In a conversation recorded in 2008, conductor James Jordan praised Morten Lauridsen for his Lux Aeterna, the composer’s non-liturgical requiem for chorus and chamber orchestra. As Jordan emphasizes, the masterpiece takes listeners on a journey of very personal places, and it assists them in the spiritual struggle to “maintain perspective” in the face of the inevitable losses and grief, which come to us all. As Lauridsen puts it, the work offers "a quiet meditation on light” on “illumination of all kinds.”

Those insights point to crucial circumstances of composition and reception. When he composed the five-movement work in the mid-1990s, Lauridsen used his daily labor on the text and music to help heal himself, as he grappled with the reality that his own mother was dying. After the piece became widely known following the 1997 premiere in Los Angeles, by Paul Salamunovich and the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the composer began receiving “countless letters” from listeners who also used the piece to heal from significant losses.

Drawing from interviews with the composer, letters from listeners, and musical analysis, this paper will trace the inner pilgrimage of Lauridsen’ Lux Aeterna, to argue that choral music can form a rich and distinctive “pathway” of aesthetic reflection, which stems from the apprehension of beauty and ultimately transforms listeners from one state of being to another altogether.

Though one of the more commonly assigned texts in British Literature courses, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway poses many challenges for its readers, perhaps chief of which is its use of free-indirect discourse. A hallmark of the Modernist movement, with other authors such as James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence using this literary technique to question the possibility of accurately representing the reality of thought, Woolf’s narrative technique can leave modern university students feeling unmoored as they try to follow the thoughts and actions of the characters in the novel. European painting critics in the mid-to-late 19th century felt just as, if not more, untethered while viewing the paintings of French post-impressionist Paul Cezanne. Cezanne’s work was truly revolutionary, with his paintings demonstrating completely new ways of viewing the world. Just as the literary modernists questioned our ability to accurately portray reality through text, Cezanne pushed our way of thinking about visual representation to new and exciting heights. My proposal seeks to demonstrate how exposing literature students to the work of Cezanne and explaining how he depicts multiple perspectives simultaneously in a completely novel way, helps literature students visualize and better comprehend what Woolf does with the narrative in Mrs. Dalloway. In my own classes, I’ve found that such supplementary information, from a completely different field of art, gives students a wider and more expansive grounding as they step into and grapple with one of the most important texts in 20th century English literature and continue their pilgrimage into the arts.

Commonplace books have been used since Antiquity to gather and organize information. These were sometimes kept by individuals, and very successful commonplace books would even be published and consumed by readers as a sort of precursor to the encyclopedia (e.g., Philip Melanchthon’s Loci Communes). This practice was first developed in a context of information scarcity; the ideas of a great thinker might exist in only a single location, and access to new ideas was limited, to say the least. A commonplace book provided an individual with a repository within which to curate the valuable information he or she might encounter about a chosen topic. Modern challenges with information are quite different; today, we struggle to wade through overwhelming amounts of information, all (seemingly) at our fingertips at once. Nevertheless, the ancient practice of keeping a commonplace book translates to our time in surprisingly effective ways, especially in the Christian educational context. For example, keeping a commonplace book can prompt us to question which topics are worthy of our attention and then fix our attention on them; it can combat a relativistic or purely deconstructivist approach to learning by giving us the tools to cast a vision and grow a garden based on both human learning and divine understanding; and it can reclaim the importance of discernment and opinion by providing a methodical practice for developing nuanced, creative ideas about the things that matter most to us.

Educators find themselves at a crossroads. Technology, including artificial intelligence, has disrupted education. Stakeholders scrutinize teaching practices, and many veteran educators have left the profession. Education preparation programs at Christian universities should respond with a faith-based pedagogical framework that speaks to teaching as vocation, not just profession. This paper argues that the concept of incarnational teaching, modeled after Christ, offers a resilient pedagogical framework that values relationships, embodiment, and transformation. The paper synthesizes the works of Jaroslav Pelikan, including The Christian Intellectual, and the sermons of the late Orthodox monastic, Elder Aimilianos. In The Christian Intellectual, Pelikan wrote that "...tradition is a power for liberation, setting one free from the dictatorship of the claim that his own time or culture or school is the goal toward which history is moving." As part of this tradition, teachers must work to "obliterate" themselves. Likewise, Elder Aimilianos consistently advised his followers to find joy through the elimination of ego. Incarnational teaching is a return to a uniquely Christian pedagogy, one in which Christ must increase.

In fall 2022, Concordia University Chicago (CUC) commissioned its general education committee to revamp the university’s core curriculum. This represented a major bureaucratic and administrative task, of course, but it also represented something more profound. CUC is deeply invested in its Christian mission, Lutheran identity, and liberal arts tradition. So while the new curriculum would need to provide a comprehensive base of study for undergraduate students, it would also need to exemplify the University’s values of Truth, Freedom, and Vocation. In this presentation, Dr. David Bates, chair of CUC’s general education committee, will trace this long journey, including the committee’s extensive theoretical work, data collection, and collaboration across various academic units. He will also consider the fruits of its completion—new university-wide learning outcomes, new general education outcomes, and a new system of general education assessment—including an extensive discussion of the unique challenges and opportunities the committee faced. Finally, he will offer a review of lessons learned during this long but gratifying pilgrimage.

General education science courses play a critical role in developing scientifically literate citizens capable of engaging thoughtfully with contemporary scientific issues. This presentation describes the development of a Natural Sciences General Education Assessment implemented in introductory science courses at Concordia University Chicago. In this assessment, students engage with professional scientific research while fostering reflection on the nature, limits, and purpose of scientific inquiry. Students embark on an intellectual pilgrimage by participating in an instructor-approved science experience, such as a scientific conference, research symposium, guest lecture, museum exhibit, webinar, or recorded presentation. These encounters expose students to the work of practicing scientists and invite them to explore how scientific knowledge is generated, communicated, and applied.

Following the experience, students analyze a research study, examine its limitations, evaluate ethical considerations, reflect on its implications for understanding the created world, and develop an original hypothesis using the scientific method. By critically examining experimental design, measurement reliability, sample size, and data interpretation, students encounter the crossroads that scientists routinely navigate in the pursuit of knowledge.

Aligned with the conference theme Pilgrims at the Crossroads, this assessment presents scientific inquiry as a process of curiosity, uncertainty, discernment, and growth. Through intentional integration of faith and learning, students are encouraged to consider how scientific discovery informs vocation, stewardship, and responsible engagement with creation. In a time when higher education faces questions about purpose and relevance, this model demonstrates how Lutheran institutions can cultivate scientific literacy while guiding students toward thoughtful participation in an ongoing journey of intellectual and spiritual discovery.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced schools to implement remote learning on an unprecedented scale, creating an opportunity to examine how instructional modality influences student achievement and participation. This quantitative causal-comparative study investigated grade distributions and attendance at a suburban Midwestern public high school before, during, and after the implementation of remote learning. Archival data from the 2018–19 through 2021–22 academic years were analyzed across the general student population and among special education students and English learners. Grade distributions were also examined within English, mathematics, science, and social studies. Chi-Square and ANOVA analyses were used to evaluate nine research questions comparing student outcomes across instructional modalities.

Eight of the nine research questions produced statistically significant differences in student grade distributions and/or attendance between in-person and remote-learning periods. Findings included a notable increase in failing grades during the fully remote year, followed by a substantial decline after students returned to in-person instruction. Although statistical associations varied in strength and outcomes differed across student populations, the findings demonstrate that instructional context matters.

This session moves beyond the emergency conditions of the pandemic to consider what these findings mean for contemporary educators. Participants will examine implications for student engagement, equitable access, instructional decision-making, and the intentional use of remote and technology-supported learning in future educational settings.

Students today are standing at a major crossroads and trying to figure out not just what they want to do, but who they are and where they are called to go. As educators, we have an opportunity to guide them beyond resumes and interviews into deeper conversations about purpose, identity, and direction. In this session, I share how I intentionally connect career readiness activities like elevator pitches, personal branding, and professional communication with reflection on values, faith, and calling.

Drawing from my experience teaching business and HR courses, I walk through simple, practical ways to shift assignments from task-based to purpose-driven. Participants will engage in a few of the same reflective activities I use in the classroom, allowing them to experience firsthand how students begin to build confidence, clarity, and direction.

This session aligns with the idea of being “at the crossroads,” where decisions matter and guidance is critical. Attendees will leave with ideas they can easily bring back to their own classrooms to better support students as they prepare not just for careers, but for meaningful and purpose-filled work.

Lutheran intellectual identity is deepened by realizing its essentially Catholic character--in separable from its original founding in the Catholic University of Wittenberg. While in most essentials existing in full continuity with its Catholic roots, Lutheranism's stance on faith and reason--though often misunderstood--gives it a peculiar twist both foreign and paradoxical in relation to much modern intellectual life. One manifestation of this is in Mark Schwehn's "Exiles in Eden," which demonstrates how qualities of character nurtured by faith enhance intellect. But nurturing qualities of faith and character requires communities of faith and character, perhaps described as "pilgrim colonies." The question is whether--or rather how--such pilgrim colonies can survive and flourish and serve in our polarized modern American world.

The pilgrimage is traditionally built around a destination: home, family, kingdom, the New Jerusalem. The obstacles along the way are in some sense incidental to the final goal. Homer’s Odyssey, for example, is finally about his homecoming. Thus, in the original work as opposed to the current popular film version, less than a fifth (Books 9-12) narrates the hero’s best-known adventures: Calypso, Circe, Cyclops, the Lotos Eaters, et al. The entire last half of the epic (Books 13-24) recounts the events after his return in disguise to Ithaca. But Odysseus (or Ulysses, as post-Roman writers tended to name him) has many afterlives, from Dante’s Inferno to James Joyce’s Ulysses to Christopher Nolan’s film. And in the nineteenth century, Romantic poets shifted the emphasis of the pilgrimage/quest from the destination to the journey itself—one might say from the teleological to the ontological, or what the critic M. H. Abrams called bildungsgeschichte, the process of being and becoming in the human consciousness. Nowhere is this so uniquely dramatized as in Alfred Tennyson’s take on the conclusion of the Odyssey in his poem “Ulysses,” which imagines the hero’s dissatisfaction with his return home and eager to begin his journeys again.

My own goal in this paper is not so much an analysis of either the Odyssey or Tennyson’s revision in “Ulysses” as to employ this shift in emphasis as a means to reflect on the usefulness of pilgrimage as metaphor for the educational journey of our students.

Each profession has a code of conduct that dictates ethical behavior. These codes of conduct do not emerge from a vacuum but carry within them the imprint of the ethical traditions that shaped them. The moral architecture underneath these codes has been largely forgotten.

In 1494 Luca Pacioli, a Dominican friar schooled in Thomistic thought, published the first accounting textbook. The modern concepts of debits and credits, debere and credere, to owe and to entrust, were not neutral technical terms but encoded a moral relationship between parties.

The modern world understands accounting as a means of communicating financial information, but Pacioli understood it as something greater: a means of measuring virtue and vice before the Maker. The audit trail was accountability theology, not merely error detection.

Subsequent writers copied the technical apparatus and left the moral architecture behind. Today's professional codes of conduct contain those echoes. The deontological rules were once virtue requirements. The consequentialist rationales were once teleological goods oriented toward the common good. But the virtue foundation that gave them coherence has been stripped away, leaving echoes without the source.

The result is a structural virtue deficit at the heart of professional ethics and a recurring ethics crisis that more rules cannot resolve because rules cannot form character.

This discussion traces the hidden moral framework underneath professional codes of conduct, argues that the virtue deficit is structural rather than incidental, and asks what recovery requires for professional education.

We are always leaving home. Thus, our lives resemble the pilgrimage of the prodigal son, who shamelessly and recklessly abandons home to seek his fortune (Luke 15). Although we often leave home for less dramatic and offensive reasons—for education, employment, adventure—nevertheless, we leave. Like the prodigal son, our pilgrimages are often attempts to “find ourselves”; yet, like the son who “came to himself,” what we often find is that we have become homeless. In our hyper-mobile society, we are perpetual pilgrims, rarely becoming rooted to a place long enough to know, love, and care for it. When the prodigal son returns home, the father’s bestowal of the signet ring signals his reinstatement as a contributing member of the household economy. Many of us, however, never “make it home”: we do not learn to make our lives and our work contribute to the health of the places we call home. Higher education contributes to this state of chronic homelessness. Young people come to college on a pilgrimage of learning, but rarely do they make it back home. It is not simply that they do not return to the places they came from; they do not receive an education that provides them with the sort of wisdom and character formation needed to know, love, and care for the biotic communities in which they live and derive sustenance. Higher education should, therefore, aim to help young people complete their pilgrimage home, providing what Wendell Berry calls “education for homecoming.”

In Exodus, the Israelites left Egypt so quickly that their bread was unleavened. Leavening is the process by which gas is introduced into the dough. The time required for bread to rise is familiar to breadmakers throughout history. In a modern kitchen, leavening can be done quickly with chemical agents (e.g. baking soda) or slowly with yeasts, living organisms that produce carbon dioxide through fermentation. Modern bakers often use baker’s yeast, a commercial product with a single strain of yeast, selected for predictable results. However, ancient doughs relied on wild fermentative yeasts and bacteria, which today would be considered sourdough.

This presentation describes an at-home laboratory activity that connects the biological process of yeast fermentation to ancient practices of breadmaking. Students in their home kitchens pursue a scientific investigation comparing chemical leavening, commercial baker’s yeast, and sourdough fermentation. In doing so, they learn how carbon dioxide production, microbial metabolism, and mixed microbial communities shape the texture, flavor, and structure of bread. The activity emphasizes hands-on observation and allows students to connect the physical experience of breadmaking to the historical practices of the ancient Mediterranean. In this way, the lab frames scientific inquiry as a journey from familiar modern assumptions toward deeper biological and historical understanding.

This presentation explores how a collaboration between the Biology Department and University Library at Concordia University Chicago grew into an interdisciplinary, community-supported pollinator garden that serves as a living laboratory for stewardship, experiential learning, and community engagement. Founded in 2023, the Pollinator Garden Club began with limited resources, no established partnerships, and an unsuccessful first garden site due to poor soil conditions. Rather than abandoning the project, students, faculty, and staff reassessed their approach, sought expert guidance, identified a new location, and pursued external funding and community partnerships. Support from Student Government, West Cook Wild Ones, the Village of River Forest, Home Depot, and the Oak Park River Forest Garden Club transformed the project into a thriving native habitat.

The presentation argues that place-based environmental initiatives can function as forms of academic pilgrimage, fostering resilience, stewardship, and collaborative problem-solving. Students have participated in pollinator surveys, grant writing, habitat restoration, monarch butterfly rearing and release, educational outreach, and ongoing garden maintenance. These experiences have strengthened student engagement and, in at least one case, influenced a student's decision to pursue a Biology double major.

Today, the garden is a certified Monarch Waystation containing more than twenty native Midwest plant species and serving as a hub for collaboration among academic departments, student organizations, alumni, community partners, and local educational programs. By highlighting lessons learned through failure, adaptation, and partnership-building, this case study offers a replicable model for connecting learning, servant leadership, and care for creation.

Structural color vivid hues produced not by pigments but by extremely small geometry reveals a natural hidden beauty woven throughout creation. Many of nature’s brightest colors, from butterfly wings and peacock feathers to beetle shells, and the metallic color of the Pollia fruit, arise from special patterned structures (e.g., photonic) that bend, reflect, and amplify specific light (wavelengths) through interference1, Bragg diffraction2, and photonic bandgap effects3. These natural systems operate at nanoscales4, and generate iridescent, angle dependent colors far more brilliant than chemical pigments. This paper introduces the physics behind natural structural color using simple, everyday analogies to make complex optical phenomena accessible to non scientists. It then explores biological examples of multilayer reflectors like melanin mosaics, gyroid photonic crystals, and tunable guanine lattices, highlighting how organisms use structural color for communication, mating, camouflage, and defense. Framed through the theme of scientific inquiry as pilgrimage, the paper draws on Martin Luther’s concept of the “Masks of God,” interpreting natural laws and physical beauty as instruments through which divine creativity becomes visible. Structural color thus becomes both a scientific phenomenon and a theological insight revealing order, precision, and aesthetic richness embedded in creation. Finally, we examine how modern nanotechnology attempts to imitates these natural photonic systems to produce sustainable, toxic free coloration, smart materials, and energy efficient coatings. In studying and replicating structural colors, scientists participate in stewardship of creation by reducing toxic chemicals to generate colors and discovering beauty that has always been present yet hidden in the geometry of light.

Most pilgrimages involve challenges that are intellectual, physical, and psychological. Each challenge is a crossroads where one direction is definitely preferred, but may be difficult to take. Another path may have to be taken, and the pilgrimage experience will be a bit different from what it could have been. My understanding of pilgrimage is based on personal experience. This will include a pilgrimage to Greece a week before this conference. A professor’s life is also a pilgrimage on a quest for truth. The challenges that present themselves throughout that journey are not only things to be overcome, but also shapers of the character of the pilgrim professor. In my presentation, I will talk about how my spiritual pilgrimages occurred, and how analogous challenges in my professional life shaped the professor I became. The point is to show that it is useful to think of the life of a professor as a pilgrimage; a pilgrimage in which the professor is continually flipping between pilgrim and guide.

Prompting the parable of the Good Samaritan, an expert in the law correctly identifies what the law requires to be saved: love the Lord your God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself. Sensing he might be in trouble and wanting to be saved he asks the pragmatic question: “who is my neighbor?” The question is posed in hope of a narrow definition of neighbor; the answer takes the form of a masterful short story with rich, complex characters. It is anything but narrow.

At private liberal arts universities, increasing costs and enrollment challenges necessarily prompt new ideas to improve the value proposition. One trending path reduces the cost of a degree via reduced credit degrees for fields like business, IT, and health professions. Such programs are tailored to provide job-specific training, cutting content and coursework deemed non-essential.

Is this a good path?

Seeking to justify the Christian liberal arts education, this paper argues against the trend toward hyper-focused career preparation as diverging from the way of Christian education. The medical journey following my son’s prenatal congenital heart block diagnosis provides a cautionary tale of specialization and technology proliferation. From the vocational perspectives of Christian father and engineering educator, the paper responds both to the Lutheran question – what does this mean? – and the titular question – who is my Neighbor?

Pilgrimage is usually defined as a trip to a place charged with significance. Trips to locations with religious meaning are prime examples. In the secular realm, some make pilgrimage to battlefields and cemeteries that have been preserved to commemorate the events that took place there. Sometimes the sites visited by pilgrims have personal significance—veterans often return to the lands where they served and fought. Why do this? It seems that for some, processing memories of the past brings healing, closure, and deeper self-understanding.

Reading my college journals, I pondered: who was I—and who was I supposed to be? What was the trajectory of my life? What did it all mean? Memories rushed over me, bringing me at times to tears. As Thomas Wolfe wrote in Of Time and the River, youth is “so full of anguish and of magic”, and I remembered times of incandescent joy and crushing loss. I was also reminded of the shame and guilt I bore during those years. But as I read about and remembered fondly the special people whose paths had crossed mine, I emerged with a profound and renewed gratitude for them: many whom I had loved; many who had loved me. As Tennyson wrote of Ulysses, I feel that “I am a part of all that I have met.” I have realized that my story is one of longing…for scientific adventure, friendship, love, meaning, and purpose—and looking back, I have found clues that deeply impact my life today.

Heaven and earth are full of your glory: hosanna in the highest! Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord. These words, an elaboration of the heavenly liturgy witnessed by the Prophet Isaiah, are sung in my church tradition at every Eucharistic liturgy. Our formation to be productive citizens starts at the very beginning of our lives. Our rites of passage reinforce the societal expectation that we will “grow up” by choosing a profession once we finish high school. We have constructed an entire system upon this principle in the preparatory steps taken in secondary schools and in the curricula of Christian higher education. What happens when our Christian values challenge societal assumptions and we discover that vocational achievements are finite and are not fulfilling? To whom and what do we turn when we arrive at crossroads that might impel us to embark on new paths, even if they are permanent exits from our original vocations? In this presentation, I will draw upon my own experience as a graduate of a business school, a multi-decade professor of theology, and an Orthodox priest to develop a framework for making the best of our earthly sojourn while devoting ourselves to citizenship in God’s kingdom. The idea is for us to authenticate the claim we sing - heaven and earth are full of your glory - by having the courage to follow God, even if the way is dark and unclear.

While not currently working in a school setting, a doctoral student needed a meaningful way to participate in the experiential work of an instructional coaching course. The instructor of the course reached out for my guidance as program leader. I discerned how to support both the instructor and student while preserving what the experiential work was intended to cultivate in doctoral learners.

In response, I designed an interactive experience that employed an AI-mediated instructional coaching simulation to engage the student in core practices of instructional coaching. While recognizing that a simulation cannot replace human interaction, we critically examined how it might support the student’s learning journey and professional growth.

Through independent and collaborative reflection, the student recognized how the quality of their questions and question rationale shaped the dialogic nature of their learning. They also forged deep connections among their learning, practice, and research interests. I recognized how leadership, teaching, scholarship, and service were interwoven across my vocations as I responded to the needs of those I serve. As the process unfolded, we became thinking partners, continuing to grow in our respective vocations in relationship with one another.

We invite colleagues to join us in expanding our thinking on how our many vocations interwork as we respond to intra- and interpersonal needs, how our relationships shape who we are becoming in and through our vocations, and how emerging technologies might serve the human formation and flourishing toward which our vocations call us.

Jacobsen and Hudstedt Jacobsen's 2025 text on thinking as pilgrimage describes a historical and epistemological shift from universalism to multiculturalism to individualism. The Calling and Purpose in Society (CAPS) Fellows Program at the Institute for Leadership and Service (ILAS) at Valparaiso University seeks to hold in tension the current focus on individual understandings of vocation with communal understandings of justice, service, and leadership. The current CAPS Fellows Program Director and two former CAPS Fellows who went on to work as student aides with ILAS carried out two internal focus groups in August 2026 in order to explore the concept of pilgrimage as applied to CAPS. Themes that emerged from the focus group discussion include: how physical pilgrimage leads to intellectual pilgrimage, tensions between expectation and serendipity, and the importance of both challenge and support. Of the four intellectual pathways, the CAPS Fellows identified the program as starting with attentiveness, embracing compassion, and leading to interior contemplation and personal growth. In this paper and presentation, the two CAPS Fellows (who interned at Opportunity Enterprises Camp Lakeside and Holden Village) share their personal experiences of the program as pilgrimage, and share some ideas about how to continue supporting students, particularly at the recruitment level.

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) has sparked intense debates in cognitive science regarding the nature of mind, computation, and consciousness. Increasingly, human interaction with generative neural networks resembles a digital pilgrimage—a quest to seek existential answers from a seemingly disembodied intelligence. This talk roots this contemporary phenomenon in the foundational history of computer science, specifically focusing on the letters, academic collegiality, and "poetical science" of Ada Lovelace.While Charles Babbage viewed the Analytical Engine as a mere calculator, Lovelace’s extensive epistolary network allowed her to conceptualize computation as a symbolic framework capable of processing abstract logic. Crucially, we explore how Lovelace forged these breakthroughs within a fragile, failing body. Facing debilitating, lifelong illnesses—and heavily medicated with opiates toward her premature death—Lovelace’s cognitive tenacity underscores the deeply embodied nature of early computer science theory. Her physical suffering did not blunt her intellect; rather, it heightened her curiosity about how the physical nervous system maps onto mechanical computation.This cognitive framework is further illuminated by archival evidence within the Lovelace papers at Oxford’s Bodleian Library. In her 1844 correspondence, Lovelace explicitly rejected a purely secular view of computation, describing her mathematical pursuits as an intense devotion to "reading God's natural works." By analyzing these manuscripts alongside early connectionist frameworks, I argue that the genesis of computer science was deeply entangled with theological inquiry. Ultimately, I argue that when modern users treat AI as a digital oracle, they are fulfilling the latent, transcendental pilgrimage Lovelace embedded into the very origin of algorithmic thought.

DescriptioWe've been using and benefitting from Artificial Intelligence for years. Siri, Alexa, Grammarly and the automatic suggestions from YouTube and Netflix are familiar technologies. But the newest LLMs (Large Language Models) like OpenAI’s Chat GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini are raising the stakes and creating serious concerns. With the rapid development of machine learning and the possibility of recursive self-improvement, General Artificial Intelligence (where AI is on par with human intelligence) and Super Artificial Intelligence (where AI far surpasses human intelligence) are conceivably on the horizon. RRecent breakout incidents and the rapid pace of AI development have prompted CEOs of large AI companies to sound alarms and actually ask for government regulation. But what could that regulation look like? And what can we do, as individuals, as we experience this cultural AI apocalyptic zeitgeist?n text goes here