24 September 2026
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What if advanced AI gave every person their own simulated universe? Roman Yampolskiy explores the idea of “personal universes”—individualized virtual realities designed around a single human’s preferences—and argues that creating billions of such worlds could make the broader simulation hypothesis more likely by vastly increasing the number of simulated realities. 0:08 Why AI Alignment Fails Across Billions of People 0:49 The Idea of Personal Universes 3:08 The Substrate Control Problem 4:38 Reducing AI Alignment to One Person at a Time 6:34 Personal Universes and the Simulation Hypothesis Roman V. Yampolskiy is a tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Louisville's Speed School of Engineering, where he founded and directs the Cyber Security Lab. Widely credited with coining the term "AI safety" in 2011, he is the author of AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable.
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Who Is Our Lady of Walsingham and Why Is She Important?
Today, Our Lady has two feasts. Our Lady of Ransom and Our Lady of Walsingham, Queen of England, are both celebrated today. There is an annual pilgrimage to Walsingham.
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From Aleteia
By Philip Kosloski
Our Lady of Walsingham is a primary patron of Catholics in England and is connected to a series of apparitions in the 11th century.
Catholicism in England has a rich history and a strong devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Catholics for many centuries invoked the Blessed Mother under the title of Our Lady of Walsingham.
This particular title is linked to a series of apparitions to a woman named Richeldis that took place in the 11th century in England.
Our Lady of Walsingham
The Catholic National Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham offers the following history of these apparitions:
"Our Lady led Richeldis in spirit to Nazareth and showed her the house where the angel had greeted her. ‘Look, daughter,’ said Our Lady. ‘Take the measurements of this house and erect another one like it in Walsingham, dedicated to praising and honoring me. All who come there shall find help in their need.
‘It shall be a perpetual memorial to the great joy of the Annunciation, ground and origin of all my joys and the root of humanity’s gracious Redemption. This came about through Gabriel’s message that I would be a mother through my humility, and conceive God’s Son in virginity.'" [Pynson Ballad 1485]
Richeldis built this Holy House, and the shrine at Our Lady of Walsingham became known as "England's Nazareth."
It was a place of pilgrimage for many centuries, but was destroyed in the 16th century following the Reformation.
During the 19th century a local chapel that was on the way to Walsignham was purchased by a Catholic and restored to Catholic use.
Furthermore, "In 1897, by rescript of Pope Leo XIII, the sanctuary of Our Lady of Walsingham was restored with the building of a Holy House as the Lady Chapel of the Catholic Church of the Annunciation, at King’s Lynn."
Most recently Pope Benedict XVI created an ordinariate for Anglicans seeking to maintain their unique liturgical traditions, but who wanted to belong to the Catholic Church:
The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham was erected by decree of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the same day [January 15, 2011].
Devotion to Our Lady of Walsingham has seen a new resurgence in recent years and thousands of pilgrims visit the shrine in England annually.
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Who is Our Lady of Ransom?
Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Ransom, the Patroness of the Order of Our Lady of Mercy and the Redemption of the Captives, the Mercedarians.
From Aleteia
By Philip Kosloski
Our Lady of Ransom is connected to the Order of Mercedarians, who sought to free Christian captives.
September 24 is a special feast day celebrated in many Spanish- and French-speaking countries that honors Our Lady of Ransom.
In Spanish the feast is titled Virgin de la Merced. Merced means grace, benefit, mercy, and the Order of Mercedarians promoted devotion to Our Lady under this title.
According to the University of Dayton, "Our Lady of Ransom is a Marian title commemorating the foundation of the Mercedarian religious order by St. Peter Nolasco in 1218 ... St. Peter Nolasco founded the order in response to a request made by the Blessed Virgin during an apparition on August 1, 1218. Members of this order took a special vow to act as hostages, if necessary, to free Christian captives whose faith was in danger from the Moors."
As a result, September 24 became a day historically associated with praying for prisoners, as well as for releasing captives.
Devotion to Virgin de la Merced is now more focused on our spiritual chains and breaking free from slavery to sin.
23 September 2026
Another Influencer Priest Leaves His Vocation (What’s Going On?)
We’ve all seen influencer priests, monks, and nuns online. It’s a wonderful thing… being able to spread the gospel over such a wide-ranging medium. But is it all rainbows and sunshine? Is there a major risk that comes with entering the online domain? Over the last few years, we’ve seen quite a few “influencer priests” leave their vocations. So I’m trying to find out… is there something about digital content creation that is at odds with sacred vows?
Our Lady of Walsingham: The Queen of England
Our Lady of Walsingham, Queen of England's, Feast Day is today, the same day as Our Lady of Ransom in the General Roman Calendar.
From The Imaginative Conservative
By Joseph Pearce
The reason for Walsingham’s importance is its association with the Marian apparitions to a pious English noblewoman in 1061. By the middle of the fourteenth century, people considered England to be “Our Lady’s dowry” and that she was, in some special sense, the protectress of the English people.
Few people in today’s godless England have heard of Our Lady of Walsingham. But there was a time that she was known and revered throughout the whole of Christendom, to such a degree that she could be said to have put England on the map, at least in spiritual terms.
During the Middle Ages, the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham was one of the major pilgrimage sites in the world, ranking alongside Rome, Jerusalem, and Santiago de Compostela. It was the principal shrine to the Blessed Virgin, the place above all others that Christians flocked to pay homage to the Mother of God. And they flocked in such numbers that the Walsingham Way was also known as the Milky Way, suggesting poetically that the number of pilgrims rivalled the number of stars in the sky. A succession of English monarchs made pilgrimages there, and pilgrims arrived from all over Europe. An anonymous poem, entitled “As Ye Came from the Holy Land,” sometimes attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, refers not to Jerusalem but to “the holy land of Walsingham.”
The reason for Walsingham’s importance is its association with the Marian apparitions to a pious English noblewoman in 1061, at a glorious time in English history when the country was ruled by a saint, Edward the Confessor. The news of the apparitions spread and Walsingham’s reputation grew, as did the devotion of the English people to the Blessed Virgin. By the middle of the fourteenth century, and probably from much earlier, people considered England to be “Our Lady’s dowry” and that she was, in some special sense, the protectress of the English people. In 1350 a mendicant preacher stated that “it is commonly said that the land of England is the Virgin’s dowry.” An altarpiece from the late fourteenth century depicts King Richard II offering the Virgin an orb, on which a miniature map of England is depicted, with the inscription Dos tua Virgo pia haec est, “This is thy dowry, O Holy Virgin.” The Wilton Diptych, one of the masterpieces of late mediaeval art, dating from around 1395, depicts Richard II kneeling before the Madonna and Child and flanked by two canonized English kings, St. Edmund the Martyr and the aforementioned Edward the Confessor, the latter of whom had been generally accepted as the patron saint of England until the crusaders returned from the Holy Land, bringing the cult of St. George with them. As for St. George himself, he is represented in the Diptych by the flag emblazoned with the cross of St. George, the flag of England, held aloft by an angel.
At the end of the fourteenth century, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, wrote of the Blessed Virgin that “we English, being… her own Dowry, as we are commonly called, ought to surpass others in the fervour of our praises and devotions.” In the early fifteenth century, the title dos Mariae (Mary’s dowry) was being applied to England in Latin texts and, on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, English priests prayed for the intercession of “the Virgin, protectress of her dower.”
All was well until the monster, Henry VIII, destroyed the shrine in 1538, publicly burning the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham that so many generations had come to venerate. The distress that this caused the people of England was expressed in an anonymous poem, “The Ballad of Walsingham,” which depicts the ruins of the shrine several decades after its destruction:
Bitter, bitter oh to behold
The grass to grow
Where the walls of Walsingham
So stately did show.
Such were the worth of Walsingham
While she did stand,
Such are the wrackes as now do show
Of that so holy land.
Level, level with the ground
The Towers do lie
Which with their golden, glitt’ring tops
Pierced out to the sky.
Where were gates no gates are now,
The ways unknown,
Where the press of friars did pass
While far her fame was known.
Owls do scrike where the sweetest hymns
Lately were sung,
Toads and serpents hold their dens
Where the palmers did throng.
Weep, weep, O Walsingham,
Whose days are nights,
Blessings turned to blasphemies,
Holy deeds to dispites.
Sin is where our Lady sat,
Heaven turned to hell;
Satan sits where our Lord did sway,
Walsingham, oh, farewell!
This plaintive cry was taken up by a later English saint, John Henry Newman, in his poem about England’s “Pilgrim Queen”:
“Here I sit desolate,”
sweetly said she,
“Though I’m a queen,
and my name is Marie:
Robbers have rifled
my garden and store,
Foes they have stolen
my heir from my bower.
The Pilgrim Queen goes on to speak of how the Puritans said they could keep her Son “far better than I,” placing him in a “palace of ice, hard and cold as were they.” After this Puritan palace had “all melted away,” the people of England, her people, had bartered her Son for “the spice of the desert” and the “gold of the stream,” choosing mercantile materialism over the pearl of great price:
And me they bid wander
in weeds and alone,
In this green merry land
which once was my own.
This sad and sorry scenario would appear to be the unhappy ending for England, this most distressful country which has sent her true Queen into exile. And yet there are signs of life after death, something which should not surprise those who worship a God who found his way out of the grave, to borrow a phrase of Chesterton’s. Over the past two years, the replica of the mediaeval statue of Our Lady of Walsingham has been touring England, visiting every one of England’s Catholic cathedrals. The Pilgrim Queen, long in exile, has returned!
Known as the Dowry Tour, in recognition of England’s traditional title, the Pilgrim Queen’s royal visit to all four corners of her realm culminated on March 29, 2020 with the formal rededication of England to Mary. This was done simultaneously at Westminster Cathedral in London, at the resurrected shrine of Our Lady in Walsingham, at all the other cathedrals of England, and in many parishes and homes. This divine development, which should bring joy to the hearts of all true sons and daughters of Albion, was the answer to the prayers of St. John Henry Newman, England’s most recently canonized saint, who prophesied in the final lines of his poem the Return of the Queen:
I look’d on that Lady,
and out from her eyes
Came the deep glowing blue
of Italy’s skies;
And she raised up her head
and she smiled, as a Queen
On the day of her crowning,
so bland and serene.
“A moment,” she said,
“and the dead shall revive;
The giants are failing,
the Saints are alive;
I am coming to rescue
my home and my reign,
And Peter and Philip
are close in my train.”
__________
The featured image is the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham in the Slipper Chapel, photographed by Thorvaldsson, and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. It appears here courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and has been brightened for clarity.
The Christian Nation We Aren’t Ready For
"As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." Art. 11 of the Treaty with the Dey of Tripoli, ratified by the US Senate on 7 June 1797, and signed by President John Adams on 10 June 1797, thereby becoming the supreme Law of the Land under Article 6 of the US Constitution
From Crisis
By John Melnikov, MA
Christian civilization isn’t simply created out of thin air with the use of banners, slogans, mottos, or declarations.
Should Christianity have political influence in America is a question that will become increasingly discussed in the run-up to the 2026 midterm elections. The fact of the matter is that Christianity is naturally going to influence our government and our nation, considering the number of Christians that live and vote in the United States. The more important question is what kind of Christians parishes and congregations are producing and whether they are adequately prepared to ensure the survival and flourishing of a free, ordered society.
Christian civilization isn’t simply created out of thin air with the use of banners, slogans, mottos, or declarations. It is cultivated by Christian men and women who have been formed in sacrifice, self-denial, courage, forgiveness, and the belief that they are called to serve a purpose and a Being higher than themselves. A nation incapable of governing its own appetites cannot preserve the noble, laudable aspects of its character no matter how many stump speeches end with, “God bless America.”
Apparently, America is facing an enormous Christian nationalism crisis. Depending on whom you ask, these Christian nationalists are the last fail-safe against full-scale national suicide or theocratic psychopaths no different than members of al-Qaeda or the IRA. The question, frankly, is lazy at best and wholly exhausting. Attempting to determine whether or not America is a Christian nation glances over the more important analysis of whether or not American Christians are actually Christian.
Secularism in the United States tends to view a robust, public witness to Christ with suspicion if not downright contempt. Christians and Christianity itself are castigated as remnants from a largely regrettable past replete with unforgivable sins and directives that are pointed to as the causes of every evil of Western civilization throughout the course of its history. Therefore, the definition of what a Christian is can only be thoroughly negative and worthy of sociopolitical ostracization.
Without explicitly stating it, modernity commands that Christians leave their Christianity at home and face the world with a completely secular set of ideas and criteria by which they make decisions. Once this is accomplished, modern society then congratulates itself on tolerating Christians—only after they have been rendered politically harmless.
A Christian who truly believes in the Gospel and participates in the life of his or her church will naturally carry the aspects of their Christianity into the voting booth with them. With the current uptick in church attendance and affiliation across the West—and especially in the United States—it would seem as if the tide is finally shifting away from postmodernist piffle back toward the timeless philosophy of Christ and His Church. However, the Christian-American should hold off on celebrating just yet.
Unfortunately, Christian nationalism has been largely co-opted by some members of the political Right who are more concerned with counting cultural cool than promoting policy and legislation that steers the country toward a more authentic expression of Christian ethics. A Christian country isn’t created by ensuring that there are American flags in churches or that Ten Commandments legislation is given a national audience. It is not cultivated by how many baptized, vocal Christians are elected or tweet “Christ is King” on their 𝕏 feeds. It is not solidified by “owning the libs.”
Christianity stripped of sacrifice and selflessness becomes tribalism with a crucifix. When Christ and His Church are seen as nothing more than assets to a team sport, the entirety of His message is manipulated and politicized beyond the point of recognition. If I self-identify as a conservative Christian but I abandon my marriage when it becomes difficult, consume pornography, refuse children because they inconvenience me, live beyond my means, despise my political enemies, and spend six hours a day staring at a phone, exactly what Christian civilization am I conserving?
A republic requires people to say “no” to survive. Political self-government without a voting population that practices personal self-government cannot survive. Catholicism teaches precisely what is needed in order for a man or woman to perform self-governance in a manner that will bear both spiritual and physical fruit in their lives. The virtues of temperance, justice, charity, and fortitude teach the Catholic Christian that we are capable of being wrong. But we are also capable of healing those wrongs with diligent prayer, self-reflection, an amended life, and the grace of Our Lord through the reception of the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
Modern culture asks us to express ourselves, find our truths, and slough off the things that deny us happiness. Christianity challenges us to deny ourselves, conform ourselves to the Truth of the Gospel, and take up our own crosses.
The real Christian nationalism crisis has to do completely with formation. As a high school teacher, I have the privilege of working with teenagers every day. Over the course of my career, I have become acutely aware of a difference in the kids that sit in my classroom every day. They are, more and more, finding their formation in institutions that teach them that their truest form of self and deepest experience of happiness comes from a lack of self-restraint.
A nation that trains its children from a young age to constantly look for ways to sate their basest desires and instincts will naturally attempt to form and cultivate governments that exist solely for that purpose. The opposite of a Christian nation may not be a state that denies the existence of God. It could very well be a state that recognizes God but fosters a deep egoistic emphasis on the self rather than the willingness to sacrifice for the benefit of the neighbor.
The answer to all of this is actually quite simple. If you want America to be a distinctly Christian nation, then that’s fine. Start producing more Christians. This starts in the home with families that understand that sacrifice is one of the essential building blocks of love and community. It is fostered by parents who are visible in their prayer, Catholic schools that are unapologetically Catholic in their character, people who forgive their enemies, and parishes filled with congregants who actually know one another and care for one another. Providing an example to the younger generation is the first step in ensuring that the Christians we are creating aren’t Christians merely in name only.
The fantasy is that Washington can restore a civilization that American families, churches, schools, and individuals are unwilling to live. Politics matter. Laws matter. Elections matter. But as Andrew Breitbart said, “Politics is downstream from culture,” and if Americans cannot govern themselves, eventually somebody else will. Looking into the culture to dismantle the insidious pitfalls and landmines that have taken the soul out of Christian life is the job of each Christian, first and foremost.
So, is America a Christian nation? That is increasingly beside the point. The more pressing concern is whether enough Christians are willing to live an authentically Christian life so that their families, schools, institutions, and, eventually, government are recognizably Christian?
Christian civilization will not be restored because a politician invokes God from behind a podium. It will be restored, if it is restored at all, by ordinary Christians doing extraordinarily unfashionable things—such as remaining married, raising children, controlling their appetites, honoring their obligations, forgiving their enemies, worshipping God, caring for their parents, and accepting that freedom sometimes means refusing ourselves what we desperately want. Perhaps before Christians worry about taking back their country, they should focus on taking back themselves.