“Music has the great capacity to draw in people who are not necessarily committed Christians at this moment, but who are talented musicians, and who may find, if they are allowed to put their gifts into church music, that faith emerges.”

Church and cathedral choirs were masterful at enabling personal and spiritual growth, Dr Hance said, referring to a transformation at St Leonard’s, Streatham, “in an unglamorous bit of South London . . . a thoroughly ordinary inner urban church, a little bit catholic but not really, a little bit evangelical but not that much, a building with beautiful bits” and a diverse congregation.

“This church has doubled in attendance over the five years the present Rector has been in post, and not from doing anything very left-field or wacky, but by investing in doing what we do as well as we can do it, and most especially the music and the liturgy. The present music director has built a wonderful choir through hard work and skilful networking and the music on a Sunday morning is always excellent, sometimes glorious. We now have a children’s choir who are taking their first steps and they will become excellent over time too.

“It’s all about the right level of investment in the people, helping them to discover and develop their skills and talents, to become more than they thought they could be. . . We call it discipleship.”

Read it all.

Music shapes the mission of the Church: who it attracts and who it repels, the Revd Dr Stephen Hance, who is the Church of England’s national lead for evangelism, told the annual Royal School of Church Music (RSCM) online conference on Saturday https://t.co/j3PZT4dNW3

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) March 21, 2023

The industry makes most of its profits from those who are vulnerable, with 86% of online betting profits coming from 5% of customers. Most of thesepeople are already suffering from gambling–related harms or have been diagnosed as suffering from an addiction. Further, the statistics show that 35% of people with a gambling disorder receive daily incentives to gamble, compared to only 4% of those without. All too often there are reports in the media of people receiving offers of ‘free’ spins and the chance to be a ‘VIP customer’ when they have been trying to stop gambling.

Coroners currently do not need to record an opinion on the factors that may have caused a person to taketheir life. My Private Members Bill, the Coroners (Determination of Suicide) Bill aims to change that.

It is estimated that between 400 – 500 people take their lives each year in this country due to gambling. Yet when the House of Lords ministers answered my questions they claimed that there was no reliable statistics of the numbers of deaths caused by gambling. Furthermore, they showed little concern to find out.

If this bill comes into law, the requirement on coroners to record the ‘where, how and what’ questions associated with each suicide will remain unchanged. However, once this part of the inquesthas been concluded, each coroner will be required to record the co-morbidities of each suicide….

Read it all.

Coroners currently do not need to record an opinion on the factors that may have caused a person to take their life this has to change, argues the Bishop of St Albans in this important article discussing his PMB – https://t.co/pK6hMtBJlC #Parliament #SuicidePrevention

— Alistair Thompson (@ali_thompson1) March 17, 2023

The speed of the change is astonishing. Since entering America in 2017, TikTok has picked up more users than all but a handful of social-media apps, which have been around more than twice as long (see chart 1). Among young audiences, it crushes the competition. Americans aged 18-24 spend an hour a day on TikTok, twice as long as they spend on Instagram and Snapchat and more than five times as long as they spend on Facebook, which these days is mainly a medium for communicating with the grandparents (see chart 2).

TikTok’s success has prompted its rivals to reinvent themselves. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has turned both apps’ main feeds into algorithmically sorted “discovery engines” and launched Reels, a TikTok clone bolted onto Facebook and Instagram. Similar lookalike products have been created by YouTube (Shorts), Snapchat (Spotlight), Pinterest (Watch) and even Netflix (Fast Laughs). The latest TikTok-inspired makeover, announced on March 8th, was by Spotify, a music app whose homepage now features video clips that can be skipped by swiping up. (TikTok’s Chinese sister app, Douyin, is having a similar effect in its home market, where digital giants like Tencent are increasingly putting short videos at the centre of their offerings.)

Read it all.

Short-form video has taken over social media. Although users have a seemingly endless appetite for the format, it is proving less profitable for platforms than the old news feed https://t.co/3uUiiiW4VL

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) March 21, 2023

I had a most remarkable but unsettling experience last week. Craig Mundie, the former chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, was giving me a demonstration of GPT-4, the most advanced version of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI and launched in November. Craig was preparing to brief the board of my wife’s museum, Planet Word, of which he is a member, about the effect ChatGPT will have on words, language and innovation.

“You need to understand,” Craig warned me before he started his demo, “this is going to change everything about how we do everything. I think that it represents mankind’s greatest invention to date. It is qualitatively different — and it will be transformational.”

Large language modules like ChatGPT will steadily increase in their capabilities, Craig added, and take us “toward a form of artificial general intelligence,” delivering efficiencies in operations, ideas, discoveries and insights “that have never been attainable before across every domain.”

Then he did a demonstration. And I realized Craig’s words were an understatement.

Read it all.

Insightful article by @tomfriedman. “Are we ready? It’s not looking that way: We’re debating whether to ban books at the dawn of a technology that can summarize or answer questions about virtually every book for everyone everywhere in a second.” #GPT4 https://t.co/Z3APrDVrlJ

— Michael Y. Uohara, MD (@mikeuohara_md) March 22, 2023

Almighty and everlasting God, the source and perfection of all virtues, who didst inspire thy servant James de Koven to do what is right and to preach what is true: Grant that all ministers and stewards of thy mysteries may afford to thy faithful people, by word and example, the knowledge of thy grace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Today the Episcopal Church commemorates James DeKoven, Priest, 1879 https://t.co/KvUQBNQEMg

A priest & educator who taught at Nashotah House & Racine College (now The DeKoven Center https://t.co/nPAViHbmdE), he was a leader of the Anglo-Catholic movement in the Episcopal Church. pic.twitter.com/bGvr0rawC9

— The Anglican Church in St Petersburg (@anglicanspb) March 22, 2023

Merciful Lord,
absolve your people from their offences,
that through your bountiful goodness
we may all be delivered from the chains of those sins
which by our frailty we have committed;
grant this, heavenly Father,
for Jesus Christ’s sake, our blessed Lord and Saviour,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

Bright Blue Skies. 12°C and a keen Southwesterly breeze. Daffodils pic.twitter.com/f027R9N0M7

— Yorkshire Wolds Weather (@WeatherWolds) March 22, 2023

The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: “Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do. Then the word of the LORD came to me: “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? says the LORD. Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.

–Jeremiah 18:1-6

"Blue Hour, City in Bloom"#Daybreak #Dawn #JeffersonMemorial #CherryBlossoms, #PeakBloom #WashingtonDC #StormHour #ThePhotoHour pic.twitter.com/6lWJiuxi1q

— Thomas R Fletcher (@ThomasRFletcher) March 22, 2023