The NAUA Academy presents its most compelling course to date with over 100 people registered. The presentation covers the philosophy and ideas behind the identity movement, that has driven so much controversy in churches, universities and businesses. This presentation helps us understand why.
The presentation begins at about minute 2:36.
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Frank Casper and Jay Kiskel are long time Unitarians who are very concerned with the ideological and authoritarian shift happening in Unitarian Universalist congregations and organizations. They also realized that there is no way for average Unitarian Universalists to communicate with one another. Thus, they authored Used to be UU: The Systematic Attack on UU Liberalism and founded the Fifth Principle Project.
This five page PDF Executive Summary of the book overviews the main ideas and summarizes the controversies that continue to challenge Unitarians and their organizations. Many UU leaders belief that dissidents like Casper and Kiskel are needlessly promoting these controversies. The book makes the counter argument that something is deeply problematic with this ideological shift in UU organization and leadership.
They invite you to read the book, think of how it does, or does not apply to your understanding of our Faith and to draw your own conclusions.
Rev. Todd Eklof teams up with a variety of Artificial Intelligent tools and Wikipedia to create an amazing set short videos high lighting ancient Greek Philosophers. Besides being engaging, visually stunning and informative, Todd claims the videos were easy and quick to create.
We hope you enjoy the videos and subscribe to the YouTube Channel for notifications has more philosophers
are added to the series.
There is much uncertainty and uneasiness about what Artificial Intelligence will mean for our future but, for now, it’s already being employed by millions of people to save time researching, writing, creating art, and producing media. Not wishing to be left behind, I recently started dabbling with AI myself and have been overwhelmed by its creative possibilities.
My exploration began by taking a children’s story I’d written several years ago about a mama bear and her hungry cubs. I pasted its transcript into ElevenLabs AI, a text-to-speech program, chose a voice, and within seconds had a flawless voice-track telling the story. Then I asked ChatGPT to create a storyboard. The story was immediately broken down into scenes, complete with descriptions that I could then use as image prompts in Leonardo AI, a text-to-image program. After I had all the original AI generated royalty free pictures needed for the story, I animated and made them 3D in LeiaPix AI. Finally, I asked Tracksy AI to compose an original piece of music, lullaby-like, to play in the background (also royalty free). Then I edited it all together the old-fashioned way, using Adobe’s Premiere Pro.
The most time-consuming part of the process was the extra time it took to learn these various (mostly free) programs and how best to prompt them for my desired outcomes. (It’s a whole lot easier than learning the symbolic language necessary to code!) This only amounted to minutes, not hours or days. That’s it! Check out the accompanying link to see the outcome for yourself.
By NAUA President, Rev. Dr. Todd Eklof
The August 2023 Issue of the Liberal Beacon is now available.
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