I think I will read this while running my agents in parallel. Thank you, my friend.
The writing is genuinely excellent.
In tech communities, we often talk about how many times productivity will increase, or whether AI has consciousness. But in religious documents, the focus is often on how the problems of the vulnerable and the community will change.
That is interesting to me. The worldview is Western and religious, so it feels somewhat unfamiliar, but at the same time, it seems useful as a way to rediscover values that we may have forgotten.
Rerum Novarum is an absolute banger. I had the pleasure of discovering it thanks to the discourse surrounding Leo XIV choosing his papal name, and I'm really glad I did. Leo XIII had some really insightful things to say about the problems surrounding workers' rights.
Rerum Novarum was written by Leo XIII. When Robert Prevost took as his papal name Leo XIV, it was a clear signal of priorities, at least to those who are educated in church history and teaching. (There aren’t many names that carry a signal as clear as Leo. The only name that would have been in the same league might have been Francis II).
It should be said that, as in many other fields, it was effectively forced on the church by external development. Marx published The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and Das Kapital in 1867; it took more than a generation for the church to accept that workers' rights were a thing.
Even after that shift, the Catholic Church continued to be a fundamentally reactionary force in the realm of social policies, all the way through the second world war.
This sounds like a whiggish progressive distortion of history.
First, the Church isn't in the business of policy. The Church recognizes the distinction between secular and religious authority, and indeed, it is the origin of that distinction, from which the exaggerated liberal separation of Church and State comes from (you won't find this distinction outside of Christianity, and indeed it makes no sense outside of that context). The Church will advise or comment or respond to policies as a moral authority, but policy as such does not belong to its scope.
Second, Catholic Social Teaching didn't materialize out of thin air. It is a culmination and explicit formulation of millennia of teaching. The industrial, political, and economic upheavals of the modern era are what motivated this explicit formulation.
Third, I wonder what you consider as "reactionary" here. The term itself is an incredibly loaded and condescending progressive term and takes for granted the correctness of the progressive view. The Church has been consistent in its teaching. It does not adapt to what is fashionable or to ideological fallout (even if particular prelates may show signs of doing so).
> This sounds like a whiggish progressive distortion of history.
Proceeds to argue that the Catholic Church is not in the business of policy, when it ran an actual, sizeable _nation state_ all the way to 1870 and in fact was extremely pissy when it was taken from them. And you call me distorting? Lol. They are in the business of policy, they've always been.
Dude, I'm from a city that was directly ruled by popes for centuries. We've dealt with all that rubbish over and over, Gelasius' swords etc etc. The reality is that the institution does what it does in order to survive and maintain as much power and influence as possible, by any means necessary. They will find ways to justify anything and its opposite, because theology is just a literary game.
Rerum novarum was an attempt to maintain power and influence in a situation where their power system was fundamentally challenged (or unmasked, some would say). It remained a niche and largely ignored effort all the way to Council II. For all the effort of some local clergy, most of the real powerbrokers in the Catholic Church still don't give two shits about redistribution and social justice, and never will.
You haven't actually made any cogent argument, just a strangely emotional, mocking, cynical, and hand-wavy remark that doesn't address anything (you also say "we've dealt with" as if you personally lived through it).
Yes, there actually is a distinction between ecclesiastical authority and secular authority. The same person can hold both secular and ecclesiastical offices. The Church - the institution - wasn't deciding policy in the Papal States, and it is not deciding it in the Holy See today. It is simply nonsensical to claim that.
Of course, the Church does maintain that all states must conform their laws (ius civile/lex) to the natural and divine law, but that's a general moral claim. I think most sane people would reject positivist conceptions of law as crazy and tyrannical, and would agree that the civil law should be a determination of general moral principles according to particular circumstances within a jurisdiction, and not arbitrary. Policy thus properly belongs to the state which is guardian of the particular common good of its jurisdiction. So, yeah, I would expect someone holding both offices to enact policies that coherently agree with the teaching he is transmitting through his ecclesiastical office. But as I said, the Church already expects all secular authority to conform prudently to the natural law at the very least, and the fullness of the Church's teachings if they are a Catholic confessional state.
But more to the point, it is irrelevant, because even if the Church had been directly deciding policy in the Papal States, it wouldn't follow that the Church has the authority to enact policy just anywhere. Its authority rests above it, like a referee.
A two millennia old institution rarely operates on the scale of decades. The workers’ rights movement may have become a pressing political issue then, but workers have been around for thousands of years. Most genuinely new ideas are actually terrible, so why not approach them cautiously? Given the terrible outcomes of the French Revolution and later the Bolshevik Revolution, the hesitancy seems justified.
> […] it took more than a generation for the church to accept that workers' rights were a thing.
The care for workers was a thing long before Marx. Rerum novarum (¶20) quotes scripture on the topic:
> To defraud any one of wages that are his due is a great crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven. "Behold, the hire of the laborers... which by fraud has been kept back by you, crieth; and the cry of them hath entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth."(6)
Jesus himself was a tradesman, often translated as "carpenter":
Marx's caring for the downtrodden and weak is itself a Christian concept; in contrast, Nietzsche hated weakness and Christianity for its support of those that are (he was not a fan of the Sermon on the Mount).
ANTIQUA ET NOVA: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence. "Francis ... on 14 January 2025 ... approved this Note and ordered its publication."
When I was in formation a couple of years ago, I showed our homiletics instructor a ChatGPT-generated homily for our assigned text. He read through it and put his head on the desk. Then he handed it back to me and said it was as good as good as anything you'd hear from the ambo that Sunday.
By this, he meant that it was ok-but-not-great, and there's a lot of weak preaching out there. And your point is dead on: the text and the assembly are the primary considerations. I preach on the same readings to 4 different masses, but the 4:30 Saturday Vigil folks are a different group than the 11:30 Sunday Morning crowd, so the message is tuned accordingly. Different emphases, different touchstones, differing exhortations, etc.
That’d be Guinea fowl, but all you’ve done is created a new problem unless you have a large area for them to range and a high tolerance for bird guano.
Can confirm. Grew up in suburban Atlanta during the period depicted, including getting caught in the first big Freaknic blowout he describes. It’s so dead-on it made me homesick.
I used it exclusively for my graduate theology studies - all my papers, presentations, and so on. Along with Zotero, I had everything I needed.
Just for fun, I did a few papers in LaTex, but I ran into a minor footnote formatting issue that I couldn't fix, so I didn't use it for my closure projects. LibreOffice was fine.
Also an Extra. I actually delayed renewal this year, but then re-upped when I remembered that I'd been using the callsign@arrl.org email forwarded for a bunch of stuff and shelling out for one more year was easier than hunting down all the places I'd used it. I'll probably address that soon and let it go for good after this year.
With a handheld radio and a Technician License, you can get on the air via local repeaters, work the VHF/UHF satellites, tinker with APRS (using something like this: http://www.mobilinkd.com/).
$500 will get you a good HF rig, but as another comment mentioned, you'll need to factor in the cost of a DC power supply, some decent coaxial cable and something to use for an antenna. Antennas can be dirt-cheap - just wire cut to length and lofted however you can.
/r/hamradio is a solid online resource. There's a semi-official IRC channel too.
Encountering Artificial Intelligence (https://jmt.scholasticahq.com/article/91230-encountering-art...)
Reclaiming Human Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (https://jmt.scholasticahq.com/article/154545-reclaiming-huma...)