Little Beasts Exhibit Examines The Nexus Of Biology, Theology, And Art
Little Beasts gives viewers a chance to take a step back, appreciate the beauty of nature, and contemplate mankind’s place in the universe.Little Beasts gives viewers a chance to take a step back, appreciate the beauty of nature, and contemplate mankind’s place in the universe.Doug Wilson’s CNN interview exposes the left’s religious illiteracy ... again
For the leftists who lie awake at night worrying about Christian nationalism taking over the country, Pastor Doug Wilson has clarified that it’s much worse than they think. Christians aren’t planning to stop at the country — they plan to Christianize the world! That is the stuff of nightmares for left-wing atheist CNN journalists and humanities professors.
CNN’s interview last week with Doug Wilson went just as you’d expect: a reporter acting as if she were hearing about the Great Commission for the first time and Wilson fielding “gotcha” questions about whether he really supports a pro-slavery theocracy.
It’s not a question of whether we live in a ‘theocracy,’ but of which God we serve.
But the real story isn’t Wilson — it’s the reporter and the ideology she represents. Has she never been to Sunday school? Had she already been thoroughly “decolonized” from the Bible by the time she took a literature class? Does she truly not know that Christians founded the United States on Christian ideas — or that prominent Americans, multiple presidents, and the Supreme Court have called ours a Christian nation? Does she even care?
The Great Commission means ‘conversion’
Wilson responded to the interviewer with his usual flair. He pointed out that if she visited Saudi Arabia, she would recognize it as an Islamic nation and not be surprised. But he also made it clear that he plans to convert Saudi Arabia into a Christian nation.
And that’s the key word: convert.
Christianity is not a tribal religion. It seeks to fill the earth by preaching the gospel and converting sinners to Christ. This is the source of the belief that all humans are equal.
That’s precisely why Christianity is such an offense to the non-Christian. The sinner doesn’t mind being told, “I don’t agree with you.” But preaching Christ crucified is foolishness to the worldly-wise because it confronts them with a painful truth: They have sinned not only against their neighbor, but against God — and the only means of reconciliation is the cross of Christ.
They must humble their pride, but the modern leftist worships pride.
Every culture but ‘Christian’
“Culture” is another reason why Christian culture is so repugnant to the left. Leftists are fine recognizing that Islam gives rise to Islamic culture and Islamic countries. In fact, what do female reporters do when they work in Saudi Arabia? They voluntarily wear head coverings and act respectful of Islamic authorities. The same goes for Buddhism or Hinduism.
But if you point out that Christianity also produces a distinctive culture, one that gave us the United States and the values that have allowed it to continue, they panic. Suddenly, they’re asking questions about slavery and the role of women.
The CNN report spent considerable time — given its length — on how Wilson and other conservative Christians view women. The reporter was quick to mention her favorite dystopian fantasy, “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Why? Because the idea that a woman might actually enjoy having and raising her own children to know and love God simply doesn’t compute.
Such a woman, in the reporter’s view, must be under the severe oppression of men to harbor such ideas. The reporter shared that she has three children, but also emphasized that she is a successful journalist, which consumes most of her time.
Wilson’s answer humanized mothers more than anything CNN likely has ever aired. What could be more important than caring for the immortal souls of your own children? Why hand that off to someone who hates God and pushes LGBTQ+ ideology in kindergarten classrooms? Christianity teaches the dignity of women and mothers in a way that the hollow, secularized values of the left never can.
We all serve somebody
And yet the supposed worry about Christian nationalism is that once you let one religion into the halls of power, you’ll have to let others in too. If Christians have the ascendancy today, are they really ready for some other religion to gain power if the next election goes the other way?
This kind of argument has been used to keep Christians under control for decades. Wilson’s reply cuts to the heart of the matter: it’s not a question of whether we live in a theocracy, but which God we serve. Everyone serves some god. Christians know this.
The left, on the other hand, has tried to hold on to American principles after ripping them from their theological roots. But those principles only ever made sense in a Christian context — historically and logically. The result? The left now serves the god of pleasure and holds parades in honor of Aphrodite.
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Whatever one thinks about Wilson, what he said in this interview isn’t controversial. Or it shouldn't be. Christ gave Christians the Great Commission. The New Testament shows Christians living it out, and they eventually Christianized the Roman Empire. Old Testament prophecy assures us that the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord. Both Christians and non-Christians know what’s at stake.
And just as everyone serves some god, everyone also seeks to convert others. The left wants to teach other people’s children (since leftists rarely have their own) that they are merely animals and should worship Eros in all its forms. Christians teach that humans are made in the image of God, and they want to convert people to faith in Christ. The lines are clearly drawn.
How AI is silently undermining Christianity from within
South Korea’s demographic crisis is no secret: plummeting birth rates, collapsing marriages, and a society aging faster than it can replenish itself.
What’s less discussed is how this crisis has seeped into the Catholic Church. Faced with shrinking congregations and a growing sense of irrelevance, church leaders in South Korea have not turned inward toward doctrine or upward toward God. They’ve turned, instead, to circuits and code.
When scripture gets scripted
From Seoul to Suncheon, priests are now being trained to use generative AI. Not to critique it or guard the faithful from its implications, but to embrace it — enthusiastically. They're using ChatGPT to write sermons and generate liturgical music.
What once began in the minds of Silicon Valley technocrats is now being welcomed into the sanctuary.
This shift marks a deep departure from the church’s foundation. A tradition grounded in divine revelation is beginning to rely on predictive text to feed its flock. Priests are swapping prayers for prompts. Scripture is being blended with machine-generated syntax, often created by people who view religion as an outdated, outlandish myth.
Herein lies the problem: Algorithms don't understand dogma. They optimize for relevance, not revelation.
AI won’t march into a parish and demand the pulpit. It doesn’t need to. All it takes is gradual adoption, dressed in euphemisms like “pastoral efficiency” and “digital evangelization.” In the process, the church begins to outsource something essential — discernment, once the backbone of spiritual leadership, now handed off to a machine.
The gospel isn't a trend to follow. If anything, it’s the remedy for a world lost in trends.
And once AI begins shaping sermons, it also begins shaping belief. The process is slow, subtle, and in many ways suicidal. A softened passage here. A reworded doctrine there. A few iterations later, the original message remains in form but loses its force — still quoting scripture, but lacking the strength, the substance, and the sacred weight it once carried.
Truth bends to the tone of the digital mood. And the faithful, unaware, are guided by a voice that knows nothing of their souls.
From Calvary to clickbait
Meanwhile, in Rome, the Vatican just celebrated a different kind of digital transformation.
Last month, the Catholic Church held a “digital jubilee,” honoring 1,000 priests and friars who have embraced the role of influencer. But these men are not known for spiritual authority. They’re known for gym selfies, poetic reels, and dog videos. Some offer blessings between squat reps, but none offer hope.
The church likes to call it outreach, but it’s really just image management with a halo filter. The priesthood, once a solemn and set-apart vocation, is now being curated for online consumption. Mass increasingly feels like a soft-lit content shoot, complete with drone footage and lo-fi background music. The Eucharist is staged like a backdrop. Captions do the work catechism once did. Sermons are trimmed to fit reels, and followers are counted like conversions.
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Somewhere along the way, the line between preaching and performing vanished.
There’s a quiet seduction at work. The lure of virality, the steady drip of likes, shares, and algorithmic affirmation. But the church was never called to be entertaining, and it wasn’t built to chase engagement metrics or trend on TikTok. Its task has always been to rouse the soul, not flatter it. To call people into spiritual battle, not soothe them with hashtags and Father Fabio’s weekend vlog.
The goal was never visibility. It was salvation — a far less marketable, far more demanding thing.
In chasing relevance, the church allows the culture to set the terms. It tries to keep pace with a world that’s built to forget. But the gospel isn't a trend to follow. If anything, it’s the remedy for a world lost in trends.
When relevance replaces revelation
When priests become influencers, they lose the distance that once gave their words weight. And when the Church lets AI in without caution, it mistakes manipulation for modernization. Homilies no longer rise from prayer or tradition. They’re assembled through autocomplete. Doctrine doesn’t need to be debated; it just needs to be updated.
But the world doesn’t need a church that mimics it. It needs a church that holds firm, one that doesn’t run the race for relevance, but stays rooted solid, unchanging, unapologetic.
That spirit isn’t gone, but reclaiming it will take courage. The kind that says no, not just to shiny tools, but to the creeping belief that real problems demand digital fixes. It means pushing back against the idea that relevance is the highest virtue. It means remembering that the priest isn’t a host, the church isn’t a brand, and the Mass isn’t content.
Truth doesn’t evolve with audience feedback. It isn’t versioned. It doesn’t run on engagement or A/B test itself. It just stands — stubborn, unmoved, inconvenient. And the church’s job has always been to stand with it, not tweak it for better traction.
If the church forgets that — and if it keeps chasing applause instead of holding the line — it won’t be silenced, persecuted, or driven underground. It’ll be liked, shared, and celebrated right into irrelevance, gradually transformed into yet another lifestyle brand, one more voice amid a noisy feed, fading away as soon as the algorithm shifts.
Shroud of Turin debunked? Not even close — here's the truth
Once again, the Shroud of Turin is making headlines, this time with bold claims such as “The Shroud of Turin was not laid on Jesus’ body, scientists reveal” and “Shroud of Turin didn’t wrap Jesus’ crucified body — it was just art, new research claims.”
These sensationalized assertions are based on a recent article published in Archaeometry, in which Cicero Moraes, an accomplished digital modeler, used visually intriguing 3D simulations to argue that the Shroud image could not have been formed on a full human body, but rather by contact with a low-relief sculpture.
Why wouldn’t Jesus leave behind a sign of His resurrection?
While the media delights in a provocative “debunking” narrative, Moraes’ study is not a scientific breakthrough. In fact, it recycles long-discredited assumptions.
His central thesis — that the Shroud is a contact imprint — is not demonstrated but simply presumed. Using 3D software, he simulates what a cloth might look like when draped over both a full 3D form and a shallow bas-relief. He then concludes — predictably — that the bas-relief result more closely resembles the Shroud. But this is not new insight. It’s a tautology.
When you begin with a flawed assumption, your conclusion naturally mirrors it. This isn’t discovery — it’s circular logic.
More importantly, Moraes fails to engage with decades of rigorous image analysis and physical testing that demonstrate the Shroud image is not consistent with contact imprinting, artistic rendering, or any known medieval method. The Shroud’s image is anatomically precise, encoded with three-dimensional information, and limited to the topmost surface fibrils of the linen — not soaked or pressed through as one would expect from a contact transfer.
Moreover, Moraes’ approach ignores decades of serious scientific work, especially findings that deeply challenge any contact-based theory. The Shroud image is not the product of direct contact. It is far too subtle, too topographically accurate, and too spatially encoded for that.
Last week, I had the privilege of serving as a keynote speaker at the International Shroud of Turin Conference in St. Louis, where I met with Dr. John Jackson, one of the original physicists who led the 1978 STURP investigation and co-author of the landmark 1984 Applied Optics study on image formation.
The evidence he and his team uncovered stands in sharp contrast to the assumptions Moraes recycles.
Consider the groundbreaking VP-8 Image Analyzer work done in 1976 by Captains (and physicists) John Jackson and Eric Jumper, U.S. Air Force scientists. This analog image analysis device, developed for nuclear weapons laboratories in New Mexico, was designed to detect spatial relationships in radiographic imagery. Additionally, the VP-8 Image Analyzer was developed and used by U.S. military weapons laboratories, specifically for analyzing high-energy radiographic and photographic data, including images of atomic bomb tests.
When Jackson and Jumper input a photograph of the Shroud into the VP-8, the machine generated a three-dimensional relief of a human body.
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This was extraordinary. No other photograph — whether of a painting, statue, or live subject — produced anything close. Why? Because the Shroud image is spatially encoded. Its image intensity varies inversely with the distance between the cloth and the body it once covered. The closer a body part was to the cloth, the darker the image; the farther away, the fainter the impression.
This inverse relationship was confirmed in Jackson, Jumper, and Ercoline’s 1984 peer-reviewed paper in Applied Optics, where they wrote:
The frontal image on the Shroud of Turin is shown to be consistent with a body shape covered with a naturally draping cloth in the sense that image shading can be derived from a single global mapping function of distance between these two surfaces.
They concluded that none of the known artistic or physical processes — direct contact, heat transfer, dabbing with powders, electrostatic imaging, or radiation from a heated bas-relief — could simultaneously explain the Shroud’s 3D encoding, high resolution, surface-only image penetration, and absence of pigment or thermal damage.
Let me be clear: The Shroud is not simply a medieval art piece or a contact imprint.
Its image resides only on the topmost fibrils of the linen’s surface. It does not penetrate the threads. Its subtle optical qualities are consistent across ultraviolet and visible spectra. It displays anatomical fidelity that would be nearly impossible to reproduce by hand. And unlike thermal burns from the 1532 fire, which fluoresce under ultraviolet light, the image does not, indicating it was not formed by heat.
Moraes’ theory also fails to explain the lack of distortion.
As Russ Breault noted in his interview with Michael Patrick Shiels, a cloth wrapped around a face would, when flattened, appear “like a pumpkin.” Yet the Shroud image displays no such warping. The image appears vertically collimated — not distorted or stretched as it would be from wrapping or contact.
And critically, attempts to reproduce the image by pressing cloth against bas-reliefs or models — whether by rubbing pigment, applying heat, or using other methods — have consistently failed to replicate the Shroud’s anatomical accuracy or 3D encoding.
As Jackson and his co-authors emphasize:
A satisfactory hypothesis of image formation must be able to produce an image structure capable of a 3-D interpretation … for in doing so the shading distribution of the Shroud image should presumably be duplicatable.
So what are we left with?
While Moraes’ graphics are state of the art, the conclusions drawn are far less innovative than they first appear. The study rests on a foundational assumption: that the Shroud image is a type of contact imprint — essentially, a “body print” resulting from direct physical interaction with a corpse or sculpted form.
Unsurprisingly, Moraes’ simulations conclude that a low-relief model aligns more closely with the Shroud image than a full-body figure. But as digital artist Ray Downing — a renowned American 3D expert who was featured in the History Channel special "The Real Face of Jesus" — rightly observes, this is a classic case of circular reasoning. If one begins with the assumption that the image was formed through contact, it is no surprise when the model supports that assumption.
This approach overlooks critical empirical details. The Shroud image is characterized by its photorealistic subtlety, with gradations and shading more akin to a negative photographic plate than a physical transfer. Traditional contact imprints, by contrast, produce stark, binary images — high in contrast, low in nuance.
But the presence of features such as the sides of the nose and cheeks — areas unlikely to have touched the cloth at all — poses a serious challenge to any purely contact-based model.
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There are further inconsistencies.
The lack of mirror symmetry between the frontal and dorsal images contradicts expectations from simple cloth-body interaction. We also do not observe the telltale signs of capillary wicking or pressure distortion typical of contact imprints. Moreover, the bloodstains on the Shroud are anatomically precise, appear to have transferred at a different time from the body image, and exhibit halo rings under UV fluorescence — further evidence that the blood and image formed by distinct mechanisms.
As Downing and others have noted, Moraes’ study does not provide novel insights beyond what has already been established — decades ago — by the STURP investigation. His use of modern rendering software offers a visual upgrade but does not advance the scientific conversation. Presentation alone cannot rescue a flawed hypothesis.
Ultimately, Moraes’ work illustrates a broader truth: Technological sophistication cannot compensate for weak foundational assumptions.
Until a contact-imprint model can be demonstrated under real-world conditions — and account for the full range of physical, chemical, and optical properties of the Shroud — the theory remains speculative at best. Digital simulations, no matter how elegant, are only as reliable as the premises they’re built upon. In this case, the digital artistry is commendable, but the interpretive framework remains deeply inadequate.
Moraes’ simulation, while technically polished, brings nothing new to the conversation. It recycles a theory that fails against the hard evidence — evidence amassed by physicists, chemists, and image analysts across more than four decades. Without accounting for the VP-8 findings or the full chemical, spectral, and physical properties of the Shroud image, his conclusions remain, at best, superficial.
And then there’s the deeper question. As Russ Breault beautifully summarized: Why wouldn’t Jesus leave behind a sign of His resurrection?
According to John’s Gospel, the linen cloths left in the tomb were the first piece of evidence to convince John that Jesus had risen (John 20:8). Is it so implausible that God, in a moment of divine transformation, impressed upon burial linen a subtle, encoded image — a kind of sacred relic left for the world to ponder?
Moraes’ paper may impress in terms of digital technique, but it fails to contend with the depth of the data. Any theory about the Shroud must explain not just what is seen — but how it is scientifically seen.
The Shroud is not merely mysterious — it is measurable. And the more we measure, the more it challenges every naturalistic explanation offered so far.
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