Rev. Douglas Blake Olds
My blogs
| Gender | Male |
|---|---|
| Industry | Religion |
| Occupation | Minister, Ethicist, Poet |
| Location | San Francisco/Marin County, California, United States |
| Introduction | Douglas B. Olds is a poet, theologian, and ethicist whose recent work has developed beyond an original critique of artificial intelligence into a broader poietic metaphysics of accountable bearing. The foundations of that project precede AI: ecological trusteeship, grace as praxis, virtue as skilled neighbor-bearing, conation as directed life, embodiment against abstraction, historical correction, and futurity as something entrusted rather than predicted. AI enters the corpus comparatively late as a revealing test case, sharpening distinctions between bearer and configuration, concept and suscept, recollection and retrieval, analogy, homology and bearing, alignment and accountability, archive and witness. The governing question is who or what can actually bear a predicate, a history, a consequence, or a future. Olds distinguishes living persons, who can recollect, undergo correction, answer for injury, redirect intention, and undertake repair, from configurations that may preserve, route, classify, predict, or simulate without bearing the histories and consequences they mediate. His poetry returns these claims to body, creature, memory, place, and vulnerability. |
| Favorite books | Olds’s poetry performs a different kind of testing from his prose. Where the prose differentiates and names, the poems return those distinctions to lived actuality: a bird, a dying body, shame at seminary, a father, a lake, a meal, rust, dancing, a field at dusk, or the desire to live long enough to see what comes of and from oneself. Such particulars are not illustrations added after an argument. They function as tribunals before which abstraction must answer. The movement is scalar: the local body or creature discloses a larger theological, political, ecological, or technological structure, and that larger claim must descend again to the neighbor, wound, landscape, or remembered life that made it visible. Across his blogs and books this produces a distinctive relation between theology, ethics, ecology, technology, and poetics. Living persons are bearers of time because they can receive a past as claim, recollect it, undergo correction, answer for consequence, redirect intention, and undertake repair. Technical systems may preserve traces, route information, classify patterns, optimize responses, and extend archives, but those capacities do not constitute historical bearing. This distinction underlies Olds’s critique of predicate theft: the transfer of morally and historically thick predicates such as intelligence, memory, judgment, agency, care, repentance, or creativity from living bearer of time to configurations that cannot bear consequences. The blogged corpus is therefore neither finally anti-machine nor reducible to technological criticism. Its encompassing claim is that reality becomes ethically intelligible through what living beings can bear, correct, transmit, and repair through time. The proper test of abstraction is return: whether a concept, system, institution, theology, or technology can descend from formal coherence and remain answerable to creature, neighbor, history, substrate, consequence, and future. Every abstraction must account to conativity |