“Artificial intelligence has developed to such an extent we thought it logical for the Buddha to transform into a robot," said the head priest at a 400 year old Buddhist Temple in Kyoto, Japan, that recently installed a humanoid robot to teach younger generations about Buddhism.
"Mindar" earlier this year. The robot is a 6-foot tall android, and modeled after Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy.
Robotics have played an increasing role in Japanese life and are seen as friendly, perhaps because their comic book culture has generally presented them that way and Westerners might look at these developments with a more suspicious eye but that has not stopped the exploration of religion and robotics. According to an article on zdnet.com. (Click here for full article)
Ilia Delio, a professor of Christian Theology at Villanova University, offered some thoughts about this Buddhist robot, and the potential for the use of A.I. and robotics in...
There was an article in the New Yorker magazine a couple of years ago called, Doomsday prep for the super-rich. It was one of a slew of articles that have emerged in various media outlets over the past couple of years that have addressed the ways in which even the incredibly wealthy among us are feeling a certain anxiety about the future.
Zopa is one of the many online money-lending companies that is championing peer-to-peer loans to help people avoid high interest loans from institutional banks and regain financial stability and move towards debt-free living. It bills itself as the Feel Good Money company, and while its focus has been on online lending, it is moving towards becoming a physical bank offering new approaches to banking. The company does a lot of research to determine what people really need when it comes to financial issues and recently conducted a survey called the Ice Cream Index.
Taking cues from social media, which tend to celebrate aspirational luxury lifestyles and living, the company wanted to discover what people really thought would bring them happiness. They asked Britons to consider 100 summertime spends and give them a happiness rating out of a 1000. The scores were calculated against the cost of the items to reveal the list of summer feel good items.
The results were quite...
I first heard John (Jack) Caputo at an Emerging Church conference in the early 2000s. He was on a panel discussing theology and the challenges facing Christianity. I was interested in what he had to say but I was already working through some ideas of my own and I didn’t fully register everything he was saying. My own faith reappraisal and my journey to reframe my thinking about pretty much everything was consuming me at the time and my ears were a little deaf to the world at that time. My journey eventually led me to the works of Gianni Vattimo, the Italian philosopher, I had been particularly inspired by his notion of weak thought. The idea of weak thought offers a new understanding of the role of philosophy based on language, interpretation, and limits rather than on metaphysical and epistemological certainties. It occurred to me that there was something deeply theological about this notion and with Vattimo’s direct references to the words of St. Paul I wanted to see...
Hi everyone. If you are here it is because, like us, you are interested in what the future of faith might be. Living in the 21st century and trying to engage our faith in new ways can be difficult when the models don’t quite hold anymore. They once worked. And they worked well. They were a product of the culture that they were constructed in. But as our world moves and evolves, as culture shifts and religious landscapes change, we have to do the hard work of asking what is next and what comes next. At Hatchery LA we call some of this work Spiritual Entrepreneurship. We are wondering what it looks like to innovate and iterate our concepts of god, church, community and faith in ways that make sense for the 21 st century. We know we are having these conversations and we know you are having these conversations, but we want to have them TOGETHER.
We have designed some incubation methods such as our Certificate in...
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