The Final Climate Warning, Ableist AI, Sin and OCD
KTF Weekly Newsletter
Hi everyone!
Psalm 62:1 says, “Truly my soul finds rest in God; my salvation comes from Him.” We pray that in the midst in the messiness of life, and especially in interpersonal and institutional conflicts, you are able to find rest this Lent in the one who holds all things together. It has been a helpful reminder for us from Faith Unleavened that God doesn’t abandon us in the difficulties. It’s often where he does his best work.
And with that, on to our recommendations for the week.
Sy’s recommendations:
This one comes to you from God is My Special Interest, one of our recommended publications on Substack. It focuses on neurodivergence and religion. This post from Tuesday is by Aly Prades, a woman who grew up in evangelicalism with undiagnosed Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. She writes in vivid detail about how the overemphasis on sin, guilt, and shame at her church led her to become obsessed with her own failings and with regimented religious activity. She explains how she began to heal when someone finally asked her about the unrelenting voice of critique in her head: “What if it’s not God?” This article gives us another angle on two truths Tamice describes in Faith Unleavened. First, love for God cannot begin with fear of doing or being wrong. Second, Churches are often places where the symptoms of psychological trauma like Prade’s’ obsessive thoughts or Tamice’s disassociation are misidentified as piety, rewarded, and magnified. I pray that churches would encourage us to better understand mental health and the way our own minds work, free of theologies that are too abstract and rigid to accommodate humanity.
The Allegheny County Department of Human Services is under investigation for its use of an AI tool designed to predict when children are at risk of neglect or abuse. This article and the accompanying video tell the tragic story of a Pittsburgh couple whose infant daughter was refusing to eat. After trying everything they could, their pediatrician suggested they go to a hospital. The baby girl eventually began to eat again and regained weight. But the hospital was cagey about when she could go home, until child protection workers confronted the parents with a court order that the girl enter foster care. She is now two years old, and the couple still has only one idea of why she isn’t at home: the husband has cognitive impairments caused by a stroke, and the wife has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The Department of Justice believes the AI tool may have flagged the couple and others like them because of their disabilities. Such tools, making waves in the media right now, can only be as good as their algorithms, and often they serve to codify our existing prejudices and systems of oppression.
You may remember that Dominion, a manufacturer of voting machines, is suing Fox News for libel over false reports about the machines being manipulated to elect Joe Biden. A former Fox News producer is now also suing the company for allegedly coercing her into being a scapegoat in that case. She asserts that the coercion was part of Fox’s overall culture of misogyny, and the stories she has make Tucker Carlson’s studio sound like a frat house. As this article reports, both these suits have led to the disclosure of documents demonstrating that many Fox personalities and higher-ups neither believe the election conspiracies they espouse nor care about reporting accurately. The focus is captivating and maintaining an ever more radicalized audience. The producer bringing the lawsuit herself once responded to a pundit’s question about pushing Donald Trump on whether he would peacefully transition power by saying, “To be honest, our audience doesn’t want to hear about a peaceful transition.”
Jonathan’s Recommendations:
In 2014, The Atlantic published a groundbreaking series of articles called “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It laid bare the moral debt that white America has accumulated over the course of its history of oppressing Black Americans. Now, as the Associated Press reports in this article, San Francisco is attempting to actually pay some of that debt. Some politicians back the idea, but they have not definitively answered the questions of how to distribute the payments and whether the payments should come in the form of cash or community investment. San Francisco, The California state government, and Boston all have similar reparations committees that formed in the wake of the protests in 2020. They are trying to do something to make things right when there is so much wrong, but I come away from this article feeling that their work is mostly tedious, difficult, and slow-moving. And this money won’t undo centuries of pain and suffering. But it could also be a real step toward reconciliation and a more just world for many Black Americans.
Scholar and author from our anthology, Robert Chao Romero, wrote a short piece called “Empire and Atonement,” which reflects on the temptation to choose between a Jesus that is a Savior or Liberator—a ransom for sin or a radical activist. These and other tiny binaries simply cannot hold all that Christ’s birth, life, death, resurrection and return accomplished and fulfilled. The scriptures he cites are sobering reminders to resist the temptation to pride or theological and moral supremacy. They also call us to a high standard of Christian leadership. Professor Romero invites us to contemplate the mystery of the work of the Cross, the complexity of God’s Church, and what God is still to accomplish for His glory and our benefit. Also, if you haven’t read Romero’s book Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity, it’s worth your time.
The Secretary General of the United Nations called the alarming final report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe,” adding, “Our world needs climate action on all fronts.” This sobering warning is the latest in an escalating drumbeat exclaiming emphatically to inadequate avail that our way of life is unsustainable for the planet and all its inhabitants. Yes, we are making some changes, but not at nearly the rate necessary to stave off the increase in devastation that has already affected every continent. As I discussed last week, the Biden Administration went back on a campaign promise not to finance new oil projects. This week, Biden vetoed a bill that would have denied certain investors the ability to take a company’s climate impact into account. That policy inconsistency does not meet the gravity of this moment and perpetuates our current trajectory while giving the appearance of progress. The most vulnerable are always the priority in the Kingdom of God and Jesus was consistent about that. May we go to the ballot box with the most vulnerable in mind. May we integrate habits into our every day that help to steward all we have, instead of consuming all we can attain.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
The KTF team