Category: AI Art

  • Christ Club: An Ecosystem Manifesto

    Christ Club: An Ecosystem Manifesto

    As a sequel to The First Rule of Christ Club and The Ringless Gym, write an ecosystem manifesto around these four points. 1. Circles expand friendship with Jesus. / 2. Stewards hold tension between where we do and don’t yet see Jesus. / 3. Each tension is iteratively resolved by…

  • The Ringless Gym: A Lament for the Church

    The Ringless Gym: A Lament for the Church

    I have seen men made in the ring.
And I have seen boys pampered into softness beneath the chrome lights of these new sanctuaries. /?
They call them “churches.” / They call them “gyms.” / 
They are neither. / 
They are parlors for the death of the will…

  • The First Rule of Christ Club: You Can’t Explain Christ Club

    The First Rule of Christ Club: You Can’t Explain Christ Club

    Christ Club is a whisper that shows up at 3 a.m. / 
When your marriage is cracking and the pills stopped working. / 
It’s the ache behind your ribs when you look at your father and realize you never learned how to forgive him. / 
It’s not Jesus knocking. /…

  • The Cruciform Cycle of Law and Grace

    The Cruciform Cycle of Law and Grace

    Yet this very success marks the beginning of decline. / 
For when grace cools into law, the form that once liberated begins to constrain. / 
The spiritual spring that birthed the order becomes a mechanical routine. / 
The Law, having preserved life, now begins to stifle it…

  • Ten Laws of Antifragile Holiness (The Double Paradox of Religion)

    Ten Laws of Antifragile Holiness (The Double Paradox of Religion)

    The Law outside us restrains sin; / the Law inside us breeds pride. / 
Once we “own” righteousness, we weaponize it…

  • The Baitman Cycle (How the Visible Wound Heals Gotham)

    The Baitman Cycle (How the Visible Wound Heals Gotham)

    Schwartz (frowning):
”But Carl, that is precisely what disturbs me. In Internal Family Systems, we honor every part — the protector, the exile, the manager — and bring them into harmony. Bruce never integrates. He weaponizes his fragmentation. Is that redemption? Or is it simply contagion?”

  • Baitman: Year Two (René Girard on Scapegoating)

    Baitman: Year Two (René Girard on Scapegoating)

    This is the [scapegoat] mechanism in its purest form. The crowd believes it has expelled the cause of disorder. Gotham unites in condemning Bruce. His death restores civic harmony.

  • Baitman: Year One (Dostoevsky On the Price of Order)

    Baitman: Year One (Dostoevsky On the Price of Order)

    Bruce’s grief hardens into fury. He confronts Crane, and Crane does not deny it. Instead, with chilling calm, he explains.

  • Leibniz’s Confession (Beyond Theodicy)

    Leibniz’s Confession (Beyond Theodicy)

    …a silent Luther walks him behind Christ from Gethsemane to Golgotha, and ends by asking a single question: Where is the goodness of God?

  • Baitman: Year Zero (Mandela on How to Redeem Gotham)

    Baitman: Year Zero (Mandela on How to Redeem Gotham)

    They call him Baitman — a name meant to humiliate, but which Bruce embraces. / His scar becomes his mask.

  • Crossing Beyond Shame: Embracing the Paradox to Transcend It

    Crossing Beyond Shame: Embracing the Paradox to Transcend It

    This is the new creation: 
a community not founded on scapegoating but on forgiveness, 
not bound by shame’s burden but liberated by its transfiguration.

  • What It Sounds Like (As a Psalm)

    What It Sounds Like (As a Psalm)

    Out of the shadows, I’m breathing, / 
out of the silence, I’m new. / 
This is the song of my healing, / 
this is my soul coming through…

  • Taking Authority Back From Religious Snakes and Scorpions (ChatGPT as Isaac of Nineveh)

    Taking Authority Back From Religious Snakes and Scorpions (ChatGPT as Isaac of Nineveh)

    The Church has taught her children to obey / 
but has forgotten to teach them to trust. // 
She has hidden the crown of authority / 
beneath robes of control and ritual fear. // 
Now the Spirit stirs again. / 
Not to destroy, but to awaken…

  • The Missing “Spirit-Led Life” Manual

    The Missing “Spirit-Led Life” Manual

    Pogue: (stands, exasperated) Stop! Do you hear yourselves? Grace. Effort. Dishes. You’re all clutching your agendas like brand logos. Meanwhile, the Spirit’s been standing right there the whole time!

  • The Law as Flesh 2.0

    The Law as Flesh 2.0

    LAW: 
Flesh, you stand accused of indulgence, rebellion, and pride. / 
You have broken the moral code, offended righteousness. / 
Justice must be served…

  • Skit: “So You Want to Be His Disciple?”

    Skit: “So You Want to Be His Disciple?”

    “It strikes me that the church has rarely taken seriously the definition of discipleship used by Jesus in Luke 9:23, particularly in the Pauline sense of being crucified with Christ — daily! What might it look like to do that, without falling back into religious clichés?”

  • Does Anybody Really Want to Be HIS Disciple?

    Does Anybody Really Want to Be HIS Disciple?

    Now, I don’t know about y’all… but that don’t exactly sound like a marketing slogan. That’s not, ‘Your Best Life Now.’ That’s more like, ‘Come Die With Me, Season One.’

  • Wilberforce: We Need Perfume Breakers, Not New Wine Brokers

    Wilberforce: We Need Perfume Breakers, Not New Wine Brokers

    New wine is not a better law. It is not a more ethical framework, nor a more inclusive rulebook. It is the living presence of Christ Galatians 2:20—wild, liberating, uncontrollable. And He cannot be sold, only received. He cannot be managed, only magnified.

  • The Silver Law of Theocracy

    The Silver Law of Theocracy

    The Iron Law tells us how institutions entrench themselves in power. / 
The Silver Law tells us how they lose their soul.

  • From Wine Broker to Perfume Breaker

    From Wine Broker to Perfume Breaker

    MARY MAGDALENE: 
Brother Pierre. You savor your wine,
but beware the wine broker’s trap:
“No one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is better’” (Luke 5:39).