Ken M. Penner – Digital Biblical Studies

Can AI Edit Ancient Manuscripts? Benchmarking LLMs across the Digital Scholarly Editing Pipeline

Can generative AI edit ancient manuscripts? Over the past two years, claims that frontier multimodal models can “read historical manuscripts in seconds” have proliferated across tech media. For textual scholars, critical editors, and digital humanists, these claims demand rigorous, empirical evaluation rather than uncritical adoption or dismissive skepticism.

Preparing a primary textual witness for scholarly publication is a demanding, multi-phase endeavor. A digital scholarly edition requires far more than translation: it demands diplomatic transcription from damaged surfaces, multi-witness collation, constructing a formal critical apparatus, lemmatization and morphosyntactic parsing, arbitrating epigraphic lacunae, and encoding the entire apparatus into schema-valid TEI EpiDoc XML.

Under our SSHRC Insight Development Grant (Generative AI in Digital Humanities Research Methodology), our research team at St. Francis Xavier University developed a comprehensive benchmark suite to test 31 frontier and open-weights Large Language Models across 13 distinct scholarly editing tasks in Medieval Latin, Ancient Greek, and Dead Sea Scrolls Aramaic.

Here is what we learned from 400+ dual-blind graded evaluations, latency audits, and cost-efficiency trade-offs.

1. The Benchmark Architecture: 13 Tasks Across 3 Corpora

Rather than evaluating generic, out-of-context translations, our benchmark tests models across the entire end-to-end digital scholarly editing pipeline using three primary historical witnesses representing distinct scripts and preservation states:

Medieval Latin Bookhand (Isidore of Seville, De ortu et obitu Patrum, Vat. lat. 629, f. 3v): Pristine 10th-century Caroline/early Gothic minuscule in two columns with standard scribal abbreviations, ligatures, and critical collation against Chaparro Gómez (1985).
Continuous Greek Majuscule (Codex Marchalianus, Vat. gr. 2125, p. 11): 6th-century Egyptian uncial written in scriptio continua with lunate sigmas (ϲ), Nomina Sacra contractions under supralinear strokes, and collation against Schermann’s 1907 Vitae Prophetarum.
Fragmentary Qumran Aramaic (Book of Giants, 4Q530 / 4Q531 / 6Q8): 1st-century BCE/CE Jewish Aramaic formal square script on darkened, lacunose leather. Tasks include consonantal transcription with DJD sigla, multi-fragment alignment, verbal stem parsing (Peal/Pael), and lacuna-disciplined translation.

Each model was evaluated under strict philological negative constraints at temperature zero and scored across a 0–100 scale by an automated dual-blind judging panel (MiniMax M3 and Grok 4.6).

2. Benchmark Results & Visualizations

Overall Leaderboard: 31 LLMs across Digital Scholarly Editing Benchmark — **Figure 1:** Overall performance leaderboard across 31 LLMs evaluated on 13 digital scholarly editing tasks (0–100 scale).

Heatmap of 31 Models across 13 Scholarly Editing Tasks — **Figure 2:** Task-by-task performance heatmap showing pronounced model specialization across transcription, collation, translation, parsing, and TEI XML encoding.

3D Pareto Frontier: Score vs Latency vs Cost — **Figure 3:** The 3D Pareto frontier balancing overall accuracy, execution latency, and cost per task.

🖱️ Interactive 3D View: Left-click and drag with your mouse to rotate the viewpoint. Right-click and drag to pan. Scroll to zoom. Hover over any node to view exact model scores, latency, and costs.

3. Key Finding #1: The Workflow Difficulty Hierarchy

When analyzing performance across the 403 individual task evaluations, the workflow phases formed a steep, definitive difficulty hierarchy:

                      WORKFLOW PHASE DIFFICULTY HIERARCHY (0–100 Mean Score)
  Translation            57.7  ──────────────────────────────
  Transcription          48.9  ────────────────────
  Lacuna Handling        45.9  ──────────────────
  Annotation / MSD       39.0  ──────────────
  TEI P5 XML Encoding    37.6  ─────────────
  Multi-Witness Collation 32.6  ──────────

Translation (57.7/100): Modern LLMs perform relatively well on literary translation from Greek and Latin, leveraging vast pre-training corpora.
The Collation Bottleneck (32.6/100): Constructing a formal critical apparatus ([lemma] reading Siglum ;) remains the steepest hurdle for AI. Models frequently hallucinate non-existent variants or fail to maintain strict lemma-bracket discipline across multiple manuscript witnesses.
TEI XML Metadata Failure (37.6/100): Models dropped precipitously when tasked with emitting schema-valid TEI P5 EpiDoc XML. They routinely hallucinate modern catalog schemas, invert nested tags, or fail XML validation, proving that structured digital encoding remains an active research challenge.

4. Key Finding #2: The Script & Damage Gradient

In our multimodal vision transcription benchmarks, character error rates (CER) did not correlate primarily with language family or script complexity. Rather, model performance mapped directly onto physical manuscript preservation and lacunosity:

                            THE SCRIPT & DAMAGE GRADIENT
  0.0 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────► 1.0 CER
  Latin Minuscule (0.04)     Greek Majuscule (0.12)      Fragmentary Aramaic (0.75)
  • Intact parchment         • Faded ink, broken edges   • Lacunose, darkened, cracked
  • Clear word division      • Scriptio continua         • Carbon ink invisible in colour
  • High training volume     • Nomina Sacra contractions • Unseen fragmentary text

Intact Latin Bookhand (CER 0.042 / WER 0.254): On clean, continuous parchment, frontier models (Gemini 3.1 Pro, Gemini 3.7 Flash) achieve single-digit error rates in under 40 seconds. At this tier, automated transcription is already an operational reality for digital scholarly editing.
Greek Majuscule with Scriptio Continua (CER 0.121 / WER 0.281): Models like Claude Opus 4.8 and Grok 4.6 function effectively as primary drafting aids, requiring human collation to catch uncial diagonal confusions (Δ vs. Λ).
Fragmentary Dead Sea Scrolls (CER 0.754 / WER 0.980): Every model collapsed. With three out of four characters misidentified and word error rates near 100%, generative vision models are completely unusable for damaged epigraphic fragments.

5. Key Finding #3: Model Specializations & The Pareto Frontier

As illustrated in the heatmap (Figure 2) and 3D efficiency chart (Figure 3), no single model dominates every phase of digital editing:

Anthropic (Claude Opus 4.7, 4.8 & 5): Dominates hermeneutics, literary translation, and lacuna restraint (scoring up to 93.2/100 on recognizing when damaged parchment makes textual certainty impossible).
xAI (Grok 4.6 & 4.5): Demonstrates superior typographic precision and layout alignment in critical apparatus construction.
Google (Gemini 3.7 Flash) & OpenAI (GPT-5 series): Lead in high-speed morphosyntactic parsing, grammatical tagging, and structured XML generation.
The Cost-Efficiency Champions: Models like Gemini 3.7 Flash and DeepSeek v4 Flash achieve top-tier accuracy while reducing per-task costs by 95% compared to legacy frontier models (operating for fractions of a cent per page).

6. Methodological Pitfalls Every Digital Humanist Must Know

Our benchmark uncovered three systemic traps that researchers must account for when deploying AI in textual scholarship:

1. The Allograph Trap: Metrics Embody Editorial Theory

When we first evaluated Claude Opus 4.8 on Latin minuscule using raw string matching, it received a poor CER of 0.188. Detailed inspection revealed why: Claude had faithfully transcribed historical scribal allographs—long-s (ſ), r rotunda (ꝛ), and dotless-i (ı). When we applied palaeographical folding (LATIN_FOLD)—collapsing allographs to modern base characters—Claude’s error rate plummeted from 0.188 to 0.053. Naive string-matching metrics actively punish the most paleographically faithful models while rewarding models that silently modernize.

2. The Abstention Inversion: Hallucinations on Blank Leather

When seven models were fed visible-light colour images of Dead Sea Scroll fragments containing no visible ancient ink (readable only under infrared), Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-4o correctly abstained by returning [...] or declaring the image illegible. In contrast, Gemini 3.1 Pro hallucinated four lines of fluent Aramaic on every blank fragment, inventing plausible paleographical arguments for ink strokes that did not exist. Standard CER metrics perversely ranked the hallucinating model at the top of the leaderboard because it produced text. Abstention Rate must be reported as an independent metric.

3. Commercial Safety Guardrails on Sacred Texts

Commercial safety filters represent a severe infrastructure vulnerability for religious studies. Gemini 3.7 Flash suffered a 100% safety block (PROHIBITED_CONTENT) on the 6th-century Greek martyrdom of Isaiah (being sawn in two under Manasseh), while Claude Opus 5 returned a 100% content-filter refusal across all 12 Aramaic Book of Giants fragments. Digital humanists cannot rely exclusively on closed commercial APIs whose safety filters classify historical religious literature as prohibited violent content.

7. The Methodological Blueprint: Human-in-the-Loop

Rather than viewing AI as an autonomous editor or a forbidden tool, digital scholarly editing requires a Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) framework where human expertise and algorithmic capability form a synergistic workflow:

Tier 1 — High-Speed Parsing: Deploy lightweight, cost-effective models (e.g., Gemini 3.7 Flash) for initial morphological tagging and transcription drafting of intact bookhands.
Tier 2 — Critical Synthesis: Deploy disciplined reasoning models (e.g., Claude Opus, Grok 4.6) with strict negative constraint prompts for multi-witness alignment and apparatus synthesis.
Tier 3 — Human Curation & Validation: The text critic serves as the indispensable curator—arbitrating epigraphic lacunae, correcting uncial confusions, and validating schema compliance against master TEI EpiDoc standards.

In the digital age, our task is not to surrender the archive to the algorithm, but to use the algorithm to look more closely at the archive.

This research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant (“Generative AI in Digital Humanities Research Methodology”, Fund R0253025). Benchmark datasets, prompt libraries, and scoring scripts are maintained in the project repository. Special thanks to Lead Undergraduate Research Assistant Demarquis Moss for his contributions to the ground-truth collation and benchmark audits.

Biblical Allusions in U2’s “COEXIST (I Will Bless The Lord At All Times?)” (Easter Lily EP, 2026)

“COEXIST (I Will Bless the Lord At All Times?)” is a prayer written in the dirt, caught between lipstick that had learned how not to kiss and drones hovering without any consciousness over war crimes.

It begins as a reckoning with the ego: Am I the best or the worst or the worst of the best?—a line that recalls the self-indictment of “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief” (1 Timothy 1:15, KJV).

The anchor of the song is a vow seized from King David in duress, a stubborn promise to bless the Lord at all times, quoting verbatim “I will bless the LORD at all times: his praise shall continually be in my mouth” (Psalm 34:1, KJV). This is praise spoken through gritted teeth, and the COEXIST title frames that struggle with what Bono called a “powerful symbol of tolerance,” an attempt to imagine common ground when human rights feel under siege in the aftermath of 9/11.

The child without armour suggests a vulnerability that refuses the king’s heavy steel: “David strapped Saul’s sword over the armor, and he tried in vain to walk, for he was not used to them.” (1 Samuel 17:39, NRSV).

This is the “Beloved community” where food and shelter we share, a radical hospitality that remembers that to honour the hurt and the hungry is to search for the divine in the least and the lost: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in,” (Matthew 25:35, NIV), riffing on the prophet:
“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?” (Isaiah 58:6–7, NIV).

When the girl of Guadalupe sings Save us, she touches the biblical pressure of Hosanna itself: “LORD, save us! LORD, grant us success!” (Psalm 118:25, NIV).

The question mark in the title registers a faith still being tested in the wilderness, still listening for “the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God” (Isaiah 40:3, KJV).

Biblical Allusions in U2’s “In a Life” (Easter Lily EP, 2026)

“In a Life” is set in the underworld of ordinary existence. Platforms, tunnels, traffic, the Circle line. But Bono fills that cramped civic space with biblical meteorology. I’ll meet you in the air carries the ache of reunion and the upward pull of 1 Thessalonians 4:17 “After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever” (NIV). It is as though the Underground were haunted by the possibility of resurrection.

But the song doesn’t stay aloft for long. It drops into resistance. Kicking the pricks. That old King James phrase from Acts 26:14 “And when we were all fallen to the earth, I heard a voice speaking unto me, and saying in the Hebrew tongue, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks” (KJV). Saul fighting the goad and only wounding himself more deeply.

Bono has always been drawn to that collision between pride and grace, and here it sharpens into a quiet confession: still I’m learning how to kneel. This is more than piety and performance. It is surrender. The hard schooling of the self before the truth that “every knee should bow” (Philippians 2:10; cf. Romans 14:11 “For it is written, As I live, saith the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God” KJV).

Then comes an unforgiving son. It catches the older brother outside the feast in Luke 15:28, locked out not by the father but by his own refusal of mercy (“And he was angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father out, and intreated him” KJV).

Even the closing descent, The ocean floor is not my home, sounds like Jonah praying from the deep (Jonah 2:6 “at the bottom of the sea where the mountains take root” MSG). It also reaches toward Hebrews 11:13–16 (“they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth”) and its restless conviction that human beings are pilgrims, not settlers.

The song’s deepest insight lies in its confession that nothing is finally self-made. I never achieved anything on my own / I only received from being shown. That is the theology beneath the train noise. Grace arrives before achievement. Surrender before arrival. And even in the packed loneliness of modern life, Bono hears the old biblical rumour that this world, for all its beauty and wreckage, is not the final address.

Biblical Allusions in U2’s “Easter Parade” (Easter Lily EP, 2026)

In “Easter Parade,” Bono turns grief into procession, and procession into theology. Something in me died / But I was no longer afraid catches the New Testament’s fierce paradox that death can become a doorway, that one is “buried with him through baptism into death” in order to “walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4), finding the love that “casteth out fear” (1 John 4:18).

The song lives in the country of the unseen: You speak to the part of me that cannot speak recalls the Spirit interceding beyond language (Romans 8:26), and I can’t see you but I know you’re there stands close to faith as “the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).

By vowing to always worship what I cannot keep, the lyric renounces possession in favor of the eternal, echoing Christ’s warning against storing treasure on earth (Matthew 6:19–20).

Admitting that not every song will be a prayer, the song strips away performance and piety until all that remains is the oldest cry of dependence: Kyrie eleison—Lord, have mercy (Matthew 15:22).

Biblical Allusions in U2’s “Resurrection Song” (Easter Lily EP, 2026)

“Resurrection Song” plays mortality as a death and resurrection show, hunting for an open door. It could be the open door of Revelation 3:8, or the door of salvation in John 10:9.

It leans into the cold dark, whispering, Last night you promised the sun would rise, catching the bruised hope of Psalm 30:5 or Luke 1:78, where the night does not get the last word.

It goes looking for signs to forever, the way John’s Gospel (2:11 or 20:30–31) treats miracles not as magic tricks but as signs pointing past themselves.

And while the lyric swings between heaven and hell (Matthew 25:46), it refuses to leave resurrection in stained glass. It drags it onto the pavement. We gotta get the hungry bread. That could be Isaiah 58:7 or Matthew 25:35. If nobody is getting fed, the hallelujahs ring hollow.

Then the song goes for the throat: ’Til death dies too. Picking a fight with the grave happens in 1 Corinthians 15:26, Revelation 21:4, and 2 Timothy 1:10, with the last enemy on its knees.

And when the dirt settles, love’s its epitaph, maybe nodding to Song of Solomon 8:6, where love stands up to death and does not blink.

The song signs off with a dare to love extravagantly. Wasteful. Beautiful. Like the costly perfume of John 12:3, or the stubborn, enduring love of 1 Corinthians 13:4–8. Without regret.

Biblical Allusions in U2’s “Song for Hal” (Easter Lily EP, 2026)

“Song for Hal” sits in the bruised, expectant hush of Holy Saturday, that strange borderland between loss and resurrection where a friend has vanished from the frame but faith refuses to let that disappearance have the final word. Written by The Edge as a tribute to the band’s close friend, the celebrated music producer Hal Willner who passed away from COVID-19 complications in 2020, the song is a vigil; it reaches out for the divine in the midst of solitude. You’re not alone when you’re on your knees leans into the secret companionship of prayer, recalling Jesus’s instruction to seek the Father “who is unseen” (Matt. 6:6 NIV), and Not alone if no one sees you fall sits in the psalmist’s confidence that “The Lord upholds all who fall and lifts up all who are bowed down” (Ps. 145:14). Even the line that one being close to God / who makes his old friends laugh lets the heavy air of grief breathe with promised joy, like Job’s stubborn hope that God “will yet fill your mouth with laughter and your lips with shouts of joy” (Job 8:21).

When a friend disappears from the photograph, one is plunged into the heavy, static-filled silence of that Saturday before the stone is rolled away, yet Bono recognized, “even sometimes in the silence, God does answer” (McCormick 19). “Song for Hal” listens on that frequency.

Biblical Allusions in U2’s “Scars” (Easter Lily, 2026)

In Bono’s imaginative world, faith often begins as the quiet hum of a Dublin choir or the polite Jesus of the Sunday school wall charts. It is the Jesus who stands at the door and knocks, waiting for the believer to turn the brass handle (Revelation 3:20). But as one lives a little longer, gathering the “scar tissue” of human struggle and sitting in the harsh, fluorescent glare of hospital waiting rooms, the realization dawns that grace isn’t always polite. Sometimes history stops knocking and starts using a boot. Sometimes the doors of the heart have to be kicked open.

“Scars” is a lyric that feels written with the police report of Good Friday still warm in the hands. Bono’s work pushes back against sanitizing the cross, reminding the listener that it was a brutal state execution. The song plunges into the roar of the townhall demanding a scapegoat (Matthew 27), the cynical suits making laws out of lies, and the cold, terrifying steel of the “nails of the state.” One cannot sing about this Passion without tasting the sour vinegar on the sponge (John 19). The lyric wants the listener to feel the absolute physical wreckage of it. When the song shifts and asks, “Put your hand in my side,” it evokes Thomas in the upper room (John 20), yes, but it is also a demand to touch the very real, bleeding contours of the marginalized today. The loser. The least (Matthew 25). That is where the divine hides.

And the wildest twist of the narrative—the paradox Isaiah saw centuries before when he wrote that “with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53)—is that the trauma isn’t erased on Easter morning. The wounds remain. The scars are what give true beauty; they are the proof of love’s stubborn persistence. Bono’s writing has long been drawn to the strange fact that when the resurrected Christ steps out of the blackest night into the blue dawn, his own friends don’t even recognize him. Mary thinks he’s the gardener in the dirt (John 20); the disciples on the road to Emmaus think he’s just a stranger talking too much (Luke 24). It is the terrifying and beautiful promise of “Scars”: You won’t know who I am the next time we meet. But the divine knows exactly who the believer is, bruises, scars, and all.

Secularization and Memorialization in the Father Stan Bust Project

Mural of Father Stan MacDonald at StFX (Ken Kingston photo from https://www.989xfm.ca/new-mural-overlooking-st-fx-stadium-honours-father-stan-macdonald/ )

After Reverend Father Stanley MacDonald passed away on May 11, 2025, at the age of 92, the university community initiated plans to erect a memorial bust in his honour. But the proposed location for this permanent monument is not the university chapel or a designated sacred space. Instead, the proposed home for the bust is the Amelia Saputo Centre for Healthy Living, the epicentre of the university’s athletic, recreational, and physical wellness life. I was asked what I thought of the “secularizing” of a Catholic priest’s legacy. After all, “Father Stan” served as an ordained Catholic priest for over four decades before returning to his alma mater to serve as a Priest-in-Residence. Why the Saputo Centre? Shouldn’t his lifelong religious vocation take priority when selecting a memorial site? But the public persona by which he is better known is that of the “ultimate StFX Super Fan,” with his booming “Go X Go!” chant, his presence at varsity sporting events, and his relationships with students and athletes.

Since we’re a university, let’s investigate whether this community-driven memorial project to place a Catholic priest’s memorial inside a secular athletic facility constitutes an erasure of Father Stan’s religious vocation (a literal “secularization” of his legacy). The proposition to erect a memorial bust of the late Reverend Father Stanley MacDonald within the Amelia Saputo Centre for Healthy Living at St. Francis Xavier University serves as a classic sociological case study in the dynamics of memory, spatial geography, and secularization in modern higher education. Where I end up on this question is that this project reflects a post-secular integration of faith, presence, and community identity.

The concept of secularization has been a foundational pillar of classical sociological theory for over a century. Theoretical frameworks influenced by early twentieth-century thinker Max Weber posit that modernization, rationalization, and the rise of scientific paradigms inevitably lead to the decline of religious authority and practice. Weber’s analysis of the “Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” famously explored how the secularization of Christian asceticism laid the foundation for modern capitalist structures and rationalized bureaucracies. This is the traditional, zero-sum view (referred to as the “subtraction narrative”), in which the sacred and the secular operate in direct opposition. As secular institutions (e.g., state-funded universities, scientific laboratories, and public athletic programs) grow in prominence and operational scale, religious institutions are forced to retreat to the private sphere.

Under this classical framework, placing a priest’s bust in a secular sports facility would be the final stage of institutional secularization. It would be the triumph of the secular arena over the sacred chapel, reducing a lifetime of sacramental and theological devotion to a mere cultural artifact or a secular mascot designed to boost athletic morale.

But more recent scholars of religion and sociology in post-secular Europe and North America tend to see secularization not as the subtraction or death of religion, but as the transformation, translation, and relocation of the sacred. Sacred spaces and religious figures are repurposed to serve broader civic, psychological, or community functions without losing their transcendent resonance.

Mircea Eliade noted in his explorations of the sacred and the profane that humans can’t stop constructing sacred spaces, even in settings that are ostensibly secular. Edward Linenthal has studied exactly this: modern public monuments operating as sacred civic spaces. So when a Catholic priest is memorialized in a university sports complex, it’s a prime example of this kind of spatial and symbolic translation. The community still needs sacred focal points, but we look for them in the new version of sacred spaces: areas of collective effervescence, of which sports arenas are a classic instance.

During the early to mid-twentieth century, the institutional identity of StFX was characterized by “priest-professors.” This was the situation long before he became “Father” Stan; I mean when he was a varsity athlete. Stan MacDonald competed for both the X-Men varsity hockey and rugby teams. He was captain of the very last varsity men’s rugby team to play on the StFX campus in 1953. He understood the psychological pressures, the intense physical demands, the necessity of teamwork, and the communal bonding inherent in collegiate sports. His lived experience as an athlete provided the empathy and environmental understanding that would later define his campus ministry.

Only after his graduation from StFX in 1954, of course, did MacDonald enrol at the Holy Heart Seminary in Halifax to complete his theological formation. On May 23, 1959, he was ordained to the priesthood. For nearly forty years, Father Stan served in Cape Breton and Antigonish as Assistant Pastor and Pastor. So it is true that to suggest that Father Stan lacked a deep, formal commitment to the institutional Church would be a historical fallacy; his life was entirely defined by his ecclesial vows.

But over the twentieth century, the university shifted. The number of ordained priests as faculty members dwindled, and the university transitioned toward what we have now: a secular, lay faculty and administration. And at the age of 65, Father Stan officially retired from active parish ministry; this was in 1998. Yet his most highly publicized, culturally impactful, and institutionally defining phase of ministry was still to come: a decade later, in 2008, he returned to his alma mater, serving as Priest-in-Residence at StFX.

Father Stan’s M.O. as Priest-in-Residence was to be a visible presence across the secular spaces of the campus. He became the iconic figure loved by all, instantly recognizable by his gregarious smile, his booming voice, and his signature greeting: fist-bumps. He met students exactly where they were; there were chats outside the meal hall, conversations over coffee at The Tall and Small, and, of course, his faithful attendance at athletic events. He is the epitome of a bridge between the university’s historic Catholic identity and its modern, heavily secularized student body.

Traditional religious gatherings no longer are the primary locus where community cohesion happens, especially among Canadian university students. For the vast majority of the student body these days, the campus chapel is physically and culturally peripheral. Instead, the athletic stadium, the hockey arena, and the gymnasium take over that function as the modern forges of collective identity. It is in these highly charged physical spaces that the student body gathers to participate in shared “rituals,” chant “litanies” in unison, and experience what sociologist Émile Durkheim termed “collective effervescence,” that is, the profound sense of energy and harmony that emerges when a group of people gather for a shared, synchronized purpose.

Father Stan understood the intense sociology and psychology of these spaces. He recognized that to pastor effectively to the modern university student, he had to enter their sanctuaries. So he became a permanent fixture in the crowd for all varsity sports over a span of fifteen years, providing unwavering support for both the X-Men and X-Women teams, whether football, soccer, rugby, hockey, basketball, or cross country.

The renaming of the building to the Amelia Saputo Centre for Healthy Living points to a philosophical shift that the facility’s mandate extends beyond elite, competitive varsity exercise to encompass holistic physical and mental well-being for Xaverians. This holistic philosophy is exactly what Father Stan’s role on campus represents. He always made a habit of checking in on the mental and emotional health of the students. So placing his memorial in a building dedicated to “healthy living” is an acknowledgement that spiritual and emotional health are essential components of human wellness.

With this context in mind, let’s circle back to the question: Does the placement of a bust of a Catholic priest in a multi-million-dollar sports complex constitute a “secularization” of his legacy? By monumentalizing him primarily as a “Super Fan” in an athletic centre rather than as a priest in a chapel or a library, is the university community stripping away the specific theological and sacramental realities of his lifelong vocation?

Well, from a strict traditionalist or classical Weberian perspective, an argument can be made that placing the bust in the Saputo Centre secularizes and dilutes Father Stan’s legacy. He was, after all, fundamentally and permanently an ordained priest who served as a spiritual shepherd for nearly forty years in conventional parish settings across Nova Scotia.

But a post-secular sociological perspective suggests the exact opposite. The placement of a Catholic priest’s monument in a secular sports complex isn’t the dilution or erasure of his religious vocation, as classic secularization theory would have it; rather, it is the most authentic reflection of his incarnational ministry. Father Stan deliberately chose to execute his post-retirement ministry in the secular spaces of the campus. He didn’t wait passively in the chapel for students to seek him out; he proactively went to the hockey arenas, the running trails, the dining halls, and the coffee shops. The concept of incarnation (present in multiple religions) dictates that the divine enters into the messy, physical reality of the human world. Father Stan’s ministry was nothing if not incarnational. He was indeed the “Super Fan,” using the universal language of collegiate sports to bridge generational, cultural, and ideological divides, offering guidance, joy, and spiritual steadying to thousands of students regardless of their personal religious affiliations.

Viewed this way, the Saputo Centre is the very site of his most impactful work; it’s not a profane space that degrades his memory. To place his memorial in a quiet, purely religious space—a space he frequented but which did not define his public persona over the last two decades—would be an exercise in historical revisionism. Instead, the placement of the bust in the Saputo Centre accurately acknowledges that in the modern, pluralistic university, the sacred is encountered more often in the bleachers, the locker rooms, and the shared pursuit of excellence. By placing his bust in the very arena where he championed the physical and emotional health of the student body, St. Francis Xavier University ensures that the Xaverian spirit of compassionate community is expressed through the power of presence, proving that the sacred can indeed flourish amidst the noise, sweat, and challenge of the modern secular arena.

The Enclosure of the Digital Mind: Why Defending Artificial Scarcity Won’t Save Artists

A Response to the AI Training Debate from the Humanities

Many of my friends and colleagues in the humanities are convinced that training Large Language Models on books, music, and art constitutes theft of intellectual property. I understand the anger. I share the underlying concern: that powerful institutions are extracting value from human creativity without compensating the humans who produced it. That’s a real injustice, and anyone who dismisses it isn’t paying attention.

But I want to suggest that the injustice runs deeper than the technology, and that the solutions most commonly proposed will make things worse for the very people they’re meant to protect.

The Anxiety Is Real

Let me start with what my friends and colleagues get right. Under our current economic system, creators are squeezed from every direction. Musicians earn fractions of pennies per stream. Adjunct professors with doctoral degrees teach for near-poverty wages. Freelance writers compete in a race to the bottom. When a technology company builds a billion-dollar product using the collective output of human culture, and the humans who produced that culture receive nothing, the outrage is justified.

Where I part company with my friends is not on the diagnosis of the disease, but on the proposed cure.

The “Theft” Metaphor Doesn’t Hold

The word theft implies that something has been taken away from its owner. If I steal your bicycle, you no longer have a bicycle. But information doesn’t work this way. If an LLM processes your novel during training, you still have your novel. Every copy remains intact. No reader has been deprived of access to your work.

This isn’t a trivial distinction. It reflects a fundamental property of information that economists call non-rivalry: one person’s use of an idea, a pattern, or a digital file does not diminish anyone else’s ability to use it. Physical goods are rivalrous; for example, if I eat your bread, you go hungry. But ideas, once expressed, can be shared infinitely without loss.

What happens during AI training is not reading in a human sense. It is computational analysis of the commons, the identification of statistical patterns across millions of texts. Humanists already have a name for this kind of work: distant reading, the term Franco Moretti coined for the computational study of literature at scale. Corpus linguists, digital humanities scholars, and literary analysts routinely process vast archives of text to identify patterns no individual reader could perceive. We have never considered this a violation of authors’ rights.

There is, of course, a crucial difference. When a digital humanities scholar performs distant reading, the output is scholarship, a meta-text about the corpus. When an AI company trains an LLM, the output is a generative system that can produce new texts, potentially competing with the original authors in the marketplace. That difference matters, and I don’t want to minimize it. But it is a difference in what is done with the patterns, not in whether extracting patterns from public culture is legitimate. The proper response to harmful commercial applications is to regulate the applications, not to criminalize the act of learning from the commons itself.

Who Actually Benefits from Stronger IP?

When creators call for stricter intellectual property enforcement against AI, I understand the impulse. But let’s consider who has historically benefited most from aggressive copyright regimes.

Not independent artists. Not poets or adjunct scholars. The primary beneficiaries of expanded IP law have consistently been large corporations such as Disney, major record labels, pharmaceutical companies, and academic publishers. These entities use copyright and patent law to hoard culture, extract rents from access to knowledge, and sue smaller creators who build on existing traditions.

If we establish the legal precedent that AI can only be trained on explicitly licensed data, we don’t stop AI development. We guarantee that only the wealthiest corporations (those that can afford to buy out the world’s copyright holders) will be permitted to build it. We hand the future of human knowledge to a cartel of licensors.

This is the historical pattern of enclosure: the privatization of what was once common. In early modern England, common lands that sustained peasant communities were fenced off for the profit of landowners. Today, the digital commons faces enclosure from two directions simultaneously: IP maximalists want to fence off the inputs (restricting what can be read, analyzed, or learned from); and tech monopolies want to fence off the outputs (ingesting the open web into proprietary, closed-source models and charging subscription fees to access the synthesized result). Both are forms of enclosure. Both concentrate power. And neither serves the independent creator.

Artificial Scarcity as a System of Control

To understand what’s really at stake, we need to name the economic structure that makes this debate so agonizing.

Capitalism is a system designed to allocate scarce resources through markets. When a resource is genuinely scarce (e.g., land, food, housing) markets serve a real (if often unjust) allocative function. But when a resource is infinitely replicable (e.g., a song, an algorithm, a medical formula) its natural market price trends toward zero.

This is a problem for capitalism. If the price of information is zero, no one can extract profit from it. So the system imposes artificial scarcity: paywalls, DRM, patents, licensing fees, and aggressive copyright enforcement. These mechanisms force inherently abundant resources to behave like scarce ones, so they can be bought and sold.

The result is a world in which a child in rural Nova Scotia and a child in rural Senegal may both lack access to the same textbook, not because the textbook is scarce, but because someone has decided it must be sold rather than shared.

When we demand stronger IP protections, we are (however unintentionally) reinforcing this system. We are insisting that ideas must be treated as property, that knowledge must be enclosed, that culture must be commodified. And the people who suffer most from that commodification are not tech executives. They are the poor, the marginalized, and the geographically isolated, precisely the people the humanities claim to care about.

“But Creators Need to Eat”

This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a hand-wave.

Yes. Creators need to eat. Right now, under our current system, intellectual property is one of the few tools available to individual creators trying to survive in a market that systematically undervalues their work. I am not suggesting that artists unilaterally surrender their copyrights while tech billionaires continue to accumulate wealth. Think of it as harm reduction: IP is a flawed tool, a tool of enclosure that overwhelmingly benefits corporations, but it is currently the only shield most creators have. The point is not to ask creators to drop that shield today. The point is to locate where the problem is actually situated, so we can build the structures that make the shield unnecessary, in order to eventually set it down together.

What I am suggesting is that the problem is not the free flow of information. The problem is an economic system that conditions human survival on the ability to monetize one’s output. The solution is not to re-enclose the commons. The solution is to change the conditions under which people create, and to do so with enough urgency that “wait for a better system” does not become an excuse for inaction.

Several approaches deserve serious consideration:

Universal Basic Income. If creators’ basic material needs (e.g., housing, food, healthcare) are met unconditionally, the desperate need to monetize every creative act evaporates. Artists can create for the sake of meaning, community, and human flourishing rather than market survival. If you think this is utopian fantasy, consider Canada’s own Mincome experiment in Dauphin, Manitoba in the 1970s (one of the most rigorously studied guaranteed income pilots in North America) demonstrated improvements in health, education, and community participation. More recent programs from Finland to Stockton, California, have shown that guaranteed income increases creative output and entrepreneurial risk-taking.

Taxing the monopolies. If AI companies are generating enormous wealth by synthesizing human culture, that wealth should be taxed and redistributed, not by locking down information, but by ensuring the public shares in the returns. A data dividend, an automation tax, or a corporate windfall tax directed into public arts funding would compensate creators without restricting the flow of knowledge.

Public funding for culture. Canada already does this better than most countries through the Canada Council for the Arts, SSHRC, and provincial arts councils. The principle is sound: treat cultural production as public infrastructure, funded collectively, available to all. We don’t need a new principle so much as a dramatic expansion of existing ones.

Open access as liberation, not theft. The Open Access movement in academic publishing demonstrates that freely available research accelerates discovery, benefits researchers in lower-income countries, and does not destroy scholarly careers, especially when paired with institutional support. Open Educational Resources have brought university-level instruction to millions who could never afford tuition. Rather than threats to human dignity, they are expansions of it.

These modern debates over access and enclosure are, in fact, echoes of much older moral questions.

A Voice from the Tradition

I write as a scholar of biblical literature, and I would be remiss not to note that the traditions I study have something to say about enclosure and abundance.

The Torah’s vision of jubilee (Leviticus 25) imagines a periodic restoration of economic relations, a systematic undoing of accumulated inequality. Land returns to its original holders. Debts are cancelled. The logic is that the earth ultimately belongs to God, not to any human proprietor: כִּי־לִי הָאָרֶץ “the land is mine” (Lev 25:23).

The prophetic tradition consistently frames the hoarding of resources as an offense against divine justice. Amos denounces those who “trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth” (Amos 2:7). Isaiah warns against the monopolizers who “join house to house” and “add field to field, until there is no more room” (Isa 5:8), an ancient critique of enclosure that resonates uncomfortably with the modern enclosure of the digital commons.

The wisdom tradition, meanwhile, presents knowledge itself as a public good. Proverbs personifies Wisdom as calling out “in the street” and “at the busiest corner” (Prov 1:20–21) — not behind a paywall or inside a licensing agreement. The assumption is that wisdom, by its nature, seeks to be shared.

These are not proof-texts for a particular economic policy. But they do suggest that the instinct to enclose knowledge, i.e., to restrict access for the sake of private accumulation, stands in tension with some of the deepest currents of the Western moral tradition.

The Harder Question

I want to be honest about what I’m not claiming.

I’m not claiming that AI companies are benevolent. Maybe some are; I don’t know. I do know that the concentration of AI development in a handful of corporations is a genuine threat to democratic life, and it requires aggressive antitrust action, regulation, and public investment in open alternatives.

I’m not claiming that the transition to a post-scarcity information economy will be painless. It won’t. Real people are losing real income right now, and “wait for UBI” is not an adequate response to someone who can’t make rent this month.

And I’m not claiming that all forms of artificial scarcity are illegitimate. For example, privacy is a form of artificial scarcity applied to personal data, and it’s essential. Verifiable credentials require controlled access to maintain trust. The infrastructure that transmits digital goods (I’m talking about servers, cables, electricity) is genuinely scarce and requires management.

What I am claiming is this: when we respond to the disruption of AI by demanding that information be locked down more tightly, we are fighting the wrong battle. We are using the master’s tools to shore up the master’s house. The enclosure of knowledge has never served the vulnerable, and it will not start doing so now.

Conclusion

Information wants to be free. Stewart Brand famously added that information also wants to be expensive, which is true because the human labour required to create it is costly. Both halves of that tension are real, and I am not pretending otherwise. The question is not whether we can make information free; we can’t eliminate the cost of creation. The question is whether we will build economic structures that bear that cost collectively, allowing human beings to thrive in a world of informational abundance, or whether we will cling to artificial scarcity and condemn creators to an endless, losing war against the nature of digital goods.

Our goal should not be to put chains on information. It should be to free the humans who create it.

Biblical Allusions in U2’s “Moment of Surrender” (No Line on the Horizon, 2009)

From Anton Corbijn’s Linear

“Moment of Surrender” arrived almost fully formed from the evocative atmosphere of Fez, Morocco, the air thick with ancient calls to prayer that inevitably colored the music (Eno). It’s a song about hitting the mat, that point of utter exhaustion where the fight just drains out of you – the fight against yourself, addiction, the void. As Stokes observed, it employs “the language of surrender, of letting go,” essential for recovery but also deeply spiritual (Stokes, 2009, U2: The Stories Behind Every U2 Song, p. 164). That word, ‘surrender,’ it carries weight. Sounds like loss, doesn’t it? But Bono explained that sometimes “The only victory was surrender” (Surrender). This isn’t merely about earthly struggles, though the shadow of addiction (“every black hole / At the altar of the dark star”) gives it a raw edge. It taps into a deeper, spiritual current, that act of letting go, the “submission to God, or a higher power” (Bono, Surrender) found across faiths – a necessary yielding reflected in the biblical call to “Submit yourselves, then, to God” (James 4:7).

The narrative captures a soul teetering on the edge, maybe Bono himself, maybe a composite figure, finding himself lost, worshipping at the wrong altars. Then, in the most mundane of settings – an ATM machine – comes a lightning strike of clarity. Seeing his reflection, but really seeing, experiencing what Bono calls “vision over visibility” (Bono, Surrender), piercing the veil of the ordinary to glimpse a profound truth beneath. For Bono, the journey to this point mirrors the grueling path of the “stations of the cross” (Bono, Surrender), evoking Christ’s own agonizing walk towards crucifixion, where soldiers “put the cross on him and made him carry it” (Luke 23:26). It’s a pilgrimage through personal suffering. Yet, crucially, there’s anticipation mixed with the pain, as the character is “Counting down ‘til the Pentecost” (Bono, Surrender). He’s waiting for that transformative inrush of the Spirit, reminiscent of the disciples when “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:4), hoping for that divine spark, that spiritual reboot.

The physical posture described – “folded to my knees” – embodies this surrender. It’s the universal sign of prayer, of humility, perhaps the moment before a confession or a plea, where one acknowledges a power greater than oneself, a posture anticipating the day when “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow” (Philippians 2:10 NIV). The body becomes a “begging bowl,” an image of utter dependency and emptiness, like the beggar Lazarus “longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table” (Luke 16:21), yearning for grace, for spiritual sustenance, to reconnect with the soul’s true rhythm. And the central question isn’t an assertion of Bono’s own belief, but a vulnerable query directed outward: “It’s not if I believe in love / But if love believes in me / Oh, believe in me.” It turns the tables, asking if Grace itself, if the Divine, still holds faith in the broken human spirit, a raw prayer echoing from the precipice.

Live at the Rose Bowl

References

Matthew 5:3 / Luke 16:20-21 (related to “Begging bowl”): Evokes imagery of dependency, humility, and being “poor in spirit,” such as the story of Lazarus the beggar.

Luke 22:42 / James 4:7 (related to “Moment of surrender / Submission”): Reflects the spiritual act of yielding to God’s will, seen in Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane (“not my will, but yours be done”) and the instruction to “Submit yourselves, then, to God.”

Luke 23:26 (related to “Stations of the Cross”): Refers to the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s suffering journey to crucifixion, including carrying the cross.

Acts 2:2-4 (related to “Pentecost”): Directly names the event where the Apostles were filled with the Holy Spirit, signifying spiritual awakening or empowerment.

Philippians 2:10 (related to “Folded to my knees”): Represents a posture of prayer, humility, and submission, aligning with the concept that “every knee should bow.”

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