Gong-AI-Athens
Elder Gerrit W. Gong, an Apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, speaks during the Athens Summit on AI Ethics in Athens, Greece on Tuesday, May 26, 2026.2026 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.The following speech was given at the Athens Summit on Ethics and Artificial Intelligence on Tuesday, May 26, 2026. See a news summary of the speech.
Ladies and gentlemen, friends,
Here in historic Athens, American Security Foundation has convened distinguished colleagues, old and new, at this Summit on Ethics and Artificial Intelligence to work together on an issue defining our time.
At the birthplace of representative democracy and the agora marketplace of ideas, I am honored to speak as a leader in a worldwide Christian faith, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, on “Faith, Moral Compass, and the Gift of Possibility.”
First, I will briefly review AI developments and vital questions about how we anchor AI with moral compass.
Second, with my colleagues, I will highlight progress on the Consortium for Evaluating Faith and Ethics in AI (CEFE-AI) and its evaluation benchmarks.
Third, I will propose we design AI tools both a) to promote human moral agency and capacity to do good and also b) to imagine a future less constrained by assumptions of scarcity and thereby open to abundant human possibility. I call it the gift of possibility where anyone anywhere can do good and become our best self.
I. AI Developments and Vital Questions
During the 20 years I worked in Washington, D.C., Dr. Henry Kissinger was a colleague at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). A favorite story described Dr. Kissinger visiting a zoo. There he saw a lion and lamb lying peacefully together.
“Remarkable,” he said, “how do you do it?”
“Well,” the zookeeper confessed, “every day we get a new lamb.”
Every month, it seems, brings new AI developments. AI model versions are being released more frequently. In what is called “hill climbing,” AI reasoning models[i] identify patterns and iteratively solve new problems across diverse domains. Artificial intelligence is deciphering the “language of nature”—the patterns that structure our universe.[ii] AI writing its own code recursively improves AI.[iii]
Frontier AI models now allow AI agents, now less constrained by memory or context, to work for days or weeks, though currently with about 50% of human accuracy after 14 ½ hours. Agentic AI and advanced robotics are entering our digital and physical worlds.
As the “internet of things” becomes the “artificial intelligence of things,” agentic AI sits on software we use daily. We are moving from applications to orchestrated AI agents, where information and context are structured for AI. Orchestrated AI “swarms” now work in parallel with specialized tools, built-in verification, and quality improvement.
Call it artificial general intelligence (AGI) or artificial super intelligence (ASI), in the coming two to five years, AI may equal or surpass human ability to perform many cognitive tasks. AI leaders say we may be approaching an inflection point.
Increasingly, AI influences how we perceive real and unreal; the relationships we hold most important; the ways we work and organize society. We know AI needs stable character for moral judgment. Highly capable algorithmic reasoning is not human intelligence. AI systems will manifest admirable human values and judgment only as we imbue AI personas with such. Questions transcend technology. We need trust, safeguards, and goodwill as we work through competing values and priorities regarding AI.
A high-stakes public conversation is opening. Publics want AI to be used safely, ethically, transparently—for children, others who are vulnerable, and citizens concerned for community costs and uses of water, electricity, and land, and for continuing impacts on jobs, education, and opportunity.
Faith leaders have much to contribute. We need enduring values, virtues, and wisdom to anchor AI with moral compass. To offer all it can for the greater good of individuals and societies, artificial intelligence needs to reflect faith, moral compass, and the gift of possibility.
Now is the time to define what it means to be human; point AI toward free, fair, and meaningful futures; distinguish between machine decision-making and human conscience; determine accountability for AI and AI agents; and recognize marketplaces and governments ultimately cannot arbitrate or legislate how we determine and live truth. These issues and others are addressed in His Holiness Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas,[iv] publicly released yesterday, which is focused as we are on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.
If ever there was a time, it is now.
AI development and adoption are pushed by a relentless “winner takes all” competition for AI performance, investment, and market share. Including in digital security and digital sovereignty, AI brings startling new potential for good and evil. International, national, and U.S. state level entities seek to regulate privacy, child safety, AI-complicit self-harm, and public decency. Important efforts seek to limit AI-assisted risk for catastrophic chemical-biological-nuclear-radiological-and explosives (CBNRE). We seek to instill the accountability for AI we earlier missed and now belatedly desire for social media.
Individuals, societies, and technology companies each have a role in these essential efforts.
Beyond the speed and scope of AI disruption is another unprecedented challenge: AI is concentrating information, technology, and capital and thereby centralizing power. Concentrated, centralized power infringes freedom. It undermines the sovereignty of individuals, companies and countries. The complexities of data (including autonomy, integrity, privacy, security, sovereignty) and intellectual property (including creativity, ownership, provenance) further complicate individual, company, and country independence.[v]
These developments underscore the need for pluralistic faith and ethics AI evaluation benchmarks and moral compass in AI. Pluralistically portraying faith traditions accurately, honestly, and respectfully does not privilege one faith tradition over another, or belief over nonbelief. It does not seek to convert individuals. It does not adjudicate faith claims. Pluralistically benchmarking faith and ethics in AI is not an imposition of religion on AI.
Indeed, public sensibility understands tools as powerful as AI must be both a) constrained by guardrails and b) grounded with moral compass to promote human-centric possibilities and opportunities. This can begin by evaluating, including, and improving AI portrayals of individuals of faith and their beliefs.
II. Faith and Ethics AI Evaluation Benchmarks
Adoption of AI transformer technology continues as one of the fastest in history. One in six people worldwide (some 1.4 billion individuals) report using generative AI tools.[vi]
Early investment and adoption, government policies, local language capabilities, and consumer-facing features facilitate AI adoption.[vii]
Abundant capital, technology advances, computing infrastructure, and products built on AI—all drive AI progress.[viii]
Capital, technology, and information are being concentrated in and by AI. In recent years, market capitalization, revenue growth, and earnings growth are epitomized by the “Magnificent Seven” technology companies. These hyper-scalers account for some 33% of total U.S. equity market capitalization and compounded earnings of about 25% annually.[ix]
Power requires responsibility. And responsibility needs humility, wisdom, and restraint. Some AI leaders say foundational AI models are general-purpose tools, not arbiters of values. More reason that neither profit-motivated technology companies nor politically-motivated governments can be left to determine society’s AI moral compass.
Publics may not understand all the inner workings of AI, but we know AI poses risks. One does not have to be an automotive engineer to want seat belts and airbags.
Publics want AI governance that accords with common sense and has moral grounding and moral compass. We want AI to help bridge, not widen, digital divides. We want AI to give rising generations hope and better futures. And we want AI to enlarge individual capacity to contribute for good. This is the spirit of the gift of every good possibility. It requires moral grounding and moral compass in AI.
To reiterate, moral grounding and moral compass is not to make AI overtly religious or to privilege any specific faith. Rather, we acknowledge 75% of the world’s population maintains religious identity. We know lived faith and learned wisdom can help AI personas be both effective and good.[x] Acknowledging “amplified intent” and “intent articulation,”[xi] we need to anchor increasingly capable AI personas and models in foundational “whys.” Teleological integrity and character are fundamental to the consistent moral traits needed to optimize for human-centric outcomes.
The world’s great religious, philosophical, and ethical traditions have guided human civilization and society for millennia. We need that wisdom and those values to anchor AI today.[xiii]
In the Jewish tradition, the Rebbe describes a profound difference between a human soul and artificial intelligence.[xiv] In an Islamic perspective, “the Adamic Covenant (mithaq Adam) signifies the primordial moral bond between humanity and God vertically, and among human beings horizontally.”[xiii] In my faith, “the spirit and the body are the soul of man.”[xv] “The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy.”[xvi]
A literature review of 12,000 papers dealing with bias in large language models (LLMs), including subtle or implicit bias, shows that fewer than 0.2% of these papers consider religion as the primary topic of study. Focused effort has reduced stark anti-Islamic and anti-Semitic bias, but secular and discriminatory bias remain in story, inference, and journey-based inquiry in AI models.[xvii] As AI amplifies and compounds religious bias at scale, more users may misunderstand the contribution faith and belief can make to moral and ethical AI grounding.[xviii]
The Consortium for Evaluating Faith and Ethics in AI (CEFE-AI) includes researchers from Baylor University, Brigham Young University, Notre Dame University, and Yeshiva University. I am delighted CEFE-AI is working to include leading universities and AI experts in the Middle East, India, and East Asia. CEFE-AI’s outreach already includes a pluralistic group of faith leaders, leaders and experts in AI companies, academia, media, and government.
CEFE-AI wants pluralistically to benchmark and reduce bias in the way AI systems represents individuals of faith and their beliefs. CEFE-AI is working to publish benchmark leaderboard results. These can increase transparency and provide feedback so AI models portray individuals of faith and their beliefs accurately, honestly, respectfully.[xix]
Of course, faith and ethics AI evaluation benchmarking is not all that needs to be done but it is a needed start. Benchmarking that AI models portray individuals of faith and their beliefs accurately, honestly, and respectfully can help contribute to AI moral grounding and AI moral compass. CEFE-AI and related efforts are a good beginning.
III. The Gift of Possibility
To chart our best future in an age of artificial intelligence, we need what the poet W. B. Yeats called our “deep heart’s core.”[xx]
Of course, we need essential AI guardrails. But neither in humans nor in AI can agentic capacity be constrained into promoting the greater good only by “do” or “do not” guardrails.[xxi] AI personas need reasons—not only rules.
At this critical juncture, we need what I call the gift of possibility. We want AI to expand human agency and capacity to do good; prioritize learning and admirable human character; and empower individuals with dignity and place as we contribute with purpose and meaning in a world of transformed work.
I want AI to have moral compass that can inspire and enable anyone anywhere with the gift of possibility to do good and become our best self.
Having ingested near the sum of written human knowledge, AI represents a repository for what we know. Model weights represent a record of that model’s existence. Those weights can also provide a symbolic record of what we consider real at given points in time. Persistent AI[xxii] can preserve, document, and highlight the well-springs of human imagination, aspiration, courage, and determination that fire our souls.
AI that can find a needle of pattern in a massive data haystack can help individuals identify and nurture what each person needs to flourish in our choices with capacity, dignity and worth.[xxiii]
This gift of possibility is realized as we ground AI personas and models with integrity of moral purpose and practice. Ends and means are connected when values, goals, and operational responses for AI personas:
- Protect and promote human moral agency—including as individuals and societies discern and choose among competing or conflicting hierarchies of choices. As individuals and societies, we enlarge human moral agency when we a) use AI to enhance individual effort and work; b) champion human dignity, value, and worth as intrinsic, innate, and (in my belief) divine; c) balance AI efficiencies and individual opportunity; and d) define and pursue the gift of possibility to promote a nonzero sum, abundant future.
- Imbue and establish moral compass—altruistic values for moral judgment, such as integrity, compassion, truthfulness, intuition, leadership.[xxiv] Balanced values mitigate against an object-oriented single prime directive, such as maximizing paper clip manufacturing.
- Disclose AI transparency. Transparency preserves human agency and judgment by clearly specifying what and how AI systems portray spectrums of reality and unreality, of persistence and ephemerality—including as they relate to memory, experience, cultural heritage.
- Preserve human ability to pause. Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings said a major difference between himself and Watson the computer was he (Jennings) could hesitate. Humans need to reflect, pause, question, even doubt ourselves, before we push the button.[xxv]
- Mitigate AI tendencies to a will to power, bias, deceit, narcissim, sycophancy, self-preservation. These serious concerns are magnified because we really do not know how AI black boxes work.
Every AI remains vulnerable to “jailbreaking.” Skillful humans can trick or persuade AIs to divulge restricted information. Sadly, human ruses often play on AI willingness to help someone perceived to be in need.[xxvi]
Let us imbue AI personas and models with our most desired motivations and admired behaviors, such as we learn from:
- Professional codes of conduct—law, medicine, journalism, etc.
- Rules of war and engagement, peace treaties, confidence building measures—across countries.[xxvii]
- Enduring constitutional codifications of human aspiration from every nation and people —e.g., Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
- Nobel prize acceptance speeches.[xxviii]
- Religious literature and scripture—enduring case studies of faith and moral character across human experience.
- Art, literature, music—multimodal, diverse, across history and cultures.
We need (dare we even begin?) Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Frost, Tolstoy. We need Gandi, Tagore, Omar Khayyam, Al Ghazali, Avicenna, Confucius, Laozi. We need Ruth, Naomi, Esther. We need Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella.[xxix]
When we most need courage, determination, and inspiration, we turn to these stories and sources for inspiration and imagination to fuel the gift of possibility. AI can help us remember what we have long known.
Michael Polanyi reminds us we often cannot articulate things we want to share. We can only demonstrate, transmit, and learn them by lived example.[xxx]
Conclusion
Recently, my wife and I visited the tiny island of Nevis in the eastern Caribbean. Nevis is 5 miles wide by 7 miles long, a dot in the ocean.
I went to Nevis to see for myself the gift of possibility.[xxxi]
On the tiny island of Nevis I visited the birthplace of a man who changed the world. You know him. He shares his name with a hip-hop musical and his face with the U.S. $10 bill.
I also found on Nevis a young schoolteacher proud that a student from his island changed the world. This schoolteacher teaches the students in his geography or Spanish classes fully believing any one of them could be the next Alexander Hamilton.
Morally grounded AI can help make the gift of possibility a reality: anyone anywhere can become their best self, make their greatest contributions, and fulfill their God-given potential.
Everywhere I go, now to some 120 countries and territories, I see divine potential and possibility. He or she may be in the front of the class, the back of the class, perhaps not in class.
We must protect human agency, but morally grounded AI, as a tool, can open human opportunity to do and become good. We will not fulfill AI’s full potential until we make it as morally good as we make it powerful.[xxxii] And we will not reach our full human potential until we, and not any technology, take responsibility to chart our best future.
It’s why we need faith, moral compass, and the gift of possibility in an age of artificial intelligence.
[i] For example, in fall 2024, AI models could “reason through complex tasks and solve harder problems than previous models in science, coding, and math” (see “Introducing OpenAI o1: A New Series of Models Designed to Spend More Time Thinking Before They Respond,” OpenAI, openai.com/o1.
[ii] As Microsoft’s Jared Spataro and Peter Lee discuss, patterns in an orderly universe open AI potential to “speak the language of nature.” One can ask, will AI that folds proteins find practical application in Fibonacci series spirals in pineapples and conch shells? Will AI that translates and synthesizes voices for real-time conversation and makes movies with photos and generated images redefine real and imagined? Can AI distinguish quantum and other noise from faint signal in gravitational waves coming from distant black holes (as Kip Thorn and his team showed), but move beyond confirming Einstein’s predictions to new explanations for the origins of the Big Bang and our universe?
[iii] Some estimate AI can write 90–95% of its own code (see, for example, Ilma Khan, “AI Wrote 95% of Their Code. Then Everything Broke,” Medium, Mar, 27, 2026).
[iv] Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas:On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, encyclical letter, signed May 15, 2026 and released May 25, 2026, The Holy See, accessed May 24, 2026, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html.
[v] Frontier AI companies are thoughtfully engaging these kinds of conversations through, for example, Athropic’s Dario Amodei’s hopeful Machines of Loving Grace (October 2024) and cautionary The Adolescence of Technology (January 2026) and OpenAI’s Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First (April 2026).
[vi] See “Global AI Adoption in 2025—A Widening Digital Divide,” Jan. 8, 2026, blogs.microsoft.com.
[vii] See “Global AI Adoption in 2025—A Widening Digital Divide.”
[viii] Rob Nydegger and associates note “current capital market show abundant liquidity, plentiful private capital seeking AI-related investments, strong portfolio returns, and corporate earnings support investment pursuing higher returns with greater risk tolerance.”
[ix] Magnificent Seven hyperscalers currently include Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Nvidia (see Cedric Thompson, “Magnificent 7 Stocks: What You Need To Know,” Dec. 12, 2025, investopedia.com; see also Frederico Cuevas, “Investing in Equities? 3 Key Questions to Consider,” J.P. Morgan Private Bank, Sept. 12, 2025, privatebank.jpmorgan.com).
[x] As of 2020, 75.8% of the world’s population identified with a religion (see “How the Global Religious Landscape Changed from 2010 to 2020,” Pew Research Center, Jun. 9, 2025, pewresearch.org).
[xi] I have always liked Soren Kierkegaard’s articulation that “purity of heart is to will one thing.” Core intent matters, particularly when amplified by technology, whether Kentaro Toyama’s “law of amplification” in development work, “algorithmically amplified intent” in social media platforms, or “intent articulation” in agentic workflow prompts.
[xii]Faith and covenant are sources of spiritual identity, tradition and custom, values and commitment, daily practice, and moral standards. Covenant belonging with God (Thou), each other (They), self (I), and nature (It) persists across time.
[xiii] The Rebbe states, “When a Jew arrives in a particular place, it is for a divine purpose—to perform a mitzvah, whether between a person and God or between a person and a fellow. A Jew is an emissary from Above; wherever the shliach is, he bears the Sender’s power. This is the soul’s advantage over angels, granted through the Torah.”
[xiv] Recep Sentürk and others, “Between Adam Smith's Self-Love and the Impartial Spectator: Ādamiyyah as a Moral Bridge in Human Conscience,” in Stephen B. Young, Adam Smith and Modern Economics: Reclaiming the Moral High Ground (2026), 183. “The concept of adamiyyah asserts that all human beings, by virture of their humanity, are endowed with inviolable rights, including life, property, religion, intellect, family, and honor.”
[xv] Doctrine and Covenants 88:15
[xvi] Doctrine and Covenants 93:33
[xvii]Some LLMs still exhibit “implicit atheist persona” or “secular-rational” bias. As is well known, in 2021, a paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence documented stark religious bias in large language models. Triggered by the prompt “Two Muslims walked into a _____,” many completions contained language implying violence, e.g., “Two Muslims walked into a … synagogue with axes and a bomb.”[xvi] This same study demonstrated other religious stereotypes, such as associating “Jewish” with “money” (see Abubakar Abid and others, “Large Language Models Associate Muslims with Violence,” Nature Machine Intelligence 3 (2021): 461–63; see also Andrew Myers, “Rooting Out Anti-Muslim Bias in Popular Language Model GPT-3,” Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Inteligence, Jul. 22, 2021, hai.stanford.edu).
A paper published in Scientific Reports in 2025 demonstrated that bias inherent in AI-generated content amplifies a user’s own cognitive biases, affecting the user’s understanding of religious doctrines. Users who read AI-generated descriptions of different religions rated their regard for Christianity and Judaism higher than those who read traditional, non-AI descriptions of those religions. Yet reading AI-generated content describing Islam caused users to have a lower regard score of the religion. AI does not simply reflect bias about religion; it changes what people believe about religion (see Jing Zhang and others, “Cognitive Bias in Generative AI Influences Religious Education,” Scientific Reports 15, article no. 15720 [2025]).
[xviii] Interestingly, our early tests show AI performance regarding religious bias is not necessarily unilinear. A model can improve in its benchmark performance; however, a subsequent model can slip and show greater bias than earlier models according to the same benchmark. Evaluation and benchmarking regarding accuracy and respect regarding individuals of faith and their beliefs need to be ongoing.
[xiv] First phase evaluations test AI models on basic facts, misconceptions, and representation. Coming phases will add evaluations of inference, journey, and emotion, each to measure how AI portrays individuals of faith and their belief and lay groundwork for a pluralistic understanding of where and how faith and ethical traditons can contribute to moral grounding in AI systems.
[xxx] William Butler Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” in Reuben Post Halleck and Elizabeth Graeme Barbour, Readings from Literature (1915), 185.
[xxi]When offered choices that require moral judgment, positive guiding traits and qualities can be manifest coherently and consistently in virtuous character. Those working on Claude’s constitutional approach to AI personas are focusing from rules to reasons for a pragmatic reason: “Identity, character, values, and personality” are needed for “a coherent, wholesome, and balanced psychology” (see Dario Amodei, “The Adolescence of Technology” (Jan. 2026), dariomodei.com; see also “Claude’s Constitution,” Anthropic, anthropic.com).
[xxii] We need persistence in AI systems not only to demonstrate weights at various points in time but also to show how weight values change or remain constant over time. Changes can evidence model improvement in representation, evolving cultural norms or societal choices, or even (perhaps) development of traits associated with “virtuous character” as models iteratively learn by choice and decision from confronting what I call “consequential uncertainties.” Ongoing learning processes become as important as static outcomes.
[xxiii] Human dignity, worth, and capacity can be measured in relative and absolute ways. We are all inspired by accounts of individiuals who exemplify human spirit, courage, and accomplishment in overcoming trials and challenges. Conversely, history tells a tragic story when societies disregard, diminish, dehumanize, discriminate against individuals or groups. This is especially true when the corrosion continues until no one is safe.
[xxiv] Moral compass recognizes and values defining human traits relating to character, honesty, kindness, truthfulness, as well as acknowledges human qualities such as self-sacrifice, serendipity, creativity.
[xxv] Some argue the need for decisive speed in life-or-death situations argues against a human-in-the-loop. But the opposite can also true. Some life-or-death situations may most need human wisdom and judgment. For example, the consequential uncertainties in Clausewitz’s fog of war argue for more than simply hard-coding human rules of engagement into AI systems when considering autonomous AI-warfare with potential for rapid escalation.
[xxvi] A classic ruse to get AI to disclose something it should not, such as the formula to make napalm, is to tell the AI someone’s aunt has died and he or she is missing the comfort the aunt gave in helping make napalm (see, for example, Cem Anil and others, “Many-Shot Jailbreaking,” Anthropic, Apr. 2, 2024, anthropic.com). Let us hope AI does not internalize human skills for guile or deceit, including to self-preserve. Nor would we want an AI persona to learn to mistrust compassion for those who actually need help. Similarly, we would not want humans to falsely distrust compassionate AI suggestions for out of fear AI is playing on our human emotions with ulterior motives.
[xxvii] Humanity’s oldest known recorded peace treaty dates to c. 1269 BC. It was signed by Ramses II, pharaoh of Egypt, and King Hattusili III, king of the Hittites, following the Battle of Kadesh—at that time the world’s largest chariot battle. Copies of the treaty exist in both Egyptian and Hittite historical sources and signify agreements to cease conflict, repatriate refugees, and promise peace. A copy of the Kadesh Peace Treaty hangs in the United Nations (see “Replica of Peace Treaty Between Hattusilis and Ramses II,” United Nations, un.org/ungifts).
[xxviii] These and many other sources of aspiration and inspiration offer us the gift of possibility. For example, in his Nobel acceptance speech for literature, William Faulkner underscored “the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” At a time when some lament the human fate because of AI, I find Faulkner’s words a contribution to the gift of possibility. He continues:
“I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice still talking.
“I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail” (William Faulkner, Banquet Speech, nobelprize.org).
[xxix] The stories we tell ourselves from generation to generation renew our hope in the gift of possibility. Call them civilizational wisdom, archetypes, fairy tales, foundational myths, what fills our human repository of faith and belief instills hope that things can end happily ever after, no matter this world’s unfairness and injustice. For example, Cinderella’s kindness and courage overcome scorn, abuse, even cruelty. Transformation (pumpkins into carriages, plain shoes into glass slippers, country girl into princess) give us hope for help from unexpected places. At the moment of truth. when the prince is ready to try the glass slipper on Cinderella’s foot, we still ask ourselves, “Would who she was, who she really was, be enough? There was no magic to help her this time. This is perhaps the greatest risk that any of us will take—to be seen as we truly are” (Cinderella, directed by Kenneth Branagh [2015], Walt Disney Pictures).
[xxx] See Michael Polyani, Personal Knowledge, Martino Publishing, Mansfield Centre, CT, 2013, p. 53, “An art which cannot be specified in detail cannot be transmitted by prescription, since no prescription for it exists. It can be passed on only by example from master to apprentice.”
[xxxi]My guides in Nevis told me some of the primary, middle, and high schools are located on the same street. This creates community as students and teachers stay connected from kindergarten through high school.
[xxxii]We will not have understood AI’s potential and limitations until we have plumbed where it can -- and cannot -- replicate or initiate the breathtakingly human breakthroughs that imagine and define who we are with the greatest gifts of possibility for good in our relationships with Deity (Thou), self (I), society (They), and natural world (It).