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The accuracy and precision of todays weapons are steadily forcing contemporary battlefields to empty of human combatants.

As more and more sensors fill the battlespace, sending vast amounts of data back to analysts, humans struggle to make sense of the mountain of information gathered.

This is where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in learning algorithms that thrive off big data; in fact, the more data these systems analyse, the more accurate they can be.

In short, AI is the ability for a system to think in a limited way, working specifically on problems normally associated with human intelligence, such as pattern and speech recognition, translation and decision-making.

AI and machine learning have been a part of civilian life for years. Megacorporations like Amazon and Google have used these tools to build vast commercial empires based in part on predicting the wants and needs of the people that use them.

The United States military has also long invested in civilian AI, with the Pentagons Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), funnelling money into key areas of AI research.

However, to tackle specific military concerns, the defence establishment soon realised its AI needs were not being met. So they approached Silicon Valley, asking for its help in giving the Pentagon the tools it would need to process an ever-growing mountain of information.

Employees at several corporations were extremely uncomfortable with their research being used by the military and persuaded the companies Google being one of them to opt out of, or at least dial down, its cooperation with the defence establishment.

While the much-hyped idea of Killer Robots remorseless machines hunting down humans and terminating them for some reason known to themselves has caught the publics imagination, the current focus of AI could not be further from that.

As a recent report on the military applications of AI points out, the technology is central to providing robotic assistance on the battlefield, which will enable forces to maintain or expand warfighting capacity without increasing manpower.

What does this mean? In effect, robotic systems will do tasks considered too menial or too dangerous for human beings such as unmanned supply convoys, mine clearance or the air-to-air refuelling of aircraft. It is also a force multiplier, which means it allows the same amount of people to do and achieve more.

An idea that illustrates this is the concept of the robotic Loyal Wingman being developed for the US Air Force. Designed to fly alongside a jet flown by a human pilot, this unmanned jet would fight off the enemy, be able to complete its mission, or help the human pilot do so. It would act as an AI bodyguard, defending the manned aircraft, and is also designed to sacrifice itself if there is a need to do so to save the human pilot.

A Navy X-47B drone, an unmanned combat aerial vehicle [File: AP]As AI power develops, the push towards systems becoming autonomous will only increase. Currently, militaries are keen to have a human involved in the decision-making loop. But in wartime, these communication links are potential targets cut off the head and the body would not be able to think. The majority of drones currently deployed around the world would lose their core functions if the data link connecting them to their human operator were severed.

This is not the case with the high-end, intelligence-gathering, unarmed drone Global Hawk, which, once given orders is able to carry them out independently without the need for a vulnerable data link, allowing it to be sent into highly contested airspaces to gather vital information. This makes it far more survivable in a future conflict, and money is now pouring into these new systems that can fly themselves, like Frances Dassault Neuron or Russias Sukhoi S70 both semi-stealthy autonomous combat drone designs.

AI programmes and systems are constantly improving, as their quick reactions and data processing allow them to finely hone the tasks they are designed to perform.

Robotic air-to-air refuelling aircraft have a better flight record and are able to keep themselves steady in weather that would leave a human pilot struggling. In war games and dogfight simulations, AI pilots are already starting to score significant victories over their human counterparts.

While AI algorithms are great at data-crunching, they have also started to surprise observers in the choices they make.

In 2016, when an AI programme, AlphaGo, took on a human grandmaster and world champion of the famously complex game of Go, it was expected to act methodically, like a machine. What surprised everyone watching was the unexpectedly bold moves it sometimes made, catching its opponent Lee Se-dol off-guard. The algorithm went on to win, to the shock of the tournaments observers. This kind of breakthrough in AI development had not been expected for years, yet here it was.

Machine intelligence is and will be increasingly incorporated into manned platforms. Ships will now have fewer crew members as the AI programmes will be able to do more. Single pilots will be able to control squadrons of unmanned aircraft that will fly themselves but obey that humans orders.

Facial recognition security cameras monitor a pedestrian shopping street in Beijing [File: AP]AIs main strength is in the arena of surveillance and counterinsurgency: being able to scan images made available from millions of CCTV cameras; being able to follow multiple potential targets; using big data to finesse predictions of a targets behaviour with ever-greater accuracy. All this is already within the grasp of AI systems that have been set up for this purpose unblinking eyes that watch, record, and monitor 24 hours a day.

The sheer volume of material that can be gathered is staggering and would be beyond the scope of human analysts to watch, absorb and fold into any conclusions they made.

AI is perfect for this and one of the testbeds for this kind of analytical, detection software is in special operations, where there has been a significant success. The tempo of special forces operations in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism has increased dramatically as information from a raid can now be quickly analysed and acted upon, leading to other raids that same night, which leads to more information gathered.

This speed has the ability to knock any armed group off balance as the raids are so frequent and relentless that the only option left is for them to move and hide, suppressing their organisation and rendering it ineffective.

A man uses a PlayStation-style console to manoeuvre the aircraft, as he demonstrates a control system for unmanned drones [File: AP]As AI military systems mature, their record of success will improve, and this will help overcome another key challenge in the acceptance of informationalised systems by human operators: trust.

Human soldiers will learn to increasingly rely on smart systems that can think at a faster rate than they can, spotting threats before they do. An AI system is only as good as the information it receives and processes about its environment, in other words, what it perceives. The more information it has, the more accurate it will be in its perception, assessment and subsequent actions.

The least complicated environment for a machine to understand is flight. Simple rules, a slim chance of collision, and relatively direct routes to and from its area of operations mean that this is where the first inroads into AI and relatively smart systems have been made. Loitering munitions, designed to search and destroy radar installations, are already operational and have been used in conflicts such as the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Investment and research have also poured into maritime platforms. Operating in a more complex environment with sea life and surface traffic potentially obscuring sensor readings, a major development is in unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). Stealthy, near-silent systems, they are virtually undetectable and can stay submerged almost indefinitely.

Alongside the advances, there is a growing concern with how deadly these imagined AI systems could be.

Human beings have proven themselves extremely proficient in the ways of slaughter but there is increased worry that these mythical robots would run amuck, and that humans would lose control. This is the central concern among commentators, researchers and potential manufacturers.

But an AI system would not get enraged, feel hatred for its enemy, or decide to take it out on the local population if its AI comrades were destroyed. It could have the Laws of Armed Conflict built into its software.

The most complex and demanding environment is urban combat, where the wars of the near future will increasingly be fought. Conflicts in cities can overwhelm most human beings and it is highly doubtful a machine with a very narrow view of the world would be able to navigate it, let alone fight and prevail without making serious errors of judgement.

A man looks at a demonstration of human motion analysis software at the stall of an artificial intelligence solutions maker at an exhibition in China [File: Reuters]While they do not exist now, killer robots continue to appear as a worry for many and codes of ethics are already being worked on. Could a robot combatant indeed understand and be able to apply the Laws of Armed Conflict? Could it tell friend from foe, and if so, what would its reaction be? This applies especially to militias, soldiers from opposing sides using similar equipment, fighters who do not usually wear a defining uniform, and non-combatants.

The concern is so high that the Human Rights Watch has urged for the prohibition of fully autonomous AI units capable of making lethal decisions, calling for a ban very much like those in place for mines and chemical and biological weapons.

Another main concern is that a machine can be hacked in ways a human cannot. It might be fighting alongside you one minute but then turn on you the next. Human units have mutinied and changed allegiances before but to turn ones entire army or fleet against them with a keystroke is a terrifying possibility for military planners. And software can go wrong. A pervasive phrase in modern civilian life is sorry, the system is down; imagine this applied to armed machines engaged in battle.

Perhaps the most concerning of all is the offensive use of AI malware. More than 10 years ago, the worlds most famous cyber-weapon Stuxnet sought to insinuate itself into the software controlling the spinning of centrifuges refining uranium in Iran. Able to hide itself, it covered up its tracks, searching for a particular piece of code to attack that would cause the centrifuges to spin out of control and be destroyed. Although highly sophisticated then, it is nothing compared with what is available now and what could be deployed during a conflict.

The desire to design and build these new weapons that are expected to tip the balance in future conflicts has triggered an arms race between the US and its near-peer competitors Russia and China.

AI can not only be empowering, it is asymmetric in its leverage, meaning a small country can develop effective AI software without the industrial might needed to research, develop and test a new weapons system. It is a powerful way for a country to leapfrog over the competition, producing potent designs that will give it the edge needed to win a war.

Russia has declared this the new frontier for military research. President Vladimir Putin in an address in 2017 said that whoever became the leader in the sphere of AI would become the ruler of the world. To back that up, the same year Russias Military-Industrial Committee approved the integration of AI into 30 percent of the countrys armed forces by 2030.

Current realities are different, and so far Russian ventures into this field have proven patchy. The Uran-9 unmanned combat vehicle performed poorly in the urban battlefields of Syria in 2018, often not understanding its surroundings or able to detect potential targets. Despite these setbacks, it was inducted into the Russian military in 2019, a clear sign of the drive in senior Russian military circles to field robotic units with increasing autonomy as they develop in complexity.

China, too, has clearly stated that a major focus of research and development is how to win at intelligent(ised) warfare. In a report into Chinas embracing of and use of AI in military applications, the Brookings Institution wrote that it will include command decision making, military deductions that could change the very mechanisms for victory in future warfare. Current areas of focus are AI-enabled radar, robotic ships and smarter cruise and hypersonic missiles, all areas of research that other countries are focusing on.

An American military pilot flies a Predator drone from a ground command post during a night border mission [File: AP]The development of military artificial intelligence giving systems increasing autonomy gives military planners a tantalising glimpse at victory on the battlefield, but the weapons themselves, and the countermeasures that would be aimed against them in a war of the near future, remain largely untested.

Countries like Russia and China with their revamped and streamlined militaries are no longer looking to achieve parity with the US; they are looking to surpass it by researching heavily into the weapons of the future.

Doctrine is key: how these new weapons will integrate into future war plans and how they can be leveraged for their maximum effect on the enemy.

Any quantitative leap in weapons design is always a concern as it gives a country the belief that they could be victorious in battle, thus lowering the threshold for conflict.

As war speeds up even further, it will increasingly be left in the hands of these systems to fight them, to give recommendations, and ultimately, to make the decisions.

Read more here:
Project Force: AI and the military a friend or foe? - Al Jazeera English

Poor Jim Lucas.

The Republican Indiana representative from Seymour who just loves, loves, loves guns and racially charged memes is in the middle of another controversy.

This latest dust-up is a particularly Lucas-like tragic farce. Its filled with alt-right half-truths and outright whoppers and ends with Lucas, as usual, feeling sorry for himself.

It began, as so often has been the case for Lucas, on social media.

A Black surgeon from Houston named James Carson wrote on Lucass Facebook page about the Constitution. He took issue with some of the lawmakers views and noted that the Constitution Lucas lauds in its original form condoned slavery and denied Black people their rights.

Lucas responded by claiming the first slaveowner in America was black.

He followed that by later asking Carson:

Did you get any scholarships or financial assistance because of your skin color? Any minority scholarships?

Before long, Carson threw up his hands and disengaged from the conversation, but not before calling Lucas racist.

The Indianapolis Star did a story on the incident.

Lucas labeled the story a race baiting hit piece.

That is vintage Lucas.

He routinely calls people who disagree with him evil and dishonest, but let anyone cast so much as a sideways glance in his direction and he goes off like a Roman candle.

No matter the dispute or context, in his eyes, Lucas is never wrong.

Hes also always the victim.

The world he moves in is like a funhouse mirror. Much of what he sees and believes is warped, distorted or just plain fiction.

Take the fact about the first slave owner in America being Black.

Anthony Johnson presumably, the historical figure to whom Lucas referred was Black and a slaveowner. Johnson was the first slaveowner to go to court here to assert the right to own another human being.

This was in the 1600s, more than a century before the Revolutionary War began when America was a collection of British colonies. Its not likely Johnson was the first American slave owner nor does it override the fact that, by the time the Constitution Lucas claims to venerate was adopted, slavery was a white supremacist institution.

But it does suggest this countrys history with race is both more complex and more tragic than Lucass self-justifying bluster would acknowledge.

The same goes for his take on affirmative action.

In Lucas-world, any attempts to redress Americas historic racial injustices are just reverse discrimination, a case of two wrongs attempting to make a right.

His misunderstanding of reality is entirely Lucas-like.

Once, in the middle of a radio discussion about gun policy I moderated, he told a legal scholar not to Scalia him. Lucas meant he didnt want to hear references to statements from the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who generally supported gun owners rights that guns could be regulated.

Lucas is an absolutist when it comes to guns.

He didnt want to hear any fact contradicting his fantasy.

Something similar seems to be going on with his views on affirmative action.

The courts have ruled any race-based discrimination that determines an outcome getting into a college or securing a job is illegal.

What is legal and encouraged is casting a wide net to make sure the best applicants, regardless of race, gender or ethnic background, find their way into it.

In addition to being good law, that also just makes good business sense.

But that reality makes it harder for guys like Lucas to feel aggrieved, so they conjure up some strange fantasy to contend with instead.

There are scholarships to support racial minorities just as there are to help veterans, people from specific towns or those who have specific skills or interests. They often are privately funded.

This is all part of living in a big and complicated nation made up of more than 330 million people with varied backgrounds, interests and points of view. Its a task that requires quite a bit of balancing a lot of give and take if its going to work.

But thats not the way Jim Lucas sees it.

He prefers to live in a fantasy world in which everything is a conspiracy to oppress folks like him.

That he seems to think that way isnt evil or even dishonest.

Its just sad.

Poor Jim Lucas.

John Krull is director of Franklin Colleges Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

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John Krull: Another alt-right self-pity party - Terre Haute Tribune Star

Joan Rivers. Photo-Illustration: by Vulture; Photo by Tom Briglia/FilmMagic

You want to make women in comedy cringe? Say the phrase women in comedy. You could be trying to be positive, like, It really is a great time for women in comedy or 10 Women in Comedy to Watch, but the words still trigger. It brings to mind mid-market morning-radio shock jocks asking, Whats it like being a woman in comedy? when you know they just want to find out if you sleep with fans. Or overly earnest journalists asking the same question and hoping the answer is traumatically bad. It makes female comedians think of ghettoized Ladies Night comedy shows or of being expected to discuss the Me Too allegations of comedians they dont know, while their male colleagues never are. This is complicated. Especially when you want to inform people of, you know, what it is and was like being a woman in comedy.

With Hysterical, a documentary about women in comedy, premiering on FX on April 2 (and heading to Hulu after), Kathryn VanArendonk joins Vultures Good One podcast to unpack the value of women in comedy projects, why were exhausted with them, and what happens when comedians get asked, Whats it like to be a woman in comedy? over and over again. You can read an edited excerpt from the transcript or listen to the full episode below. Tune in to Good One every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Jesse David Fox: I want to talk about women in comedy as an idea that gets talked about as a whole. I dont really feel the need to talk about women in comedy in actuality because I dont think its, like, a remarkable, weird thing that deserves to be discussed.

Kathryn VanArendonk: I think what we want to talk about is the idea of pointing to women in comedy as some special, deserving class that requires distinct attention because so often it results in us overlooking the fact that there are actual, individual women who do comedy. I assume we are not the only people to have noticed that there are lots of women doing comedy! But also there is still a tendency to identify women doing comedy as some unusual, strange phenomenon that requires a lot of particular focus separate from the rest of the comedy world. And thats a phenomenon. The Lets talk about the funny ladies thing is something I feel really mixed about. I feel very conflicted about it as a kind of project.

Jesse: What did you think of the documentary?

Kathryn: Its by a filmmaker named Andrea Nevins, who has done other feminist-leaning documentary work. There was a big movie that she did on Barbie, for instance. Hysterical is a look at what its like to be a woman who does comedy right now and a little bit also a history of women who have had to deal with how tough it is to be a woman stand-up over the last couple decades. She asks people about their childhoods, and you get a bunch of different perspectives. She asks people about comedian terminology. Its very general. Like, Whats it like to be on the road? The sections are framed in ways that lead the viewer through a very explicit idea of what the big issues are if youre a lady. One of them is body issues, one of them is sexual harassment, and none of them are being a woman of color, although that does come up occasionally. But it is telling to me that thats not one that is pulled out as a special, special section in the feature.

My feeling watching the documentary was a combination of longing and frustration. I love archival stuff. I love historical stuff. I love really specific deep dives that I have not seen before. But my overwhelming frustration with this particular documentary was the way that the framing Heres this issue and then this issue and then this issue led to a real flattening of every individual that the filmmaker was portraying. It was: Here are the collective issues of what women have when they try to do comedy here. You can see them all speaking to it. Yes, they will say slightly different things, but theyre all grouped in the same category. You really are not given any space to appreciate the fact that theyre people instead of examples of this phenomenon.

Jesse: With Good One, regardless of gender, my favorite thing is when someone will say something in an episode like This is what comedy is about. You have to do a joke like this. And then the next episode someone will say the exact opposite thing. I try to leave it as thats their perspective. So as a whole, youre like, Oh, theres 9 zillion ways of doing this. I mean, Im the last person alive who cares about the divide of alternative comedy and club comedy, but it does feel like it flattened the types of experiences people have and the types of rooms people were able to create to address these specific issues.

This is a part of a sort of tradition of how the history of comedy is told, both looking back and at the time. This is not the first women in comedy documentary thereve been maybe four or five in the last five years. Theres also a variety of books and tons of academic coverage. Its partly because, as comedy is covered, theres four ways of canonizing comedy history. Theres the stand-up narrative that is almost exclusively men, with women dotted throughout it; there is the history of Jewish comedy; there is a history of Black comedy; and then theres a history of women in comedy. So theyre all separated from each other, and often they then do not get told in the context of the main history. They are effectively ghettoized as sort of a different history. How do you feel about that? Where do you think that tendency comes from?

Kathryn: This is where I get very conflicted about this as a kind of project. I think its pretty clear that neither of us find this particular documentary an impressive example of this type of project. But I do think theres a bigger and less easy question about whether women in comedy, as a kind of project, is a valid, valuable way to frame any of this. I come at it from academia because thats a form of institution Ive spent a lot of time in and know generally what the institutionalized histories end up looking like. It reminds me of the way that big departments say, an English department are going to look at their curriculum, are going to look at their professors, are going to look at their students and be like, Wow, we dont have any coverage of, say, the Afro-Caribbean traditions. Theyre going to hire one person who is going to be that one professor who will only teach about that one thing and then the students who go to those classes will know exactly what theyre getting. And it will stay as this completely separate, as you said, ghettoized experience of what the rest of literature is.

Jesse: The downside of that, I think, is pretty clear. Its a way of saying theres the real thing and then theres this other thing that is not as real. Youre saying theres the main narrative and theres this other one.

Kathryn: As soon as you frame it that way, thats how it gets treated. Thats how the money works. A lot of this is institutionalized, right? So as soon as you have funding for one small thing, it sort of stays that one small thing, and theres no reason to make it part of what the bigger narrative is.

But there is a positive to that kind of choice as well because, for most institutions, if you didnt hire your one Afro-Caribbean professor, there wouldnt be anyone! This is the way that journalism often works too, and documentaries often work the same way. This is the way you get your project made. Its the angle. It is the organizing choice.

And you and I have both written lots of lists in our lives. We both know that lists are useful services for readers, that lists are sort of fascinating intellectual exercises for the writers. But also the lists ghettoize the things that you are designating as that one topic of the list. If Im making a list of women comedians, Im saying its a separate list than the main comedians. But this is the way that people find stuff. This is the way that histories that are often lost get remembered.

The other way to think about it is, rather than sidelining a group of people, projects like these create safe platforms for them. The reality is that I would love if women were always a part of a mainstream narrative of what comedy history is, but we create safe spaces and separate spaces because they wouldnt be there otherwise. So separate lists, separate projects like this have to write back against what the main narrative was.

Jesse: The version of this that Ive found most useful is We Killed, which is the oral history of women in comedy. What it really succeeds at doing is it just retells time periods. It is, Here are the different time periods in the history of comedy, starting from the beginning, and all it does is say, What if we told it from the perspective where were not ignoring that women were not dominant? The most telling is that they tell the history of alternative comedy, which was so female-led. You dont read it and come away with thinking, This is the history of women in alternative comedy. It is the definitive history of alternative comedy or alternative comedy in L.A.

Too often when you do this type of thing, it has a binders full of women phenomenon, which is, We got these women, and here they are. But there is a feeling of, you know, wanting the story to be told better. There are documentaries about specific women. Theres a Joan Rivers documentary, which is one of the gold standards of what a comedy documentary is. Theres a Moms Mabley documentary, which is fantastic. I just want so many more of those because I do think they have specific stories to be told.

Theres this question that comes back often: Whats it like to be a woman in comedy? There are different versions of that question, but that is the main underlying question. Theres also Are women funny? which is another version of Whats it like to be a woman comedian? For a long time, if there was a woman comedian on television, they would be on and the question would be like, Are women even funny? Isnt being a comedian something men do? Thats what Joan Rivers had to answer all the time. And then I guess in some bleary-eyed attempt to be whatever the past version of woke was where the question became, Whats it like to be a woman in comedy? Because I understand there are differences, and I want to hear what its like.

But ultimately, that then became bastardized by places like morning radio, which is really acting it up: Youre a woman in comedy. Isnt that weird? More recently, the contemporary version is Whats it like being a woman in comedy when theres sexual assault happening all over the place? Or instead of asking someone whats it like to be a woman in comedy, you ask every single woman in comedy, no matter what theyre promoting even if they dont talk about this stuff at all, even if theyre just playing this second lead in a sitcom or the zany roommate What about Louis C.K.? That question is not a question about what its like to be a woman comic, but thats what it becomes when its a question youd never ask a man.

Kathryn: And anyone asking that question also is not really interested in the ramifications of the answer, right? Because then that means there have been generations of comedians who have been left out because they had to leave, because it was too soul crushing. Someone asking that question is generally not actually interested in how hard it still is, and part of what this documentary and most versions of that question imply is: Louis C.K.s someone weve already gotten rid of, so now I can ask you about him. Its not, Who are all the other guys? Who are the Louis C.K.s who we dont know about yet?

The question is inherently progressivist. Its saying, And now its better! The documentary does the same thing, which is to heavily suggest that things are much, much better now. It plays a clip of Kelly Bachmans Harvey Weinstein set, which feels extremely discordant, you know, within the rah-rah sisterhood context of the end of the documentary. Its a little wild watching it and then looking at, say, reporting thats come out quite recently about the connection between stand-up clubs and the alt-right and knowing what some comedy podcasts are like and the desire to ignore all the things that are still really bad.

Jesse: Do you have an assessment of what we should look at when we look at these projects? Something thats both critical of it but also trying to imagine what value they have and how should people aspire to do it?

Kathryn: Something that I think is applicable to documentaries, longform writing, book projects, lists, anything where youve chosen to pull out a particular group of people: It is always useful to think about what this list or project is portraying as general that is actually very specific. Or vice versa. Where is the misconnection or the fuzziness happening there? This particular documentary is a project that tends to take a lot of specific things and then say, No, its a big general narrative, and then clump them all together. And look, I have written things quickly and regretted it later, and thats a fallacy weve all fallen into. I am certainly not above doing exactly the same kind of thing. But when you have time and money and editors and people watching your stuff, that is a really useful avenue to press on as far as what might be getting elided in a project like this.

If you find yourself in the position of getting ready to work on a project like this, theres also a really useful question to press on and not let yourself have an easy off-the-cuff answer: Why am I doing this? Why am I making this particular thing? Watching this documentary, it seems like the answer for that question was Because I think women are funny. Im not saying thats a bad answer, but an answer as broad and simple as that is then going to lead back to a fairly broad, simplistic viewpoint. And if instead the answer is like it was for We Killed something like, Because you see a very different understanding of what the history of comedy is when you recenter who the storytellers are you end up with a very different project. Even if, on the surface, both of those things could be summarized as women in comedy.

Jesse: One central question we keep returning to is, What is lost? When you ask women what its like to be a woman comedian, what is lost is you then dont get to ask them a different question. You hypothetically have 15 minutes with a comedian, and you spend five of it asking a question that they get asked a million times. That adds up. Truly, lets say you can do the math; lets say 10 percent of every interview a woman comedian does is spent having to answer this question. That literally puts them 10 percent behind in terms of communicating to an audience their actual point of view and their art. Thats a story that doesnt get told enough.

See original here:
Do We Really Need Documentaries About Women in Comedy? - Vulture

Churches around the world will be holding services for their three most important days during this Holy Week: Holy Thursday, sometimes called Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Easter commemorates Christs resurrection from the dead, the fundamental belief of Christianity. It is the earliest and most central of all Christian holidays, more ancient than Christmas.

As a scholar in medieval Christian liturgy, I know that historically the most controversial of these three holy days has been the worship service for Good Friday, which focuses on the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Two parts of the contemporary Good Friday worship service could be misunderstood as implicitly anti-Semitic or racist. Both are derived from the medieval Good Friday liturgy that Catholics and some other Christian churches continue to use in a modified form today.

These are the solemn orations and the veneration of the cross.

The solemn orations are formal prayers offered by the assembled local community for the wider church, for example, for the pope. These orations also include other prayers for members of different religions, and for other needs of the world.

One of these prayers is offered for the Jewish people.

For centuries, this prayer was worded in a way to imply an anti-Semitic meaning, referring to the Jews as perfidis, meaning treacherous or unfaithful.

However, the Catholic Church made important changes in the 20th century. In 1959, Pope John XXIII dropped the word perfidis entirely from the Latin prayer in the all-Latin Roman missal. This missal, an official liturgical book containing the readings and prayers for the celebration of Mass and Holy Week, is used by Catholics all over the world. However, when the next edition of the Latin Roman missal was published in 1962, the text of the prayer still mentioned the conversion of the Jews and referred to their blindness.

The Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, a major meeting of all Catholic bishops worldwide held between 1962 and 1965, mandated the reform of Catholic life and practice in a number of ways. Open discussion with members of other Christian denominations, as well as other non-Christian religions, was encouraged and a Vatican commission on Catholic interaction with Jews was established in the early 1970s.

Vatican II also called for a renewal of Catholic worship. The revised liturgy was to be celebrated not just in Latin, but also in local vernacular languages, including English. The first English Roman missal was published in 1974. Today, these post-Vatican religious rituals are known as the ordinary form of the Roman rite.

The completely reworded prayer text reflected the renewed understanding of the relationship between Catholics and Jews mandated by Vatican II and supported by decades of interreligious dialogue. For example, in 2015 the Vatican commission released a document clarifying the relationship between Catholicism and Judaism as one of rich complementarity, putting an end to organized efforts to convert Jews and strongly condemning anti-Semitism.

However, another important development took place in 2007. More than 40 years after Vatican II, Pope Benedict XVI allowed a wider use of the pre-Vatican II missal of 1962, known as the extraordinary form.

At first, this pre-Vatican II missal retained the potentially offensive wording of the prayer for the Jews.

The prayer was quickly reworded, but it does still ask that their hearts be illuminated to recognise Jesus Christ.

Although the extraordinary form is used only by small groups of traditionalist Catholics, the text of this prayer continues to trouble many.

In 2020, on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwiz, Pope Francis repeated the vehement Catholic rejection of anti-Semitism. While the pope has not revoked the use of the extraordinary form, in 2020 he ordered a review of its use by surveying the Catholic bishops of the world.

There have been similar sensitivity about another part of the Catholic Good Friday tradition: the ritual veneration of the cross.

The earliest evidence of a Good Friday procession by lay people to venerate the cross on Good Friday comes from fourth-century Jerusalem. Catholics would proceed one by one to venerate what was believed to be a piece of the actual wooden cross used to crucify Jesus, and honour it with a reverent touch or kiss.

So sacred was this cross fragment that it was heavily guarded by the clergy during the procession in case someone might try to bite off a sliver to keep for themselves, as was rumoured to have happened during a past Good Friday service.

During the medieval period, this veneration rite, elaborated by additional prayers and chant, spread widely across Western Europe. Blessed by priests or bishops, ordinary wooden crosses or crucifixes depicting Christ nailed to the cross took the place of fragments of the true cross itself. Catholics venerated the cross on both Good Friday and other feast days.

In this part of the Good Friday liturgy, the controversy centres around the physical symbol of the cross and the layers of meaning it has communicated in the past and today. Ultimately, to Catholics and other Christians, it represents Christs unselfish sacrificing of his life to save others, an example to be followed by Christians in different ways during their lives.

Historically, however, the cross has also been held up in Western Christianity as a rallying point for violence against groups that were deemed by the church and secular authorities to threaten the safety of Christians and the security of Christian societies.

From the late 11th century through the 13th century, soldiers would take the cross and join crusades against these real and perceived threats, whether these opponents were Western Christian heretics, Jewish communities, Muslim armies, or the Greek orthodox Byzantine Empire. Other religious wars in the 14th through 16th centuries continued in this crusading spirit.

From the 19th century on, Americans and other English speakers use the term crusade for any effort to promote a specific idea or movement, often one based on a moral ideal. Examples in the United States include the 19th-century antislavery abolitionist movement and the civil rights movement of the 20th century.

But today certain ideals have been rejected by the wider culture.

Contemporary alt-right groups use what has been called the Deus vult cross. The words Deus vult mean God wills (it), a rallying cry for medieval Christian armies seeking to take control of the Holy Land from Muslims. These groups today view themselves as modern crusaders fighting against Islam.

Some white supremacy groups use versions of the cross as symbols of protest or provocation. The Celtic cross, a compact cross within a circle, is a common example. And a full-sized wooden cross was carried by at least one protester during the United States Capitol insurrection in January.

Prayers and symbols have the power to bind people together in a common purpose and identity. But without understanding their context, it is all too easy to manipulate them in support of dated or limited political and social agendas.

Joanne M Pierce is a Professor of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

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Why parts of Good Friday worship have been historically controversial - Scroll.in

Churches around the world will be holding services for their three most important days during this Holy Week: Holy Thursday, sometimes called Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Easter commemorates Christs resurrection from the dead, the fundamental belief of Christianity. It is the earliest and most central of all Christian holidays, more ancient than Christmas.

As a scholar in medieval Christian liturgy, I know that historically the most controversial of these three holy days has been the worship service for Good Friday, which focuses on the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Two parts of the contemporary Good Friday worship service could be misunderstood as implicitly anti-Semitic or racist. Both are derived from the medieval Good Friday liturgy that Catholics and some other Christian churches continue to use in a modified form today.

These are the solemn orations and the veneration of the cross.

The solemn orations are formal prayers offered by the assembled local community for the wider church, for example, for the pope. These orations also include other prayers for members of different religions, and for other needs of the world.

One of these prayers is offered for the Jewish people.

For centuries, this prayer was worded in a way to imply an anti-Semitic meaning, referring to the Jews as perfidis, meaning treacherous or unfaithful.

However, the Catholic Church made important changes in the 20th century. In 1959, Pope John XXIII dropped the word perfidis entirely from the Latin prayer in the all-Latin Roman missal. This missal, an official liturgical book containing the readings and prayers for the celebration of Mass and Holy Week, is used by Catholics all over the world. However, when the next edition of the Latin Roman missal was published in 1962, the text of the prayer still mentioned the conversion of the Jews and referred to their blindness.

The Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, a major meeting of all Catholic bishops worldwide held between 1962 and 1965, mandated the reform of Catholic life and practice in a number of ways. Open discussion with members of other Christian denominations, as well as other non-Christian religions, was encouraged, and a Vatican commission on Catholic interaction with Jews was established in the early 1970s.

Vatican II also called for a renewal of Catholic worship. The revised liturgy was to be celebrated not just in Latin, but also in local vernacular languages, including English. The first English Roman missal was published in 1974. Today, these post-Vatican religious rituals are known as the ordinary form of the Roman rite.

The completely reworded prayer text reflected the renewed understanding of the relationship between Catholics and Jews mandated by Vatican II and supported by decades of interreligious dialogue. For example, in 2015 the Vatican commission released a document clarifying the relationship between Catholicism and Judaism as one of rich complementarity, putting an end to organized efforts to convert Jews and strongly condemning anti-Semitism.

However, another important development took place in 2007. More than 40 years after Vatican II, Pope Benedict XVI allowed a wider use of the pre-Vatican II missal of 1962, known as the extraordinary form.

At first, this pre-Vatican II missal retained the potentially offensive wording of the prayer for the Jews.

The prayer was quickly reworded, but it does still ask that their hearts be illuminated to recognize Jesus Christ.

Although the extraordinary form is used only by small groups of traditionalist Catholics, the text of this prayer continues to trouble many.

In 2020, on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwiz, Pope Francis repeated the vehement Catholic rejection of anti-Semitism. While the pope has not revoked the use of the extraordinary form, in 2020 he ordered a review of its use by surveying the Catholic bishops of the world.

There has been similar sensitivity about another part of the Catholic Good Friday tradition: the ritual veneration of the cross.

The earliest evidence of a Good Friday procession by lay people to venerate the cross on Good Friday comes from fourth-century Jerusalem. Catholics would proceed one by one to venerate what was believed to be a piece of the actual wooden cross used to crucify Jesus, and honor it with a reverent touch or kiss.

So sacred was this cross fragment that it was heavily guarded by the clergy during the procession in case someone might try to bite off a sliver to keep for themselves, as was rumored to have happened during a past Good Friday service.

During the medieval period, this veneration rite, elaborated by additional prayers and chant, spread widely across Western Europe. Blessed by priests or bishops, ordinary wooden crosses or crucifixes depicting Christ nailed to the cross took the place of fragments of the true cross itself. Catholics venerated the cross on both Good Friday and other feast days.

In this part of the Good Friday liturgy, controversy centers around the physical symbol of the cross and the layers of meaning it has communicated in the past and today. Ultimately, to Catholics and other Christians, it represents Christs unselfish sacrificing of his life to save others, an example to be followed by Christians in different ways during their lives.

Historically, however, the cross has also been held up in Western Christianity as a rallying point for violence against groups that were deemed by the church and secular authorities to threaten the safety of Christians and the security of Christian societies.

From the late 11th through 13th centuries, soldiers would take the cross and join crusades against these real and perceived threats, whether these opponents were Western Christian heretics, Jewish communities, Muslim armies, or the Greek orthodox Byzantine Empire. Other religious wars in the 14th through 16th centuries continued in this crusading spirit.

From the 19th century on, Americans and other English speakers use the term crusade for any effort to promote a specific idea or movement, often one based on a moral ideal. Examples in the United States include the 19th-century antislavery abolitionist movement and the civil rights movement of the 20th century.

But today certain ideals have been rejected by the wider culture.

Contemporary alt-right groups use what has been called the Deus vult cross. The words Deus vult mean God wills (it), a rallying cry for medieval Christian armies seeking to take control of the Holy Land from Muslims. These groups today view themselves as modern crusaders fighting against Islam.

Some white supremacy groups use versions of the crossas symbols of protest or provocation. The Celtic cross, a compact cross within a circle, is a common example. And a full-sized wooden cross was carried by at least one protester during the Capitol insurrection in January.

Prayers and symbols have the power to bind people together in a common purpose and identity. But without understanding their context, it is all too easy to manipulate them in support of dated or limited political and social agendas.

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Why parts of Good Friday worship have been controversial - The Conversation US