Artificial Intelligence

Well, the Abiding Together ladies took a next step in their podcast warfare with us. Fr. Dave and I walked into a “feminized” studio: a soy candle, glitter on the table, pink covers on the microphones, and a huge “Abiding Together” banner that said, “to our #1 fans, Fr. Dave and Deacon Bob.”

Actually, it was quite sweet 🙂 Apparently, there are some people who don’t know that we are actually great friends with each other, and it is all in jest. So if you weren’t sure, don’t worry! We really love and admire each other. This is more like sibling rivalry than anything else.

My own daughters (15 and 18) got into the game by getting a wig that looks amazingly similar to Heather’s hair! You can see it in the episode.

Sometimes people ask how much preparation we put into an episode. The answer is, “not much,” but there is some. We take about 5-10 minutes talking about the topics we want to talk about. For this episode, we had discussed talking about the abortion pill and other pro-life issues, and the push back against transgender athletes in sports.

Did we talk about such things? No. “Have you seen ‘I, Robot’?” Fr. Dave asked. Well, that was out of the blue, and took us down a completely different direction.

I was also glad we got to talk about Denis Prager’s visit to Franciscan last week. There were a number of people on campus who were upset about his comments regarding pornography (essentially, that it could be watched without sinning), and ironically he said he wanted to talk about it to “give it some nuance.” According to Fr. Dave, that “nuance” was to dig a deeper hole!

That lead us to a broader topic of how we might deal with people with whom we may strongly agree on some issues but disagree on others. In a divisive world, it is easy to jump to what we are most opposed about. Personally, I’m glad for the kind of dialogue we are having with people like Prager (and Jordan Peterson, for another example). I hope it is a good example of Christian charity, and I pray those who come to our campus experience something special.

We didn’t even do a Franciscan promo! Hope you are blessed by this episode.