A Generated Essay on the Sermon on the Mount, First Pass

The Sermon on the Mount is not a cheat sheet for the afterlife. It is a blueprint for right now: how to see, how to treat people, and how to build a life that stands when the weather turns. I read it this time without chapter breaks, the way its first hearers would have. Chapter numbers came twelve centuries later, and without them I had no idea I was nearly finished until the builders appeared. What I found was one continuous argument, each saying leaning on the one before it.

A Generated Essay on the One True Genre

I grew up in a faith that talks about the one true church. So it's not surprising that when I found alternative music, I didn't just find a genre I liked. I found the one true genre. For a lot of us raised Latter-day Saint in the 80s and 90s, alternative music arrived the way the gospel is supposed to arrive: as a discovery, a recognition, a sense that something real had been hidden in plain sight while everyone else was listening to the radio. Once you heard it, Top 40 sounded like what it was. Calculated. Market-tested. Eager to please. The Cure and Depeche Mode and the Smiths didn't sound like they were trying to please anybody. They sounded like they'd been given something and had to say it. We already had the vocabulary for that. Testimony. Revelation. Conversion. The difference between a man who teaches and a man who has seen. It didn't take much for that language to drift from Sunday into the stereo.

A Generated Essay on the Altar as an Arena

In the contemporary cultural landscape, the sight of a bride walking down the aisle in an overtly minimalist, revealing, or "skimpy" wedding dress frequently provokes a visceral reaction from observers. To a spectator operating under traditional, institutional, or patriarchal frameworks, such attire is easily misread as a provocative broadcast—an invocation of the male gaze, an explicit demand for validation, or a destabilizing signal regarding the solemnity of the marital commitment.

A Generated Premise for a Short Story about Temple Sealings in 2036

Latter-day Saint history is a long record of adaptation and workarounds: the 1890 Manifesto, the shift from the United Order to tithing, the Word of Wisdom hardening from counsel into commandment, the 1978 revelation, a temple liturgy (and garments) modified again and again. Each change arrived with a statement saying, in effect, that nothing essential had changed, let's all move on. That gap, between what everyone can see happening and what the institution is willing to say is the water we swim in, the fiction we live and breathe. 

A Generated Essay about Ecclesiates

For two weeks, in scattered sessions that sometimes ran long, I kept returning to twelve short chapters and a single Hebrew word that refuses to sit still. The word is hevel. The chapters are Ecclesiastes. And the tool I used to keep returning to them was, of all things, an AI. I did not set out to summarize the book. I set out to talk to it — or rather, to talk to the voice inside it, the Preacher, Qohelet, whatever name fits a figure who may be Solomon, may be a scribe borrowing Solomon's authority, may be no one in particular and everyone at once. I asked the AI to hold that voice steady across sessions: not to explain Ecclesiastes to me from a lectern, but to answer as if the text itself could still be interrupted, pushed back on, asked to clarify, asked to sit with a modern problem it never anticipated.

A Generated Plug for Sticking with Isaiah

 It is our privilege to absorb Isaiah, not necessarily to understand him. That sentence sounds like a lowering of the bar. It isn't. It's a correction of the wrong bar. We come to Isaiah assuming the task is comprehension — read the verse, extract the meaning, move to the next verse. That's how we read a manual, an article, a text message. It is not how Isaiah was built to be read, and forcing him into that shape is why he feels boring.

A Generated Essay on Why America Needs to Name Its Second Political System

The United States operates under a formal constitutional architecture — three branches, checks and balances, elections every two, four, and six years. Americans are taught to direct their civic attention there: to Congress, to the presidency, to the courts. But a growing body of evidence suggests this is only half the map. Alongside the visible, accountable state runs a second system, poorly represented in the conventional civic map: a network of corporations, trade associations, major donors, and allied nonprofits whose collective influence over policy outcomes now rivals — and in specific domains exceeds — that of elected government itself.