In smaller churches, filling voluntary vacancies is a headache, not helped by an ever-increasing bureaucracy from the centre. Consider the following recent tweets from C of E clergy and volunteers. ‘No one will be a warden,’ wrote Michael Roberts, vicar of St Michael’s, Cockerham. ‘The volume of stuff from on high puts them off.’ Daniel Thompson, rector of Icknield Benefice, wrote: ‘I am trying to explain the complexity of safeguarding portals and online dashboards to a 76-year-old.’ From Matt Triggs, PCC secretary at St Mary the Virgin in Nottingham: ‘Just had an email from our diocese to put reducing climate emissions on PCC agenda. We really don’t have the time or manpower.’

The C of E does love forms. My co-warden and I recently had a two-hour ‘visitation’ by the archdeacon. We had to fill out a 16-question form on our make-up and attendance figures; answer 55 more on parish finance; fill out a third form on when the drains were cleaned and the lightning conductor checked; and answer the questions ‘Do you have a plan for if the boiler breaks down?’ and ‘How will you make lighting more sustainable?’. My co-warden spent a weekend converting the emails by which our maintenance programme is run into a logbook as required. It wasn’t looked at….

Vanishing volunteers is not just a church problem. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport reports that numbers of regular volunteers has fallen by 11 per cent in eight years. My vicar, Nicholas Cranfield, says there has been a noticeable shift in availability. Early retirees are on grandparenting duty and more women work full time. Some employers ban staff from volunteering in case it damages their professional reputation. ‘There are not so many qualified accountants out there,’ he says.

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The Church of England’s volunteering crisis | The Spectator https://t.co/Cth7QFtfx3

— Simon Sarmiento (@simonsarmiento) May 16, 2024

A lifelike artificial intelligence with a smooth, alluring voice enchants and impresses its human users — flirting, telling jokes, fulfilling their desires and eventually winning them over.

I’m summarizing the plot of the 2013 movie “Her,” in which a lonely introvert named Theodore, played by Joaquin Phoenix, is seduced by a virtual assistant named Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

But I might as well be describing the scene on Monday when OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, showed off an updated version of its A.I. voice assistant at an event in San Francisco.

The company’s new model, called GPT-4o (the o stands for “omni”), will let ChatGPT talk to users in a much more lifelike way — detecting emotions in their voices, analyzing their facial expressions and changing its own tone and cadence depending on what a user wants. If you ask for a bedtime story, it can lower its voice to a whisper. If you need advice from a sassy friend, it can speak in a playful, sarcastic tone. It can even sing on command.

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Financial Times @ft: A.I.'s 'Her' Era Has Arrived – The New York Times. #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #aistrategy https://t.co/9VjteQTn5G

— Nordic AI Artificial Intelligence Institute (@nordicinst) May 14, 2024

Q. To what extent is it important for the rights of religious minorities and religious freedom what happens in these elections?

A. Since the BJP and several extremist organisations have been in power, the situation of Christians and other religious minorities, such as Muslims and Sikhs, has worsened.

Modi recently inaugurated a Hindu temple, something a religious leader should have done. His figure has been deified in a way, and his image appears as someone who is very religious, very dominant and very strong, but in reality he is very afraid.

Some have even placed Modi above the Hindu god Rama, creating images and even statues of him. There are temples in honour of Modi. This has never happened before with any prime minister.

Permits for Christians to receive donations from abroad have been cancelled and we are always accused of buying people to change their religion. In Manipur, for example, Christians are very marginalised everywhere.

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The world’s most populated country is in the midst of a key general election. “People are afraid that there will be no more elections afterwards”, says an evangelical from India. https://t.co/hTGzbHFGV0

— Evangelical Focus (@Evan_Focus) May 14, 2024

Seven months into the war, Hamas is far from defeated, stoking fears in Israel that it is walking into a forever war.

The U.S.-designated terrorist group is using its network of tunnels, small cells of fighters and broad social influence to not only survive but to harry Israeli forces. Hamas is attacking more aggressively, firing more antitank weapons at soldiers sheltering in houses and at Israeli military vehicles daily, said an Israeli reservist from the 98th commando division currently fighting in Jabalia.