The Preacher Bot?

I have been reading The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid and had a few thoughts about the second chapter on Agents and Angels. The authors give an excellent analysis of the use of software bots that are increasingly influencing our lives as we spend more and more time online.

There are bots that track our online behavior and then customize search results according to various algorithms. The purpose of bots is 1. to help the user by quickly finding what it "thinks" the user really wants to find, and 2. to push products of certain customers who pay the bot owner for each customer who clicks through to their website. There are alert bots that we can program to continuously search the Internet for us to find news on particular people, companies, or phrases. There are shopbots that we can program to continuously search for a particular product that we want to purchase and it will find us the best price.

One of the oldest forms of bots are called "chatterbots" that act as conversational partners with a level of "awareness" so to seem truly human. The most famous chatterbot is Eliza, an online therapist chatterbot that has been around for more than 40 years as nothing more than computer code. These bots have long been predicted to develop into personalized assistants that will keep our calendars, handle our communications, wake us in the morning, and lull us to sleep in the evening with just the right music based on its "knowledge" of our personal preferences and practices.

Chatterbots have replaced customer service representatives as the first line of response when we call a business and get the automated answering system with the human sounding voice that gives us a list of options and directs us through several layers of problem solving before finally, hopefully, handing us off to a human. Some companies have gone even further by having chatterbots search a vast database of recorded incidents of customer problems and solutions while keeping you on the phone and then delivering the most logical answer according to the algorithm. It has also been suggested that reference librarians and any other number of information professionals might be replaced in the same way.

So what I am thinking is this. Given the vast number of sermons posted to the Internet by a wide variety of different preachers, why doesn't someone write a bot program that can draw from this online resource and create a customized sermon? I am thinking of a bot that operates from a web page where I can fill out a profile of my religious orientation - denominational affiliation, doctrinal leaning, etc., as well as information about how I am feeling or what I feel like I am needing on a particular day - I am feeling depressed, I am feeling fearful, I am full of joy, etc., and within moments the bot will deliver me a sermon, in stereo if I prefer, that I can listen to whenever and wherever. The bot might take into consideration the time of the year and customize the sermon for religious holidays or maybe it has been tracking my online history and decides that I need a sermon on the dangers of greed, lust, or idleness. I almost forgot the most important part! After delivering the sermon, the bot asks for an offering.

Let me know what you think.

Testimony, Clergy, and Justification

I am still processing the article by Robert Audi that I mentioned in the last post: "The place of testimony in the fabric of knowledge and justification." I have been thinking especially about the difference between my dissertation informant and myself in terms of justification and the contents of our sermons.

My informant is justified in his belief in the power of the Gospel to change lives based on his childhood experience within his nuclear family. In the course of my data collection, I failed to pursue more information about the nature of this experience, but I can conclude that we are not talking about a dramatic conversion experience by a particular member of the family. Rather, the implication is that once his family made a commitment to be involved in a church community on a regular basis, that a change for the better began to occur that may have been noticeable only from within the family itself. Whatever the nature of this change, it also influenced my informant's decision to follow a career path into the ministry.

While I noticed change in the lives of other people when I was growing up in the church, I never really experienced anything as close and personal as my informant did within his family. I went into the ministry following in the footsteps of my father, which is a completely different motivation than that of my informant. A clergy member's motivation for entering the ministry is an important context for my future research that was not addressed in the doctoral dissertation.

The contents of my sermons frequently spoke about my doubts more than my beliefs. Some people in the congregations I served found this to be refreshing and felt free to approach me with their own doubts. Other people found it bothersome that their minister was not a beacon of faith that they could look to in moments of darkness.

My informant can sincerely and credibly speak about the blessedness that comes from loving God with all one's heart, soul, mind, and strength and loving one's neighbor as one's self. It is a message that emanates from his life and which started from a particular change that he can remember and point to in the life of his family. Whatever the problem was that changed because of involvement with the church, it probably was a private matter that only the family knew about.

My childhood family experience revolved around being the oldest child in the minister's family, of living in a fishbowl, and having to keep up appearances for the congregation. Problems did not exist if they were not acknowledged nor discussed. The situation was only tolerable if one truly believed that ours was the model family. From my conversations with other children of minister's families, I know that I am not alone in this experience.

My belief in the model family, the model Christian college, the model denomination, the model faith, etc., came to be replaced with with an equally strong skepticism. Audi refers to the absence or lack of filtering beliefs as yielding credulity, but excessively rigorous filters yield skepticism. My information filters could be described with one of my favorite sayings, which comes Frederich Buechner - "Doubt is the ants in the pants of faith - It keeps it alive and moving."

I intend to design my future research taking into account whether or not the participant clergy members grew up in a clergy family and followed a parent's path into the ministry.