Indeed, programs like ChatGPT, that can produce a sermon in seconds, might seem attractive to busy clergy.

But several religious leaders, including rabbis serving Jewish congregations as well as Christian Protestant pastors, have conflicting feelings about utilising chatbots in preparing sermons.

There may be several reasons for being cautious.

From my perspective, as a specialist in Catholic liturgy and ritual, the most important critique has to do with true intent of preaching - to offer insight and inspiration on the human experience of faith.

Historical practice

In the early centuries of Christianity, preaching was largely reserved for bishops, considered to be the successors to Jesus' apostles.

During the Middle Ages, priests were also allowed to preach, although their chief responsibility was to say the Mass - ritually consecrating the offerings of bread and wine - especially on Sundays.

In some religious orders, priests became famous traveling preachers, although much of the time they were preaching in other settings, not during Mass.

The Franciscan and Dominican orders, for example, would send priests to preach on the streets and in city centers, traveling from town to town in fulfillment of this ministry.

During the next few centuries, preaching brief sermons or homilies became increasingly important during the celebration of Sunday Mass.

The Second Vatican Council, convened in 1962, took a fresh look at all the Church's rituals and stressed the role of preaching at worship, especially at Mass.

These principles have been reaffirmed in more recent documents that guide Catholic preachers when writing a sermon. In essence, preaching was always believed to be a human activity grounded in faith.

Insight and inspiration

Preaching as a human activity has a special meaning for Catholics - and most Christians.

This is because they believe that Jesus Christ is the incarnate Son of God, who came into human life to save all of humanity from their sins and gave his apostles the commandment to preach the Gospel about this "good news" to people of all nations.

In the decades since Vatican II ended in 1965, preaching in the Catholic tradition has been emphasised as a "primary duty" of all priests.

The sermon is meant to inspire people in their ordinary lives of faith.

The preacher must spend time in preparing the sermon, but this does not just mean compiling theological quotes or doing research on the history of the Bible.

A good sermon is not just a classroom lecture. In fact, several contemporary popes have stressed that the language of sermons should avoid technical or obscure terminology.

In 1975, Pope Paul VI wrote that the language of preaching should be "simple, clear, direct, well-adapted" for the congregation in the pews.

And in 2013, Pope Francis echoed these same words in his observation that "simplicity has to do with the language we use."

But preaching is not just about offering pious mottoes or generic religious formulas. The preacher's experience, insights and emotions all come into play when composing the homiletic text.

The preacher is not simply offering good advice, but speaking out of personal reflection in a way that will inspire the members of the congregation, not just please them.

It must also be shaped by an awareness of the needs and lived experience of the worshipping community in the pews.

Use with caution

In practice, chatbots might help clergy save time by finding sources and compiling relevant facts, but the results would need to be checked for errors.

Chatbots have been known to make some factual blunders or invent sources completely.

Above all, I believe chatbots, as of now, are not capable of preparing a text suitable for being offered as a sermon. From what we know about chatbots, they cannot know what it means to be human, to experience love or be inspired by a sacred text.

Perhaps Baptist pastor Hershael York, Dean of the School of Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has put it best.

He has noted that the ultimate failure of a chatbot's sermon lies in the fact that it "lacks a soul."

Without that empathetic consciousness, a chatbot-composed sermon cannot include genuine insights based on personal spiritual experience. And without that essential element of embodied human awareness, true preaching is simply not possible.

• Joanne M. Pierce is a Professor Emerita of Religious Studies, College of the Holy Cross
• First published in The Conversation. Republished with permission.

The answer used to be provided at Easter, with the Christian climax in death by crucifixion, followed by resurrection.

The Jesus story wrestled with death not being merely death. Today, however, the sacred meaning of Easter is little more than a dusty relic.

For the secular modern age, belief in any form of life after death is in doubt.

The metaphysical supports that directed earlier generations, keeping them on their feet and moving, have lapsed.

Most no longer believe in a supernatural being — whether providential, guiding, punishing, or forgiving.

God has become a figment of the archaic imagination; gods of any type are mere alien superstitions, held once upon a time by naive, even primitive ancestors.

Belief has long gone in an eternal destination for the departing soul at death — heaven or hell.

The existence of a soul is in question; never mind whether that hypothetical soul survives the death of the individual human.

All in all, human consciousness has narrowed down to focus on mortal life, lived here and now, on a this-worldly plane; a finite span bound by birth and death, governed by everyday pleasures and pains.

Individuals today find themselves in the position of Socrates, if they are honest.

After being sentenced to death at his trial in Athens in 399BC, the 70-year-old philosopher reflected that he did not fear death.

He told his fellow citizens that he did not know what awaited him once he was gone.

There were two possibilities.

Either death was final, like a form of eternal dreamless sleep. Or his soul was immortal and would migrate off, somewhere beyond, to join other immortal souls. Socrates was the paradigm agnostic.

The death question has not gone away.

Its centrality for all humans, and in all times, is illustrated by the fact religions pivot their theology on finding an answer to it.

The first great work in the Western tradition, Homer's Iliad, focuses on death: even though it is a war and conquest story, the nature of mortality is of much greater concern than fighting and glory.

Christianity instated the cross as its commanding symbol, a death and transcendence symbol.

A different world

Today, in a seemingly quite different world, what is it possible to believe?

Let me open by considering a room full of people.

When a stranger comes through the door, those whom they encounter will recognise that a kind of force has arrived, changing the atmosphere.

An extraordinary concentration of presence has infiltrated among those assembled.

That individual human being is more than the sum of their known and observed parts: physical form, the complex of their gestures and expressions, voice, and attributes of character, and its biography.

The derogatory Yiddish term nebbish underlines the point, in negation, referring to an inconsequential person whose presence on entering a room creates a vacuum.

We see this in parenthesis in some fictional examples.

When Achilles stands up unarmed on the edge of raging battle, in Book Eighteen of The Iliad, and the goddess Athena bathes his head and shoulders in metaphoric golden light, the fighting Trojans stop in mid-stride, quaking in fear, although they are armed and winning the battle.

When Audrey Hepburn enters the royal ball in My Fair Lady the assembled throng is hushed, awe-struck by her shimmering beauty, a beauty that outshines gorgeous gown, gracious figure, and finely proportioned face.

She is a modern goddess, a film "star", the many associations with divinity indicating that some kind of supernatural glow is seen to have manifested, emanating from her.

The stranger who enters the room is more than personality, although personality may have its own impact, whether brashly domineering, slyly insincere, sparklingly alert or even darkly gloomy.

Personality may even predominate.

It, in turn, may be amplified by physical bulk, litheness of movement, fidgety restlessness or languor.

Nor does the stranger introduce just a new energy field.

Shadowing the physical form, some kind of spiritual aura has been revealed.

Those already in the room, were they to calm themselves, put their egos into recess and half-close the eyes, might sense a concentration of spectral force.

Sacred impregnation of the ether contrasts with carnal thereness.

Here lies the supreme potential power of living humans.

Intimidation may follow, as with Achilles on the edge of battle.

Alternatively, a process of psychic contagion may impose myriad other influences.

The presence of the other can inspire, excite or charm; calm or unsettle; or distress, deplete and depress.

Psychic contagion is arguably the least understood factor in personal and social relations, and the most underestimated.

This is why a corpse is unnerving.

The physical form is there, largely unchanged. But the animating presence has gone, the light switched off.

The face is a mask, whether chalklike or heavily made-up, ghastly, quite different from the prosaic outer form of the person who recently was.

The eerie horror that leaves the observer grave, shaken and mute — that simply cannot be comprehended — is that this person, lying here as a ghostly physical residue, is gone forever.

No breath remains to flutter the veil.

The body, cold to the transgressive touch, commands deathly silence, awakening consciousness of the vacancy of life, its little consequence when seen in the context of the infinite, eternal nothing.

This negative power in turn, however, implies an opposite positive truth — two sides of the same coin — a truth of such engaging potency that to remove or deny it may paralyse the witness.

It is difficult to believe that the concentration of spectral force that, but an hour earlier, animated the human entity that is now a cadaver simply disappears into nothing.

It is said that death is final. But those are mere words.

For the preceding 3000 years in our culture, it was assumed that a soul inhabited the living person.

According to most beliefs, it arrived at birth and departed at death. With their last breath, the person expired. The spirit that was breathed out for the last time was the "immortal soul".

To progress further we need to distinguish between two quite different phenomena animating the human psyche.

On the one hand, there is vitality, energy, life force and ego.

On the other, there is soul.

The former constellation is mortal. Energy ebbs as a person gets older or sickens; the ego shrinks, even withers. When the person dies their vitality is snuffed out.

If we reflect on the nature of the human ego, it appears unambiguously mortal.

The novel (and film) Gone with the Wind makes the point — a 2014 survey found it still the second favourite book of American readers, just behind the Bible.

Gone with the Wind contrasts Scarlett O'Hara, as lead character, with Melanie Hamilton.

Scarlett is a force of nature, extraordinarily vital and resilient; petulantly childish, selfish, insensitive and indomitable; all ego, yet shrewd and realistic in practical matters.

Melanie is soulful, an exemplar of selfless charity and goodness.

She is low on ego, naive and sickly, whereas Scarlett is diminutive of soul.

Scarlett's vitality seems to have its source less in a love of life's potential fulfil­ments than a tenacious clinging, driven by an assertive, buoyant ego that refuses to be cowed.

The inference may be drawn that once the struggle is over nothing will be left — and indeed for Scarlett, the life essence is struggle.

Scarlett's one reverent attachment is to her land, Tara, expressed at the end of the novel, if only as a consoling flicker.

In general, the animal life force, which Scarlett incarnates to the full, does expire.

With Melanie, the grip on actual living is weak; the influence of her spirit strong and resolute.

Most who move within her orbit, hold her in awed respect.

She is the unassuming centre of gravity, her grace, kindness and incandescent virtue a beacon to others.

It is more difficult to imagine the extinguishing of her spirit when she dies.

St Augustine made a distinction between two deaths, the death of the soul and that of the body.

The soul may die but the person goes on living — they die twice. As an illustration, those rendered permanently unconscious by a severe stroke, with the body still breathing, the heart beating, may give the overwhelming impression to those close to them that the spirit has already absented itself — the animating aura of the person, or the soul, appears to have departed.

Primo Levi, in If This is a Man (1958), his account of his experience in Auschwitz, draws an inflexible distinction among humans between those who are saved, and those drowned — a more useful distinction today, it seems to me, than the moralised one between the saved and the damned.

The distinction was more obvious in the extreme environment of the Nazi concentration camp.

Those who had lost the will to live but were still alive formed an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who marched and laboured in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer.

JK Rowling's Harry Potter is the singular book and film phenomenon of recent times.

The seven-volume Harry Potter series posits a similar understanding of the immortal soul, by casting sinister black, wraithlike creatures called Dementors, which chill the atmosphere whenever they are present, making anyone in their vicinity gloomy — they represent psychic contagion writ large.

When Dementors attack, they attempt to kiss the victim, to suck out the soul through the mouth.

In a largely post-Christian world, it is telling that Levi and Rowling should evoke almost identical imagery for the existence of the soul. Auschwitz had swarmed with Dementors.

What would sceptics say?

In fact, they can counter with one simple axiom: fear of death gives birth to many a powerful illusion.

The pure atheist, at the extreme, does not believe in God and goes further, to reject all metaphysics.

A counter-faith is set up, a new orthodoxy staked to materialist science which, it is held, explains everything.

Human beings are but material entities and, when they die, matter rots and decays, returning to dust.

Acute human experience, notably death, may however leave psychic residues that are more substantial than fantasy imaginings.

Once, when visiting the German city of Munich, I was shocked to see a station at the end of an ordinary train line named Dachau.

How, I thought, could a "normal" suburb be built on the site of one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps?

Experience points in two opposite directions here.

It is common to revisit a place in which fateful personal events had taken place — tragedy, romance, sporting triumph or even the house in which one grew up — to find it resistant to nostalgic memory, cold and empty, indifferent to the past.

Maybe the suburb of Dachau is just like any other modern Western community, with a bank, a supermarket and a playground.

The minds of the living may be haunted by ghosts from their own past, but those ghosts will vanish with them, or even before.

Yet the opposite is equally true.

There are places haunted by ghosts from the past — personally, I find it hard to imagine this is not the case with Dachau.

There are spaces that resonate with sacred atmosphere — Delphi comes to my mind, as does the inside of Bourges cathedral, the Alhambra in Granada, and some ancient Australian Aboriginal ceremonial grounds.

Romain Rolland wrote of an "oceanic feeling" he was never without, of something limitless, unbounded, a sensation of eternity.

He suggested that this feeling is the universal source of religious energy, whatever the religion and whatever the particular forms of belief and worship.

We are in territory in which there are no proofs.

Even Rolland remarked that the oceanic feeling does not necessarily imply personal immortality.

There are cases in which the soul is stifled by the housing personality.

Shakespeare's Richard II, as king, is a case in point, lacking judgment: he is proud, wasteful, lazy, irresponsible and unjust.

Once he loses power, however, he switches into a dignified, majestic reflection on life:

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs, Make Dust our paper, and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth … For within the hollow crown; That rounds the mortal temples of a king... Keeps Death his court; ….

Once Richard tunes in to things of ultimate gravity, he stills the audience.

He has been transported out of the realm of worldly ambition.

Liberated, he surrenders to timeless truth, embracing it, and he gains the rare power of being able to speak with its voice.

The deep and eternal truths about the human condition are one of the soul's currencies.

What I am suggesting here is that Rolland's abiding sense of eternity beyond the individual is matched by a sense of eternity within.

An electric current needs two poles. It is the conjoining of the two, beyond and within, that counters the threat of drowning.

The belief in the immortal soul has its roots somewhere here.

• John Carroll is professor emeritus of sociology at La Trobe University.
• First published in The Australian. Republished with permission.

"The time has come to present a proposal based on the aim that when we obtain the presidency, we must not only seek to achieve material well-being, we must also seek well-being for the soul," Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says.

The favourite to win July's election told voters: "Just as we already have a political constitution, we are going to elaborate a moral constitution." Read more

Recently on The Moth Radio Hour a young woman shared the story of her breakup with her boyfriend, a young man for whom she had deep feelings. The problem was that she, a person with a deep faith, a Mormon, struggled with the radical materialism of her boyfriend.

For him, there were no souls; the physical world was real, and nothing else. She kept asking him if he believed he had a soul. He couldn't make himself believe that.

Eventually, not without a lot of heartache, they broke up. Why? In her words: It's hard to find your soulmate in someone who doesn't believe you have a soul.

Her frustration is becoming more universal. More and more our world is ignoring and denying the existence of soul, becoming soulless.

It wasn't always like this. Up until modern times, often it was the physical and the body that weren't properly honored. But things have changed, radically.

It began with Darwin, who rooted our origins more in the history of our bodies than in the origins of our souls; it took more shape in the mechanistic philosophies of the last century, which understood both our universe and ourselves as physical machines.

It became more firm as modern medicine and experimental psychology began more and more to explain the brain primarily in terms of carbon complexification and biochemical interactions.

It seeped into our higher educational systems as we produced more and more technical schools rather than universities in the deeper sense; and it culminated in popular culture where love and sex are spoken of more in terms of chemistry than in terms of soul.

It is not surprising that for most pop singers today the mantra is: I want your body! I want your body! We're a long ways from Shakespeare's marriage of true minds and Yeats' love of the pilgrim soul in you. Continue reading

• Fr Ron Rolheiser OMI is the President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio Texas.

I am writing this blog in my office, surrounded by 27 tall bookcases laden with 5,000 books.

Over the years I have read them, marked them up, and recorded the annotations in a computer database for potential references in my writing.

To a large degree, they have formed my professional and spiritual life.

Books help define who I am.

They have ushered me on a journey of faith, have introduced me to the wonders of science and the natural world, have informed me about issues such as justice and race.

More importantly, they have been a source of delight and adventure and beauty, opening windows to a reality I would not otherwise know.

Crisis

My crisis consists in the fact that I am describing my past, not my present.

I used to read three books a week.

One year I devoted an evening each week to read all of Shakespeare's plays (Okay, due to interruptions it actually took me two years). Another year I read the major works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

But I am reading many fewer books these days, and even fewer of the kinds of books that require hard work.

The Internet and social media have trained my brain to read a paragraph or two, and then start looking around.

When I read an online article from the Atlantic or the New Yorker, after a few paragraphs I glance over at the slide bar to judge the article's length.

My mind strays, and I find myself clicking on the sidebars and the underlined links.

Soon I'm over at CNN.com reading Donald Trump's latest tweets and details of the latest terrorist attack, or perhaps checking tomorrow's weather.

Worse, I fall prey to the little boxes that tell me, "If you like this article [or book], you'll also like…" Or I glance at the bottom of the screen and scan the teasers for more engaging tidbits: 30 Amish Facts That'll Make Your Skin Crawl; Top 10 Celebrity Wardrobe Malfunctions; Walmart Cameras Captured These Hilarious Photos.

A dozen or more clicks later I have lost interest in the original article.

An explanation

Neuroscientists have an explanation for this phenomenon.

When we learn something quick and new, we get a dopamine rush; functional-MRI brain scans show the brain's pleasure centers lighting up.

In a famous experiment, rats keep pressing a lever to get that dopamine rush, choosing it over food or sex. In humans, emails also satisfy that pleasure center, as do Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat.

Nicholas Carr's book "The Shallows" analyzes the phenomenon, and its subtitle says it all: "What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains."

Carr spells out that most Americans, and young people especially, are showing a precipitous decline in the amount of time spent reading.

He says, "Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski." Continue reading

• Philip Yancey is the author of several books, including "The Jesus I Never Knew" and "What's So Amazing About Grace?"
• Image: Washington Post

We sometimes feel out of control and don't know where God is in it all. The old childhood divisions of good/bad, right/wrong light/dark, are no longer as clear as they once were, and at this stage, many of us need to let go of a child's image of God as a giant in the sky who judges us according to his rules.

Letting go is an important step in discovering our relationship with God.

In maturity, we find that God is much closer and less well defined. We look at the stories of our life and see them as one story, each experience connected to what follows. Because we no longer separate those events by putting labels on them, the past makes sense and we have a feeling of purpose, a confidence in the future. We realise that one story has to end for a new story to begin.

This process is known as "soul-making" and it was the poet John Keats who wrote in a letter to his sister: "This earth is the vale of soul-making."

Judaism puts the same teaching another way. We are all born with a spark of God in us. It is our duty in the world, to fan that spark into a flame. It's what incarnation is about - spiritual growth.

This is when we enter the deep mystery of our own faith, and live the understanding that God is not only in us but in all of existence. There are times when we dare to believe that God is all there is.

We reflect on all the stories of our life and see them as one story of soul-making. Things that seemed random, wandering, mistake, tragedy even, have all been important for growth. We no longer see God as some kind of Santa Clause giving according to our notions of comfort. We see what Jesus meant when he said, "Except a grain of wheat die, it will remain a single grain."

Jesus then went on to demonstrate the growth process with his own life.

So now, near the end of life-school, I appreciate all as a journey of soul-making and all God's gift. I look at people my age and see the bright flames of God-growth in them. There are signs that our bodies are going into labour to give birth to our souls, and while some of that may be uncomfortable, there is also the knowing that the entire beautiful story of soul-making is held in love.

There is no way we can ever be lost to that love.

I have on my wall a poem Fr Carlo Carretto wrote in his senior years:
Do not worry about what you
ought to do. Worry about loving.
Do not interrogate heaven
repeatedly and uselessly.
saying, 'What course of action
should I pursue?' Instead,
concentrate on loving.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

After hearing the "call within a call", Teresa only heard the voice of God once more before her death. She experienced what St John of the Cross described as the "dark night of the soul". She wrote frequently about loneliness, not hearing from God, fear of hypocrisy and doubts.

In one of the letters published after her death, she wrote: "Darkness is such that I really do not see - neither with my mind nor with my reason - the place of God in my soul is blank - There is no God in men - when the pain of longing is so great - I just long and long for God... The torture and pain I can't explain."

It is tempting to ignore this side of Mother Teresa, focusing instead on her selfless service of the poor and the joy with which it seemed she lived.

But to do so would be a mistake.

We naturally shy away from the harsher realities of following Jesus, not wanting to examine them too closely, unless we - ourselves - get infected. We want the Christianity that brings joy and laughter, not emptiness and pain. Yet, to refuse to engage with the reality that we will have times of being in the wilderness is dangerous.

Why?

There will be times of wilderness, whether we like it or not. We have all been there, or will be there, when we pray to God, earnestly seeking to hear from him and we get nothing. The heavens are silent.

These times might not last 50 years, but they are an inevitable part of the Christian journey.

The Bible tells the story of a man name Job, who was well acquainted with this silence. In his pain, he cried out to God, yet these cries were answered with a deafening silence for 37 chapters. But the story does not end there. He chose to hope in the Lord, despite the circumstances, and the Lord was faithful. Continue reading

• Florence Taylor is a Junior Staff Writer for Christian Today.

Despair clutches our throat and what's left of our heart cries out to a silent God. Our only comfort is the words of Butch Cassidy to the Sundance Kid: "Don't worry. The fall will kill you."

It happened to me last week. It had to do with my wife and Alzheimer's and poop — here, there and everywhere.

I didn't like cleaning it up, and when Vickie expressed her frustration by again resisting my help, I blurted out, "What's the matter with you? I'm trying to help you!"

And when the poop on her bare feet spread into other rooms like vandals, I yelled, "You're killing me!"

I wiped my hands on my pants, hugged Vickie, and said, "I'm sorry. You didn't deserve that."

I knew my anger was awful and the weight of anguish made me woozy so I hugged her some more to squeeze the fear out of both of us.

After I bathed us both with a hand-held shower spray like circus elephants, I wrapped Vickie in her friendliest PJs, placed her in the embrace of the recliner in the family room, and turned on "Ellen" who was talking like an adult to Sophia Grace and Rosie.

I went upstairs and closed the door of our bedroom. I tried to take three deep Andrew Weil breaths, in and out, in and out, but blew up on the second exhale. "God," I yelled, 'you're an —hole! An —hole! You know that?!" I grrrrd fiercely.

I suppose my scream was a projection of my own guilt, but so what, it got the poison out. Continue reading.

Michael Leach edits the Soul Seeing column for National Catholic Reporter, and is the author of Why Stay Catholic? Unexpected Answers to a Life-Changing Question. His wife was diagnosed with Alzheimer's ten years ago.

Source: National Catholic Reporter

Image: RandomActsOfMomness