Hello, everyone. Hope you're having just as great a day as I am. I'm very excited to be here to introduce you to the next speaker today. It's, to me, a superwoman. A superwoman, just like Camilla who we saw earlier this morning, like Jessica who cooked lunch for us, like Trish, where are you, Trish? Back there. Trish, I don't know if you can see me, but thank you so much. Thank you so, so much. And please, everyone, just do what Trish says. Just listen. And we instantly have a better world, I feel. But also, J.F.A. this morning, who started just fueling me with positive energy.  And I think it's very important to say with the, with mad and what mad is about, that it's not just someone doing something for others. We are all mad. Everyone in here is a part of this. And I think we need to take advantage of the things that we learn over these days and also use the power that it gives us to be a part of this community. But your next speaker is former colleague, very dear friend, someone that I admire and respect probably way more than she would realize. Please welcome Rocio Sanchez. Hello. Okay. Well, thank you. First of all, I really do want to thank the mad team in all the previous symposiums. I've always been the one with the mad T-shirt running around like crazy, not sleeping anything. So being here on stage is something that I don't take for granted. Very proud. I'm very happy to be up here and share a little bit about what I've learned. And how I, sorry, I got the wrong notes here. And how I've managed to find a purpose and identity in my life and work. My name is Rocio Sanchez. And I'm a chef here in Copenhagen. I make Mexican food. And it's pretty good. Yes, in Denmark. So three years ago, I opened my first taqueria in 2015. And the year after that, I opened the second. And early this year, we opened a restaurant called Sanchez. Before that, I worked at Noma for five years. First as a head pastry chef. And the last few years as a head of research, one of the head of research chefs in the test kitchen. So I have a lot of experience kind of working on the menu, both for here in Denmark and in all the pop up restaurants that we did, mainly Japan and Mexico. I was born in Chicago. My parents met there after they immigrated from Mexico. So from Guanajuato and San Luis Potosi. So I grew up in a Mexican family in a neighborhood called La Villita. It's also known as Little Village. So it's primarily Mexican immigrant neighborhood. Really a working class neighborhood. That's me in a September 15th parade with a Mexican flag. So I started cooking professionally in Chicago when I was 19. And then I quickly set my eyes to work in New York City. I thought that I really should take this very seriously. And if I really wanted to do it, I needed to go work among the best. And at that time, technique meant everything to me. So I really sought out to work with the best. And for me, that was with Wally Dufresne and Alex Stupak spent a long time there. Because the food that they were making was really the most interesting to me. So throughout all my life, I've always kind of gravitated towards challenges and kind of allowed my interest to dictate where I lived. So I've been in Copenhagen now almost 10 years. That's Laura, my head chef. Woo! She gave me a nice shot of mezcal backstage. So thank you for that. The truth is, yeah, Laura. The truth is I could have stayed at Nomar forever. I find it so inspiring. I think there's always that push to do something more and challenge yourself. But as with any aspiring chef, you always get the question of what you should do with your life. And you start asking yourself what you should do with your life. But when I tried to imagine the kind of food that I would be cooking, I was a little confused. As a teenager, even as a little girl, I always thought I would want to own something. I always really wanted to have some sort of small shop or something I thought about, but I never could really think of what that was. In my early 20s, I always talked about opening a mezcal shop. But that's as far as I got. I worked so hard for so long trying to cook other people's food and working my butt off to execute their vision while at the same time trying to add my little tiny bit of personality into it. So now I needed to hone in and focus all that energy on myself and what matters to me. The problem is I wasn't sure what that meant. I mean, a few years ago, if you would have asked me where I'm from, I maybe would have got a little defensive or what you need to know or ignored you a bit, but not because, you know, that Renee used to call it New York attitude. But I just didn't know how to talk about myself. And I didn't know what I should say about myself. So as far as I was concerned, I had that same old boring immigrant story. You know, grew up in Chicago from immigrant parents considered Mexican by the American and the American or the Mexican considered me American. So I moved to Europe because I really wanted to get away from it all. And I wanted to kind of start from scratch because I truly thrive in that fear that you get when you go into a new kitchen or when you go into a new city and you feel this huge potential. And I quickly found that at Noma. All the bursts of flavors, everything that I've never tasted before, the culture, the way of working, everything was new to me. And it was exactly what I was looking for. And this is when you were introducing Woods Oral to the world. So that was fun. So when I first began working on the taquerias, my creative vision was far from complete. I was really attracted to the idea of showing my respect and appreciation for Mexican flavors. Growing up as a child of immigrants, there is a little bit of cloud of shame that the food that we're doing is not worth paying real money for. So I dreamed of making a little bit of a difference, maybe in Europe, because I did see it kind of a few decades behind the states. And I dreamed of making a nice masa from corn from Mexico and making some nice salsa on top with it. But I still couldn't put into words why I was doing it. I couldn't answer the simple question of where's home? I felt at home in Mexico. Every time I was in Mexico, my soul is fulfilled and I feel happy. But my family, all my immediate families in Chicago, my dad and my brother, but physically I've been in Copenhagen for 10 years almost. So I worked frantically my whole life and I buried those questions very deep. And once we opened the taquerias, I worked at that same frantic pace. Last year with the taquerias up and running, I entered into a creative partnership with Noma in Tulum. And we spent a third of the year researching in the Yucatan. It was an amazing eye-opening experience. And when I got back, I decided that I really needed to remove all of this clutter from my head. I had all these people in my ear telling me who I am and what I should be doing. And up until that point, I tried to listen to it all and try to find the path that satisfied the most people. So when I got back, I decided to start meditating, to find a calmness within myself, to close my eyes and find solitude, and to ask myself these difficult questions without panicking. To find a clarity about who I was and where I was going. Did I ever feel silly when I was meditating? Sometimes. But it was only because I wasn't used to taking that time for myself or asking for that privacy. I hear a little murmurs from the chefs at work if I'm going to grow off, but it doesn't matter because as far as I'm concerned, it's some people need caffeine, some people need exercise to get through the day. And I think taking care of your head is no different. I have a little story.  And I made a mistake the first time sitting in my apartment and my phone wasn't off. And someone called me and I quickly answered it. And as soon as I answered it, a pain shot right to my head and I fell back on my back with my phone in my cheek. The conversation super fuzzy and I was trying to kind of fade away the pain and I don't do it ever since. I don't allow myself to get distracted because taking care of ourselves is not something that we're taught to do as cooks, but it's a really important lesson. This symposium is all about gaps. And I think this is a gap that a lot of cooks can relate to. For most of our careers, we're taught super, super affection and fine inspiration with somebody else's vision in mind. We're taught that great cooks are dedicated people that are willing to execute what they're asked to do. Yes, chef. And that's true to a certain point. But we're also told that the best chefs are the chefs that cook the food that's the most personal. And it takes an incredible amount of courage and self-acceptance to break away from what you've been taught your whole life and to find something that's really new and personal. That means that for most of us, there's a huge gap between what we do as cooks and who we are as people. I've spent the last couple of years trying to close that gap. My hope is that everyone in this industry can figure out a way to make their lives a little more complete, to close the gap between what they do for a living and what they really care about in life. And I'm not here to tell you how to get from point A to point B or how to be creative or what to do in your career or how to run your business. But I want to tell you what I've learned and that is to take care of yourself. To let yourself be a part of the process. If I had to compare it, I'd say it's like being in beta mode. Even though the results may be scary, you have to trust that no matter how many times you fail, you'll be able to get back up. Maybe you'll open up a restaurant and it closes and maybe you open up five and you close them all or maybe you open up at the caria and it closes. The truth is, if it's worth, it's worth it if it's getting closer to finding what's important to you. There's not going to be one moment of clarity where you'll know exactly what you should do. It's not going to fall in your lap. I can think of so many well-respected chefs, chefs, people that we admire who are in this room and they're still trying to figure it out. They're still trying to figure out how to define themselves, how to define their food. Still searching for that way. For me, I've traveled the world trying to figure it out and I've been away from home for almost a decade. But it wasn't until I actually shut down and closed my eyes and asked myself these questions that I can really find any answers. 10 years ago or 20 years ago, a few would have asked that Chicana girl from the south side of Chicago, if she ever would have had the confidence to open a Mexican-inspired restaurant in Europe, I think the answer would have been very different. Today, not only am I sure about the food that we're cooking, but I believe in its value to the city I now call home. It takes work, meditating and stopping to concentrate on tough questions, working to put into words who you are and what it represents. These are the aspects of cooking you don't really think about, but it's very, very apparent in the food that you serve. For me, it's worked out that my identity comes from my heritage, my family's from Mexico, and now I'm trying to focus in on those flavors, but with my experiences of them. But that's not the case for everyone. Your identity can come from anywhere. My point is that it won't come naturally. I've only been working on this for maybe a year. Meditation has really improved my form of communication. We've still got a lot of work to do, but we're definitely trying to fly in the plane as it's being built, and I can't stress how important it is to accept and take care of yourself. It's important for your development, your team, and your business. This process has helped me push toward what matters to me, which is my staff, whom I consider family, this city, and my community around the world. I feel there's a purpose to what we're making now. Today at the restaurant, I think that people can really feel the pride and emotion in our food, and it's not authentic Mexican food. It's not Nordic or fusion. If we still use that word, it's food that reflects the experiences of my team and I. Mexico's culinary culture is incredible. There's a great taco culture in Chicago, where I'm from.  So allow yourself to be in the beta mode, put in the work to find yourself and own it.


What is intelligence? So say we build a classifier that distinguishes between cats and dogs. Is this system intelligent? Let's say we build a neural network that learns how to play chess. Now is this intelligent? Is it more intelligent than the dog cat classifier? My goal for this video isn't really to answer these questions definitively. It's to get you thinking about how we solve AI today and how that actually might not be the way to make AI intelligent to begin with. Intelligent systems should ideally resemble how humans would solve problems. Based on this intuition of intelligence, the chess AI and the dog cat classifier neural networks have a few shortcomings. So for one, they require too many samples for training. We need the AI to look at thousands of dog and cat images for it to classify between the two. And humans only need to look at dogs or cats just once or twice to understand the difference between them. And another shortcoming is task generalization. We have a system that distinguishes between cats and dogs, but that same system can't determine the types of flowers, even though they are very similar tasks. And the same shortcomings applies for the chess AI. The chess AI needs to look at thousands of plays to begin even understanding the game. And even when perfect, it cannot generalize to say checkers. The dog cat classifier and the chess AI exhibit no generalization or local generalization. It is at the bottom tier of this pyramid of generalizing tasks. A characteristic of such task specific systems is that the developer can account for any possible scenario. So let's take the example of the chess AI. It's been trained for thousands of boards and is now playing an unseen board. The opponent makes a haphazard move where the bishop moves from C8 to F5. This might be a good move or it might be a bad move. Whatever it is, it is a move that's in the realm of possibility in the mind of the creator of the AI. In other words, I wouldn't be surprised by any valid move made on this board. Our AI can handle it. But we could take this up a notch with broader generalization. Consider the case of a self-driving car. You probably teach the car some general rules like, stay between the lanes, stop on red, go on green. But unlike the chess AI, there can be situations that occur where the developer hasn't accounted for it. Like a cat suddenly walking in the middle of the street.  There are many ways each of these can occur.  We say such AI needs to exhibit broader generalization. This is the type of intelligence that is under heavy research and there aren't many systems today that are able to actually do these. Now there is an even higher tier of intelligence called extreme generalization. This is the ability of using past experience to pick up on novel tasks quite quickly. Humans are the only subjects known to exhibit this extreme generalization. For example, if you haven't played checkers, you can pick it up easier if you've played chess because of its similarities with the game. Now we've talked about all tiers of intelligence. But what exactly is intelligence? I'll strip this definition from the paper titled on the measure of intelligence. And this is where they've defined intelligence quite formally. And they write, the intelligence of a system is the measure of its skill acquisition efficiency over a scope of tasks with respect to priors, experience and generalization difficulty. Okay, so that's like a mouthful and I'm going to pick this apart with the example of a self-driving car AI. So in this case, the system is the self-driving car. The skill acquisition is some performance metric that we want to optimize. The tasks are, well, they can be a multitude of them. Like keeping between the lanes could be one task, detecting light colors from the street lights could be another task, determining the distance from the car in front to this current car could be another task and so many others. And the priors and experience, well, they're the pre-trained or training data. This definition also works for comparing intelligence across systems. So let's say that we want to compare two systems A and B to determine which is more intelligent. System A has a performance of 80%, system B has a performance of 90%. But system A has been fed one million training examples and system B has been fed say 100 million examples.  Now, because A has significantly less training data and it is also a much different problem of a different level of generalization than B, it is quite unfair to make the comparisons directly. And this is why we see a bunch of qualifications in the definition of intelligence to ensure that the stakes are the same between the systems. So that's easier to compare. Now, without understanding of intelligent systems, let's hop back to the question that we wanted to solve. Using limited data, is it possible for a system to generalize across different tasks? To answer this, the abstraction and reasoning corpus or the ARC corpus was introduced. This is like an IQ test for intelligent systems where we feed the system some three to four examples of the input and output patterns and then test the system against an unseen input to see if it generates the correct output pattern. Now, this type of data set is interesting since it requires an intelligent system to do two things. The system would need to learn from limited examples like a human and the system would also need to learn different tasks like a human. And these two points are actually the shortcomings of current machine learning systems that we outlined before. So in this set of examples, a system would learn to fill the bounded regions with yellow. In this example, the system would learn to continue the pattern in a vertical direction. In this example, the system would translate the base of every shape by one unit to the left. Each of these sets of samples train the AI to do different things and different tasks. And this Kaggle Notebook here visualizes the data set really well. I'll link it down in the description below so you can check it out. So now the big question, how do we solve this given just two or three examples? How do we get the computer to actually produce these amazing stellar outputs? Well, I don't have an answer for that. And all I can say is that the traditional machine learning approach fails in both regards. We need some examples to learn a localized task, but I'm reading through some of these notebooks that propose some interesting approaches. The top notebook here actually uses cellular automata. So cellular automata is the transformation of cells on a grid. We have an initial state and some simple transition rules that define whether a cell in the next state would be alive or dead. It's an interesting approach because it preserves the state of the problem. And some surprisingly complex patterns can be derived from really simple rules. So with the rules, we can definitely, quote, learn faster than a typical machine learning solution. But of course, with rule-based systems, it's rigid, although this is still a step in the right direction. Cellular automata is a good approach to think about this problem, but there isn't an end-to-end solution here. I'd encourage you to read through some of these other solutions too. Now, like I said in the beginning, my goal here wasn't really to provide a solution itself. That's very concrete. It's more to get you thinking about how intelligence, as we know today, might not be what we're looking for in the grand scheme of AI, even though it can help solve some business problems like predicting the price of a house or predicting orders in an e-commerce platform. Hope you enjoyed this video. Drop a like and comment, hit subscribe for more content, and I will see you very soon. Take care. Bye-bye!


Hey everybody welcome back to magic with a doxy. My name is David and this is a prototype Hey today, we're gonna look at the prototype for the Calaveras day Azucar playing cards. What is this? It's a Kickstarter project. It's going on right now. It's from Natalia Silva You might remember Natalia did the Christmas deck for Penguin Magic and since then she's done a couple of other Successful Kickstarter campaigns. This is her newest one her latest one going on right now So the Calaveras day Azucar deck is a custom deck of playing cards and it's inspired by Day of the Dead and these cards when they are printed will be printed from the United States playing card company This deck is devoted to the sugar skull because that's what Calaveras day Azucar means It means the skull of sugar. Okay, so sugar art actually Okay, sugar art was brought to the new world by Italian missionaries in the 17th century and the first Mention of sugar art was around Easter time where little sugar lambs and angels were made to adorn the Alters in Catholic churches. So nowadays What they do is they take a clay mold of these different sugar figures like angels and sheep and skulls Clay molds that date back to like the colonial century Sugar skulls are now decorated to represent a departed soul Okay, so they have a name written on the forehead and they're placed sometimes in a home or near a gravestone to honor the return of That particular relative and so sugar skull art reflects the folk art style of having big happy smiles Colorful icing sparkly tin glittery adornments And so that's what you see in sugar skull art and so this deck that Natalia has put together It's kind of an homage to that. It's a representation of that. It's kind of paying tribute to that Okay, this deck here is completely redesigned as a custom deck Like I said from artist Natalia Silva She's gonna limit this to United States playing card companies smallest run of 2,500 decks You notice that the deck the front of the tuck case has that sugar skull on it And it's adorned with all kinds of flora and fauna one side says playing cards made in the USA The other side says Calaveras de Azucar the bottom has Natalia Silva's URL and the top of the tuck case Just says poker size the back design of the tuck case is of course the back design of the cards And that's pretty much it for the tuck case. So let's take a look at these cards If this campaign is successful these cards will be printed from the United States playing card company They'll probably be on the modern stock I can't really tell you about how the stock is on a prototype deck because obviously this won't be the deck that you receive So there's no use talking about thickness or handling or anything with a prototype deck Okay, this is merely to show you and get you excited about the upcoming campaign back design as you can see has a black edge border and it has the sugar skull there on the top and bottom and it's Just adorned with all kinds of fruit and leaves and flora It's really very colorful very Playful deck the front of the cards and the pips and indicee cards Are also black edged borders and you notice that it also has a tiny little gold Border there as well on the inside. There is also a faint watermark of a sugar skull on the top and bottom It's just a hint Right behind the pips and indices and you can just barely see that also to mention since it is a black face Deck you won't have black pips and indices the pips and indices for the black suits will be yellow with this deck You'll get two sugar skull jokers And then you can see that one is wearing a hat and the other one is not they both say joker going down the side And they have the title of the deck calaveras de azucar. They're at the bottom the court cards are all original and unique and you can really see Natalia's art inspiration being implemented there these definitely look like Russian nesting dolls, but Russian nesting dolls with Sugar skull faces, so she's definitely Blending these two cultures together in her iconic artistry. I also like the four aces in that they're all given Attention, you know, they're not just a single pip in the center. She's done something creative with each one of them All right So that is a quick overview of the calaveras de azucar playing cards that are currently right now a project on Kickstarter If you like Natalia Silva's artwork, and you think this is a beautiful deck Especially if you collect the other calaveras decks that have been released. I know this is kind of a thing You can get these a lot of different ways And so I definitely want to head on down to Kickstarter and give Natalia Silva's project a look and Pleasure support and if you want to learn more about Natalia Silva or her work, you can find her and Natalia Silva net. Thanks. Bye


Hello fellow followers of Christ and welcome to the show that introduces you to the men and women behind history's greatest works of literature. Come along every week as we explore these renowned authors, the times and genre in which they wrote, why scholars praise their writing and how we as Catholics should read and understand their works. I'm Joseph Pierce and this is The Authority. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Authority. I'm your host Joseph Pierce and this week we're going to be looking at one of the great Catholic novelists of the 20th century, Graham Greene. And although he is certainly one of the great Catholic novelists of the 20th century, he struggled with his Catholicism and the Catholic characters in his novels struggle with their Catholicism, if you like, reflecting the struggles of the author himself. So Maurice Behring, who we talked about last time, was a saintly figure in many ways. In the final years of his life, he suffered from Parkinson's disease, very debilitating illness and suffered those physical pains with absolute holiness as people testify. Well, Graham Greene, on the other hand, seemed to spend most of his life wanting to gratify his lower appetite or so it seems. So as Behring might be seen as a saint, although it's not for me to canonize him, Greene was certainly not a saint, although it's certainly not for me to condemn him, judge him. And I will be doing an element of judgment in this because that's my job. We need to obviously make judgment calls and to understand both authors and their works and their characters within their works. That requires an element of discrimination, discretion, judgment. But that's not the same thing as judgmentalism. It's not the same thing as condemning someone to hell. But I do, in one of my books, I wrote a chapter called In Pursuit of the Green-Eyed Monster. We might set the scene by discussion of Graham Greene by looking at at least some of the things I had to say about him because the subtitle is The Quest for Graham Greene. In pursuit of the Green-Eyed Monster, in pursuit of the Green-Eyed Monster, the quest for Graham Greene. So I'm just going to pluck out highlighted passages. The quest for Graham Greene involves a pursuit of the Green-Eyed Monster that haunted his luridly vivid imagination. Greene's novels and the characters that adorn them are riddled with anger and angst. Simultaneously confused and confounded by a deep sense of guilt and failure, his characters are informed and sometimes deformed by a deeply felt religious sensibility. The oppressive weight of the real presence of Christian faith or the terrible emptiness of its real absence turn Greene's novels into a fascinating and unforgettable conflict between the fertile and the furtive. The depiction of the drunken priest in the power and the glory and also in the play The Potting Shed exudes Greene's morbid preoccupation with human folly and failure, as well as as well as exhibiting his beliefs in the remnants of human dignity even amid the deepest degradation. At other times, as in the comedians, he squirms in with the squalor of sin and cynicism, or as in Brighton Rock, he squeals in the sadistic self-indulgence of the psychopath. Greene's fiction is gripping because it grapples with faith and disillusionment on the shifting sands of uncertainty in a relativist age. His tormented characters are the products of Greene's own tortured soul and one suspects that he was more baffled than anyone else at the contradictions at the core of his own characters and in consequence at the heart of the characters that his fertile and fetid imagination had created. I then refer in this to Graham Greene's sort of autobiography, which is called A Sort of Life, where he's obviously struggling at school, suffering from depression, anxiety, and he says, my brother suggested psychoanalysis as a possible solution and my father, an astonishing thing in 1920, agreed. Thereafter, for six months, the young and no doubt impressionable Graham Greene lived at the house of the analyst, the psychiatrist, to whom he had been referred. And whether this is significant, he chose the following words of Thomas Brown as an epigraph to his first novel, The Man Within, quote, there's another man within me that's angry with me. In later years, the genuine groping for religious truth in Greene's fiction would often be thwarted by his obsession with the darker recesses of his own character. This darker side is invariably transposed onto all his fictional characters so that even their goodness is warped. Greene's own human nature is not black and white, he says, but black and gray. So he's not his own, he saw human nature as not black and white, but black and gray. But if you take symbolically black to be evil and white to be virtue or goodness, when there's only evil, that's a murky halfway between vice and virtue, there's no virtue. And he referred to his need to write as a neurosis, an irresistible urge to pinch the abscess which grows periodically in order to squeeze out all the pus. Forgive me for the imagery, this Graham Greene's not mine. Such a tortured outlook may have produced entertaining novels but could not produce any true sense of reality. Greene's novels were Frankenstein monsters that were not so much in need of Freudian analysis as they were the products of it. Greene's conversion in 1926 when he was still only 21 years old was described in a sort of life in which he contrasted his own agnosticism as an undergraduate when to me religion went no deeper than their sentimental hymns in the school chapel with the fact that his future wife was a Roman Catholic. This is a quote. Met the girl I was to marry after finding a note from her at the Porter's Lodge in Balliol, that's a college in Oxford, protested against main accuracy in writing during the course of a film review of the worship Roman Catholics gave to the Virgin Mary when I should have used the word hyperdulia. I was interested that anyone took these subtle distinctions of an unbelievable theology seriously and we became equated. The girl was Vivian Darrell Browning then 20 years old who five years earlier had shocked her family by being received into the Catholic Church. Concerning Greene's conversion, Vivian recalled about these are words that she said to me I met her. I say more than a moment I met her at her home in Oxford back in the late 1990s when she was about 90 years old in her early 90s and more more on that at the moment. But this is Vivian what she told me when I was interviewing her. He was mentally converted. Logically, it seemed to him was all rather private and quiet. I don't think there was any emotion involved end quote. This was corroborated by Greene himself when he stated in an interview that my conversion was not in the least an emotional fair. It was purely intellectual. So again, a little bit about meeting with Graham Greene's widow. In the 1990s, Graham Greene had only died a few years earlier. They both lived to a ripe old age. But she lives in a big sporting house in in Oxford. And she was blind by this stage, I think almost totally blind. Very pleasant. Well spoken, lady. The thing that sticks in my mind most is her description depiction of the day that Graham Greene basically deserted her and their children. He came home and announced he would not be returning ever and walked out and she Thomas very evocative thing of she was upstairs with the children looking out the bedroom window as watching her husband and the father of her children walk away from their lives for the last time. And just as he got to the corner, he looked back once briefly and then disappeared. He then thereafter had a series of relationships with women. But he never divorced. Both his wife remained a devout Catholic and he certainly remained a Catholic of sorts, a sort of life, a sort of Catholic. And they never sought a divorce. And more on that perhaps presently. But there's a scene when I read Graham Greene's novel, Quiet America, which is a great novel actually, I recommend it, where the character of Fowler, the cynical middle aged English journalist, quite clearly in some sense a reflection of Greene himself and quasi autobiographically describes his leaving his wife for the last time. And it's quite clearly he's remembering the same scene that his widow remembered and speaking to me. So when I read, I read the novel after that conversation with her. So that was something which struck me and stunned me at the time that Greene had put this real life moment that had, if you like, seared itself in his wife's memory into his novel. Let's carry on without discussion to our quest for Graham Greene in pursuit of the Greene-eyed monster skipping some space here. He's still talking about his conversion, I'm quoting him. My primary difficulty was to believe in a God at all. I didn't disbelieve in Christ, I disbelieved in God. If I were ever to be convinced in evenly remote possibility of a supreme omnipotent and omniscient power, I realised that nothing afterwards could seem impossible. It was on the ground of dogmatic atheism that I fought and fought hard. It's like a fight for personal survival. End quote. The fight for personal survival was lost and Greene in losing himself had gained the faith. Yet the dogmatic atheist was only overpowered. He was not utterly vanquished. He would re-emerge continually as the devil, or at least as the devil's advocate in the murkier moments in his novels. The literary critic J.C. Whitehouse has compared Greene to Thomas Hardy, rightly asserting that Greene's gloomy vision at least allows for a light beyond the darkness, whereas Hardy allows for darkness only.  Greene is often like a self-loathing skeptic brooding over himself. As such, the vision of the divine in his fiction is often thwarted by the self-erected barriers of his own ego. Only rarely does the glimmer of God's light penetrate the chinks in the armour, entering like a vertical shaft of hope to exorcise the simmering despair. Few have understood Greene better than his friend Malcolm Muggeridge, who described him as quote, a jekyll and hide character who has not succeeded in fusing the two sides of himself into any kind of harmony. There is more truth and perception in this one succinct observation by Muggeridge than in all the pages of Psycho Babel that have been written about Greene's work by lesser critics. The paradoxical union of Catholicism and skepticism incarnated in Greene and his work had created a hybrid, a metaphysical mutant, as fascinating as Jekyll and the hide and perhaps as futile. The resulting contortions and contradictions of both his own character and those of the characters he created give the impression of depth, but the depth was often only that of ditch water perceived as bottomless because the bottom could not be seen. Greene's genius was rooted in in the ingenuity with which he muddied the waters. It was both apt and prophetic that Greene should have taken the name of Saint Thomas the doubter, Saint Thomas the Apostle, doubting Thomas, at his reception into the church in February 1926. Whatever else he was or wasn't he was always a doubter par excellence. He doubted others. He doubted himself. He doubted God. Whatever else might be puzzling about this most puzzling of men, his debt to doubt is indubitable. Ironically it was this very doubt that had so often provided the creative force for his fiction. Perhaps the secret of his enduring popularity lies in his being a doubting Thomas in an age of doubt. As such Greene's Catholicism becomes an enigma, a conversation piece, even a gimmick. Yet if his novels owe a debt to doubt their profundity lies in the ultimate doubt about the doubt. In the end it was this ultimate doubt about doubt that kept Graham Greene clinging doggedly desperately and doubtfully to his faith. So there we have, if you like, my own analysis in the effort to pursue the Greeneard monster. The quest to understand Graham Greene, that the enigma, which is Graham Greene. I'm now going to put those principles, if you like, into practice by reading parts of a long essay, which is published in a chapter in my book 12 Great Books, on heresy and orthodoxy in Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. So The Power and the Glory is Greene's most famous novel probably, also arguably his greatest. It's set during the time of anti-catholic persecution in Mexico, following the Mexican Revolution in the 1920s. Most Catholic readers of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory are happy to accept the novel's Catholic credentials on the strength of its happy ending. The arrival of a new priest to replace the martyred whiskey priest signifies the continuum of the faith and its resurrection. Always while the ends well are so we attempted to assume. It's almost as though the novelist is to be forgiven, his theological and philosophical philandering throughout the novel because of the eustrophic climax that he presents to us at its end. Much as the whiskey priest is forgiven his manifold sins through his martyrdom. Like the deathbed penitent, the sins of the novelists are to be forgiven because of the good end he has made. But does such an ending absolve the novelist of all critical responsibility for his earliest sins of infidelity? Should we forgive and forget? Or should we insist that the author remains responsible for any early apropos in his work? Should we not remind ourselves and the author that a good end never justifies evil means? Such questions should animate any discussion of Greene's masterpiece necessitating a closer scrutiny of the work as a whole irrespective of the virtuously climactic twist in its tale. As with all literary criticism an objective reading of the work requires an ability to see it through the eyes of the author so far as this is possible. In seeing the power of the glory through the eyes of Greene, we perceive the whiskey priest almost demented in piety and anti-piety as reflection of Greene himself. So in the essay I then give some of the biographical details and the discussion thereof which we've already done in the earlier part of this episode. So when we want it is therefore necessary to reread the work with an eye to the error it contains the reader becoming the whiskey priest confessor calling attention to the priest's sins and demanding amendment thereby succeeding where the novel's pathetic Padre Jose fails. There is of course much that is good and laudable in the whiskey priest a goodness that is exemplified in the real if reluctant martyrdom that he endures throughout the length of the work but even this goodness is polluted by Greene's creative neurosis using his own words. At the end of the first chapter the priest feels an unwitting hatred of the child and the sick woman to whom he is going to minister the sacraments blaming them for his missing of the ship that would have taken him to freedom. Hatred like all disordered passion is a disease of the will does not and cannot be unwilling it might become so ingrained and so habitual that it seems that we can do nothing about it but all sin in reality can be overcome by the will's cooperation with grace where there's a will God provides the way. Further example of Greene's torture due to paradox is his characterization of the weak priest Padre Jose as a martyr this is not the whiskey priest it's another character. Unlike the priests who had chosen death or exile Padre Jose had renounced his priesthood and was now living with his former housekeeper unhappy in his menage and dreading the regular duties of the marriage bed he ruminates wistfully on his own fate compared to that of the priests who had lain down their lives for their faith. Quote, he thought with envy of the men who had died it was over so soon they were taken up there to the cemetery and shot against the wall in two minutes life was extinct and they called that martyrdom here life went on and on he was only 62 he might live to 90 end quote and so we see how the coward and equivocator who serves much to the cynical pleasure of the marxist lieutenant as a living cause of scandal to the church and the priesthood is seen as the true martyr while those who have been killed for their faith have taken the easy or cowardly way out. If such ruminations are simply those of the dishonored priest wallowing in self-pitting isolation we can have no cause for complaint but what if there is something of the morbidly playful and yet earnest voice of the author himself in these thoughts what if green wants us really to consider Padre Jose as more of a martyr than those who have been killed for holding firm in their faith if so we must up braid him for his error it is true that the weakened treacherous priest is suffering greatly for his choices indeed it is true that he might be suffering more than those who die violent deaths for their faith but suffering does not constitute virtue or martyrdom if he is suffering for his own sinful actions he is suffering the consequences of his own choices are those who suffer the pains of hell martyrs only Milton satan would answer such a question in the plaintive affirmative and there is certainly something of the Miltonian satanic in the squirming twists of greens decidedly unchestitonian use of paradox greens paradoxes unlike chestitons are not those of paradise but of paradise lost as we witness the woefully pathetic Padre Jose's final reluctant surrender to his wife's pleas and he come to bed we know that he himself has made the unwelcome bed in which he now must lie and which he must lie not only in the supine but in the perjurious sense of the word he is living a lie and must suffer the consequences of his actions and the pangs of his conscience we feel for him in his agony even if he is culpable and we sense the supernatural consequences of his choices as the priest drags himself after his loveless bed somebody somewhere laughed and we feel that it is satan himself who is laughing we will learn later that Padre Jose is in the grip of the unforgivable sin despair that's a quote in the grip of the unforgivable sin despair and discover in this choice of phrase another of greens provocatively perverse paradoxes no sin however gross and grotesque is unforgivable despair is not unforgivable the problem is that the desperate soul refuses forgiveness in his pride and we should not lose sight of the fact that despair is ultimately a sin of pride the desperate soul believes that his sin and his hopelessness are beyond the forgiving power and fathomless love of the one who offers forgiveness and who has died for the sin the desperate soul believes that his sin is too big too grievous to be forgiven the true paradox is not that despair is the unforgivable sin but that the despairing man lacks the humility to hope for forgiveness once again we would have no cause for concern if the perverse paradox is only the product of Padre Jose's tortured and contorted conscience a grievous error on his part that constitutes the very heart of the problem yet we suspect that the third person narrative also contains more than a grain of the author's own contorted conceptions of truth such a suspicion is reinforced and perhaps confirmed a few pages later when we are informed that the novel's other priest and its principal protagonist the whiskey priest had also quote given way to despair the unforgivable sin and quotes or twice despair is named as the unforgivable sin in this instance the phrase appears in the long narrative section in which we can surely assume that the voice is that of the author and not that of the whiskey priest or at least that green is dabbling and dappling with literary impressionism blurring the voices of the narrator with that of his characters so that the author's voice blends indiscernible with theirs if this is so the author shares in the errors that they espouse and commit the result is that is what may be termed literary schizophrenia in which it becomes impossible to distinguish the author's objective voice from the subjective voices of the characters in the text the author loses himself in the plot and in so doing is in danger of losing the plot itself or losing his readers within it another disturbing fact of the fictional narrative is the characterization of the whiskey priest illegitimate child she is presented as being almost demonic a small malicious child who utterly untameable laughs sadistically at her father she seems to be evil incarnate possessed by the devil himself she knows her she knows her catechism but she won't say it we are told by the child's mother such ingrained recalcitrance is confirmed by her spiteful defiance of the whiskey priest efforts to show her affection quote he caught the look in the child's eyes which frightened him it was again as if a grown woman was there before her time making her plans aware of far too much which like seeing his own mortal sin looked back at him without contrition clearly the girl emerges here is a metaphor for the priest's sin of fornication a fact that is reinforced by her mother's description of her as a little devil a few lines later nonetheless the novel is not a formal allegory and as such the girl cannot be reduced to mere metaphor as a real concrete person she transcends and supersedes such abstract personification she may represent the sin on one level of meaning but she's also the priest's real flesh and blood daughter and as such her personhood demands our respect and our sympathy it is precisely because she is a real person and not a mere personification that we find her behavior so alarming we are similarly alarmed by the children who taunt Padre Padre Jose so cruelly and by the selfishly motivated children of the pious woman who are seemingly immune to the charms of the saccharine hagiographies that she reads to them why is it that green is so seemingly allergic to the presence of purity and sanctity in his work that he will not admit even a modicum of childlike innocence amid the gloom of human degradation returning to our initial assertion that green obsessively transposes a darker side onto all his characters so that even their goodness is warped we lament his apparent unwillingness or inability to allow even the children their innocence contrary to christ's exhortation that we must become like little children in order to enter the kingdom of heaven green banishes everyone from paradise by refusing to admit the childlike into his fictional kingdom nobody is childlike in green's novels not even the children themselves can anyone truly come to christ in such dismal dystopias so the chapter in the book the essay goes on but i think that you get the point here that perhaps i'm giving green a hard time but we'll finish with how did green finish so to speak as a man and he certainly is a great story teller there's no doubt about that it's intriguing that when he died his final will he left nothing not even a single penny to his current mistress he left every penny to his wife whom he betrayed at this point 45 or so years earlier and one can only detect or deduce an element of not just guilt but logic as in theological that if green had given any money to the women with whom he was having extramarital affairs he would be endorsing his own mortal sin it suggests therefore that green was very much a catholic in his understanding of doctrine even if he was not a catholic in his willingness to practice the faith in terms of the virtue demanded of those who who acknowledged the doctrine perhaps he summed up the that with a an account he had with a saint a real life living saint and that's Padre Pio. Graham Green was in on holiday in Italy with one of his mistresses and they both attended a mass at which Padre Pio was the celebrant and the green was close enough to the altar to actually see the blood stains the congealed blood on the on the gloves of Padre Pio at the end of mass someone asked him if he would like to meet Padre Pio and green literally ran from the church and when he was asked why he had done so he wrote he saw he replied that if he met a real life saint and didn't repent he knew he would be going to hell so he chose to run away because he wasn't planning to repent so we can say really in this encounter with Padre Pio that Graham Green was running from from the saint because he was running from sanctity I suppose in the final analysis as it's not for us to make a final judgment on any soul that we may merely ask Padre Pio to pray for him and on that note that hopeful note I will bid you adieu so until next time on the authority goodbye for bless and good reading this has been an episode of The Authority with Joseph Pierce brought to you by tan for updates on new episodes and to support The Authority and other great free content visit theauthoritypodcast.com to subscribe and use coupon code authority 25 to get 25 off your next order including books audiobooks and video courses by Joseph Pierce on literary giants such as Tolkien, Chesterton, Lewis, Shakespeare, and Bellach as well as tans extensive catalog of content from the saints and great spiritual masters to strengthen your faith and interior life to follow Joseph and support his work check out his blog and sign up for email updates and exclusive content at jpearse.co and thanks for listening


Hey see me for it here. What do I have here a 2020 1500 class body style? It's got the fog lamps It's the white perfect for your fleet vehicle It's got your 5-7 hemi. It's got your power seat and the driver's side. It's got the 8.4 screen blue to automatic headlights Two cabs. You got lots of room back here as well Drop in liner in the back here.  Me, Steve McQuarrden. Have a great day


Looking at the Citizenship Amendment Bill which went on to become the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019, the unhappiness that so many of us have felt that the protests on the street against the CAA have boiled down to one fact that citizenship is being linked with religion. So here there is a question of citizenship but there is also the question of a rational refugee policy. Would you like to talk about what are the rational egalitarian processes we should have for people to become citizens? Well let me address the second question first. I think it's pretty obvious that a rational refugee policy means that we claim to be a society in which anyone who's persecuted in our neighboring countries can seek asylum. It's another matter, you know, the process of seeking asylum and so on but it should be open. There should be absolutely no conditions attached to the identity of the person who's seeking asylum. If they can prove that they have been persecuted they can claim... Religion or nationality. Or nationality. Absolutely. Absolutely. Because you know once you start this identity business of religion and which country they're coming from, the next will be ethnicity, the next will be occupation, you can bring in all kinds of identities and that is really not how it has worked anywhere else and it cannot work here. I have another problem with CAA and that is that I think that essentially, in fact I have many problems which I think need to be discussed which haven't always been discussed in full detail. One of them is that the way in which these new laws CAA, NRC, NPR, the alphabetical laws have been introduced, it is also underlining and supporting the idea of Hindu Rashtra. Now what do I mean by this? The foundational principles of the Hindu Rashtra consist of Pitri Bhumi, Punya Bhumi. Pitri Bhumi is the land of your ancestors which has to be the boundaries of British India, presumably British India. We don't know which boundaries they're talking about but we presume it's British India. Punya Bhumi is that your religion has to have originated within those boundaries. Now the emphasis that is being given to, you have to produce documents to prove where you were born, when you were born and who your parents were. This is Pitri Bhumi and Punya Bhumi. This is what the NPR, the National Population Register, is attempting. The Pitri Bhumi is your ancestors, your parents, where were they born and who were they and Punya Bhumi is your religion and the territory where you were born. So territory becomes a very important issue and I see this as a kind of step towards establishing what, you know, the ideology of those currently in power is to establish a Hindu Rashtra. I mean they make no bones about it. So I see this not only as an attack on citizenship but also a subtle way of bringing in their own ideas about how to establish a Hindu Rashtra. This is one way of doing that. Romina, with all the protests that we've seen across India, people on the streets, women on the streets, students on the streets, we've had a certain sort of response, official response, which again goes back to what you were talking about, the changing the distortion of the relationship between the state and the citizen in present day India. Would you like to talk about that? Because we've seen a completely out-of-proportion, undemocratic kind of response, whether it's violence, whether it's detention, section 144th edition, NSA on and on. Yes, I think in some ways I would say that this is almost predictable, that when there is so much confusion on the part of the authority as to how to implement a particular set of laws, there is bound to be differences of opinion in implementation and procedures, differences that might and logically might lead to rather high-handed, you know, actions of detaining people and arresting people and that kind of thing. I'll tell you what worries me about the way in which the situation is moving at the moment. First of all, I think it's conducive to a lot of corruption. The man without documents who's lost because his entire family has no documents. This is now what we're talking about. Largely people who are impoverished will go to the presiding officer and say, I have no documents. Now we all know from the way in which administration functions that one of the easiest solutions is, right, you pay me under the counter, I'll give you the documents and this will become a system and I can see possibly a lot of documents being forged for a price. And this is worrying because in a sense you're not opposing the system of passing these kinds of laws but you're introducing another element of corruption into the functioning of these laws. That's one possibility that could happen. I'm not saying that it will happen but it could happen and given the way in which many laws are treated in this country, it may well happen that there will be this corruption. Secondly, what is frightening and it's particularly frightening from the way in which protests are treated and for example what has been going on in Delhi is that are we developing into a surveillance state? It's now got to the point I think that most people would say the police is no longer protecting the citizen which is what it is supposed to do. It is in fact on the side of authority and is challenging and threatening the citizen. So the ordinary citizen is not going to run to the police for protection but it's going to run away from the police. This I think is a very critical situation. There will be nobody left in society whom the ordinary citizen can go to and say please protect me. I am being harassed, I'm being threatened, I'm being almost killed. Then you have a system which has already started which is that those in the law and order section of society will simply listen to those in authority and carry out their orders which means that the actual substance and the need for having people maintaining law and order will disappear because there will be no law and order. But law and order also gets used very often in all kinds of ways. So what you mean by law and order may not be what the person on the street sitting there again I think that for example people saying that the problem in the Delhi situation and the last two days is one of law and order is really frankly unacceptable to me because it's not law and order. It is very definitely one group of people wishing to attack another group of people for very obvious reasons. No, what I mean is that the people one resorts to for bringing law and order will no longer do so and this is repeatedly shown in the last few months. The police will attack universities as they did in Jamia and in Aligarh. The police will just sit by and watch a university being attacked as happened in JNU. That's not maintaining law and order and really the force with which people are attacked even with lattes makes one shudder that are these the people that are supposed to be protecting the citizen. This disturbs me. This disturbs me very much because I think that now as a citizen one is left with no protection. Again we were talking about this process of reducing the citizen to a subject which is distorting the relationship we have with the state in a constitutional democracy. We are no longer allowed to speak up. So I know that freedom of speech is we are always referred to the qualification there saying that as long as it does not interfere with national security and so on and so forth. But look at the way sedition is being used for example. Yeah, the sedition I think has never been so many seditious citizens before in our history perhaps. And I think sedition is something that perhaps we should have got rid of immediately after independence because it's a very dicey situation where people can use it. Part of decolonizing ourselves. Part of decolonizing ourselves. But nevertheless if even if we got rid of it determined authority will bring back something of that kind. There's been some talk about the boycott of the officers that come around getting information. This in a sense is suggestive to me as it is to a couple of other people I've talked to. It recalls a civil disobedience movement of Gandhi. That if you wish to take a position against a particular law be it the manufacture of salt do it by saying as a citizen I have the right to do this you can't stop me. So as a citizen I have the right to say that I will not give you this information if I choose not to do what you like. But then you must also ensure that these wretched detention centers are closed down or are converted into schools and hospitals or whatever if they're already built as many of them are. I mean that's another terrible blot on Indian society that you have detention centers for citizens. It's unheard of. Why because they can't produce documents.


You have always known of this house, have always been invited here where you will remember the exposed beams, the honey-colored wide plank floors, skylights for light of moon, stars and sun, well-worn tables for the drying of herbs and the making of tinctures. This refuge exists beyond time and portals those who enter here into ancient forms of knowing. The movement of stars, prayers for all beings, blossoms, roots, leaves, the gift of understanding the speech of animals, plants, even whole mountains. The ancient ones taught us to come here for strengthening, showing us the uses of gold thread for infection, chamomile rising up through sand and stone bringing calm and wisdom, rose petals for jam or syrup, spirit food in times of sadness or doubt. Coming up you would see sweet-smelling bundles of nettle and lemon balm for swelling, endurance and digestion. The grandmothers and grandfathers invite us here to dance, to meet each other as reflections of our own selves and in the end to become full and complete human being. There is no fee for coming to this magical cabin, simply the donation of humility and the willingness to step into the innocent splendor of the roses, the irises, the lilies in their short and ecstatic dance on the living stage of this enchanted and priceless earth, first made by Gerard Manley Hopkins. This dark-sum-burned horse-back-brown, his roll-rock high-row roaring down, in coop and in comb the fleece of his foam, flutes and low to the lake-fall's home. A wind-puff bonnet of fawn-frog turns and twindles over the broth of a pool so pitch-black, bell-froining, it rounds and rounds to spare to drowning. Daked with dew, dappled with dew, are the groins of the braze that the brook treads through, wiry heat-packs, clutches of ferns, and the bead-bonny ash that sits over the berm. How would the world be once bereft of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, oh, let them be left, wildness and wet. Long live the weeds and the wilderness, yet Theodor Rothgeath wrote, Long live the weeds after this poem by Hopkins. Long live the weeds that overwhelm my narrow vegetable realm, The bitter rock, the barren soil that forced the son of man to toil, All things unholy, marked by curse, the ugly of the universe, The rough, the wicked and the wild that keep the spirit undefiled.  These shape the creature that is I. That you were born under, know each of the stars' stories. Remember the moon, know who she is. Remember the son's birth at dawn, that is the strongest point in time. Remember sundown and giving away tonight. Remember your birth, how your mother struggled to give you form and breath. You are evidence of her life and her mother's and hers. Remember your father, he is your life also.  Remember the plants own tribes, their families, their histories too. Listen to them, listen to them, they are alive poems. Remember the wind, remember her voice, she knows the origin of this universe. Remember you are all people and all people are you. Remember you are this universe and this universe is you. Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you. Remember language comes from this. Remember the dance languages that life is, remember.