilingual Muse: Self-Translation among Russian Poets, especially his chapter on Vladimir Nabokov, starting at paper page 112, PDF page 123. 

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The Atlantic's Adam Serwer: "Do not be cynical about Jesse Jackson: He was never the caricature his critics wanted him to be."

Jesse Jackson was one of the great preachers of our times, eloquent in text and voice. I had the great pleasure of hearing him in person fifty years ago at the Arch Street Meetinghouse in Philadelphia, at an evening session of the Bicentennial Conference on Religious Liberty, where I was serving on the nonviolent security team for the conference. There's one line I'll never forget: "Racism won't kill us because cynicism got us first." That might have been the moment that my commitment to resist cynicism began, which has been a theme of mine ever since. As a Gospel preacher, a political motivator, an organizer, a serious person in every way, Rev. Jackson was a memorable force for good.

NBC in Chicago remembers Jesse Jackson.

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William Barber on Jesse Jackson: Prophet of America's Possibility.

Henry Farrell's brief theory of very serious people.

Right Sharing workshop on "The Power of Enough": March 14, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Tigard Friends Church. Informational poster here in PDF format—please post and spread the word!

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A recently unearthed and restored Freddie King performance from France in 1975 will soon be published, according to Guitar World. In the meantime, another of his performances in France:

Remembering Bishop Seraphim Sigrist

Wassily Kandinsky, Autumn in Murnau, the cover photo on Seraphim Sigrist's Facebook page.

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Source: Union of Orthodox Journalists

Source: David Sipress, New Yorker via Seraphim Sigrist's Facebook page, commenting on his own back pain.

... [T]he gifts of the Holy Spirit are revealed in community. As such, they are for all the community, and so one gift does not quench the others, even when, as happens often, they are opposite. So the analytical does not quench the emotional, the gift of tears does not quench that of laughter, the gift of the spiritual elder does not contradict that of the psychologist, the gift of ecstasy does not stand in disharmony with that of calm.

—Bishop Seraphim Sigrist, A Life Together: Wisdom of Community from the Christian East. 

Bishop Seraphim Sigrist (Orthodox Church in America) died last Saturday morning. There must be many people all over the world who are going through what I'm feeling now. Yes, it's true that we believe that "he fell asleep in the Lord," but he gave us so much wisdom and care and sheer fun that I, for one, can't help feeling sad and very sorry for us.

I never met him in person. The closest we came to meeting each other was when I visited the Pleasantville campus of Pace University to conduct marketing interviews at a time when he was working in the library. We actually met through a Facebook chat when he contacted me to consider joining an ecumenical fellowship that, during the peak COVID years, was meeting online. That invitation led to, among other things, five years of correspondence that I'm very grateful to be able to revisit anytime. We chatted about Japan (where he served as Bishop of East Japan, and where my mother was born and raised), our experiences of Russia, several mutual friends there, the intersections of Eastern Orthodox and Quaker Christianity, authors and artists we both admired, and the joys and puzzles of ecumenical life. We sent each other many links over the years; it was he who told me that Friends Journal had published an interview with the Norwegian author Jon Fosse, whom he was reading at the time.

Looking over that correspondence, I am amazed at my own openness with him in writing about my family and early life. I've no doubt that many others found him to be a person of surpassing empathy as I did. And some of you lucky people knew him for far longer than my five years.

His scope of knowledge, interests, sympathies, and ability to detect unexpected affinities and hidden kinships across all those fields was amazing. And he frequently made those connections with gentle playfulness.

In his positive review of Bishop Seraphim's book Theology of Wonder, the Christian Reformed scholar James Peyton wrote words that ring very true, more generally, of what I came to know and love about our friend. In the Calvin Theological Journal (pages 479-481), Peyton wrote,

There is no question that the author is a gifted theologian: It is clear that Bishop Seraphim is well-acquainted with a wide spectrum of views and controversies, both among Christians of various stripes and with the views of practitioners of other faith traditions throughout the world. However, he never makes such familiarity the point of his presentation or of any of the sections; indeed, he wears his extensive learning lightly. He is not concerned to show us how much he knows, although he knows a great deal: He refers deftly to the understandings current among Hasidic Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and various kinds of Muslims. He cites with considerable dexterity literary figures from various cultures, across many centuries, and in a host of genres. Unostentatiously, the author weaves these all into a seamless tapestry that invites readers to appreciate that "all things (considered in their depth) led into eluctable mystery" (93): Bishop Seraphim is concerned to show us how much he does not understand—or, better put, what no one can comprehend. In the best traditions of the rich Eastern Orthodox tradition in which he stands, this little book offers a contemporary—and very accessible—mystical theology.

Theology of Wonder is available from St. Vladimir's Seminary Press.

Eternal memory!

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Source: LiveJournal

Seraphim in his own words, over the years: his LiveJournal.

UPDATE: A beautiful tribute to Seraphim from his friend Michael Meerson, who writes,

Maybe he truly was a seraph cast among humans, sent on some mysterious mission. A seraph on earth would move awkwardly in crowds, his wings more hindrance than help, yet he would ache constantly for the divine presence he had known before. That longing defined Seraphim. I have never met anyone so profoundly nostalgic for heaven.

(In Russian.)

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The fourth Global Ecumenical Theological Institute (GETI) in Wadi El Natrun, Egypt—an Eastern Orthodox perspective. (How I wish I could talk about this report with Eden Grace!)

Micah Bales asks a key question: Who is in charge here?

You've heard of virtue-signalling. Now we have vice-signalling and vitriol-signalling.... (Skip these links if you want to stay on the sunny side of the street.)

Kristin Du Mez, Bruce Berglund, and the Moscow Playbook.

Writer and poet Nancy Thomas on the writing vocation, technological interruptions, and ... what rhymes with Forsythe?

Yougov statistics: Super Bowl vs Winter Olympics, and how book-reading is faring in the USA (not well!).

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This time, our "Baby Scratch My Back" version comes from Otis Redding (audio only with slideshow). It's probably my favorite version strictly for vocal performance. Musicians: Booker T. & the M.G.'s (Steve Cropper, Donald Dunn, Al Jackson Jr., Booker T. Jones) along with pianist Isaac Hayes and a horn section including Wayne Jackson, Charles "Packy" Axton, Andrew Love, Floyd Newman, and Sammy Coleman.

The problem with AI ... according to AI

Source.  

It's been nearly 13 years since Gmail offered automatic classification of e-mails (sorting them into "Primary," "Promotion," "Social," etc.). I appreciated the way this organized my in-box, and I soon began creating filters that would override Gmail's decisions when necessary. Even so, I wondered what Google was doing with the data it must have been collecting to do that sorting of my mail.

More recently, Gmail has been trying to finish my sentences, and has been offering summaries of my incoming mail and my e-mail conversations. It offers to help me write letters.

I posted the following query into Google's search engine:

"Examples of unwanted and uninvited use of AI in our everyday Internet-based tasks (e-mail, for example)." I'll let AI speak for itself (but I'll return at the end).

Note: Google provides the sources of the information and advice in this essay through links in the actual Google-constructed reply to my request.

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Platforms are moving from simple "tools" to "collaborators" without always being asked.

It’s a fascinating (and sometimes frustrating) time to be online. We are currently in the "opt-out" era of the internet, where AI features are often pushed live first, leaving users to figure out how to disable them later.

While some find these tools helpful, many users experience them as "feature creep"—unnecessary clutter that interrupts flow or compromises privacy.

1. Communication & Email

This is where most people encounter unwanted AI daily.Smart Compose & Predictive Text: Gmail and Outlook now suggest the end of your sentences. While it saves seconds, many feel it flattens their personal voice or makes emails sound robotic.

AI-Generated Summaries: Some email clients now place an AI-generated summary at the top of long threads. If the AI misses a nuance or gets a deadline wrong, it can lead to costly misunderstandings.

Priority Inboxes: Algorithms decide which emails are "Important." If the AI "hallucinates" that a bill or a personal note is "Promotions," you might miss it entirely. [This happens to me frequently.]

2. Search Engines & Information

The way we look for facts has fundamentally shifted in the last year, often removing the "human" element of the web. 

AI Overviews (SGE): Google and Bing now place an AI-generated answer at the very top of search results. This pushes actual websites (written by humans) further down the page and can sometimes present "hallucinations" as factual truth.

Chatbot Sidebars: Many browsers (like Edge with Copilot) now have persistent sidebars that analyze the page you are reading, even if you just wanted a clean reading experience.

3. Social Media & Content Creation

Social platforms are using AI to keep you scrolling longer and to fill gaps in original content.

AI-Generated Commenting: LinkedIn and other platforms now suggest "AI replies" to posts. This can lead to comment sections filled with shallow, automated praise rather than genuine networking.

Feed Manipulation: Algorithms have moved beyond "who you follow" to "what the AI thinks will keep you hooked," often surfacing AI-generated "slop" (synthetic images or low-quality AI articles) in your main feed.

Invisible Editing: Instagram and Facebook have integrated AI tools that can "expand" your photos or remove people from backgrounds automatically, sometimes blurring the line between reality and digital fabrication. 

4. Workplace & Productivity Tools

The "Software as a Service" (SaaS) world has integrated AI into almost every text box. 

The "Ask AI" Pop-up: In tools like Notion, Slack, or Google Docs, highlighting text often triggers a "Write with AI" button that can get in the way of manual editing.

Meeting Transcription Bots: You may join a Zoom call only to find an "AI Note-taker" bot joined too. This can feel like uninvited surveillance, especially if the host didn't ask for everyone's consent first.

Why this feels "unwanted"

The tension usually comes down to three things:

1. Cognitive Load: Having to constantly dismiss pop-ups or "X out" of AI suggestions is exhausting.
2. Privacy Concerns: Users often worry that their private drafts or emails are being used to "train" the next version of the AI.
3. Loss of Agency: When a tool suggests how you should finish a sentence, it subtly influences your thoughts and communication style.

Even more unwanted! Google's sources did not mention perhaps the most disastrous aspect of AI's invasion into our online lives: the electricity it takes to make those often-unwanted features possible.

I asked Google, "How much additional electricity (beyond what would be used simply by the Internet) is required to power AI?" Here is its full answer. In brief,

AI-optimized data centers require 3–5 times more power per square foot than traditional facilities, with a single AI server rack consuming 50–150 kilowatts compared to 10–15 kW for conventional computing. AI searches use roughly 10 times more electricity than standard, non-AI internet searches, driving a potential 10%–20% increase in total U.S. power demand by 2030.

I admit that I appreciate that AI is probably helping Google process the questions I ask it. Instead of guessing at the best key words and their best order, as I used to do, I can frame my queries in natural language. However, my occasional and voluntary use of AI in this direction is not the same as having it intrude when not invited.

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At the end of the original response to my query, Google asks, "Would you like me to show you how to disable some of these specific AI features in Gmail, Google Search, or LinkedIn?" I answered "yes," and it linked to these suggestions.

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In the context of ICE and other U.S. Homeland Security officers' abusive behavior, it's not surprising that audiences yearn for evidence that justice is on the way. A whole new AI-powered trope has arisen to meet this hunger: videos of officers making ludicrous and cruel arrests (it happens!) and then getting scolded by angry citizens, business owners, local police, and judges. Here's a YouTube channel specializing in such videos. The channel's front page makes it clear that every video is fictional, a similar note is on each video's individual page, and the videos themselves bear all the typical features of fakes, but the vast majority of the comments on many of these videos are cheering on those righteous resisters. Occasionally there's a plaintive "It's probably AI but I wish this were true."

Other AI-generated videos tell stories of miraculous landings of stricken airplanes, or detailed accounts of Ukrainian drone strikes, and no doubt far worse material ... and we're all paying for the power that's needed to compose these AI fakes, and the mental and spiritual pollution they spread, just when civil society needs true discernment more than ever. Among the names of the early Quaker movement were "Publishers of Truth" and "Children of the Light"; I guess we're still needed, if we're up to it!

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Was it inevitable? AI agents have their own social network?? Benj Edwards on Moltbook.

Micah Bales on the humility of God. "Be encouraged, brothers and sisters."

Sunita Viswanath: The "theology of showing up" is making Minneapolis a holy place.

Artemis II's lunar mission is delayed. Amy Shira Teitel's sad and blunt commentary on this rocket and its ultra-expensive path to irrelevance: her video and article.

A Guardian report on Dezer Development and Palestinian deportations: an infuriating glimpse into the world of wealthy presidential friends who earn big fees by transporting deportees and treating them as utter nobodies.

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One of my favorite versions of "Baby Scratch My Back" ... Jason Ricci with John Lisi, Sam Hotchkiss, Andy Kurz, and Adam Baumol.