Sanae Takaichi's

Today was kind of rough, I was struggling with feeling depressed, I think heavily because of the seasonal stuff. But thankfully I cooked, cleaned, and decided to go to bed a little bit early and so I’m excited because I get to read. It also hopes that it’s raining, and it sounds really beautiful right now.

Un pionnier de l’art populaire pourtant ignoré des jeunes

Médard Bourgault (1897-1967) est considéré comme un pionnier de la sculpture sur bois et de l’art populaire au Québec. Avec ses frères Jean-Julien et André – surnommés les trois Bérets – il a fondé dans les années 1940 une école de sculpture à Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, créant une tradition artisanale et artistique toujours vivante de nos jours¹. Ses œuvres (chemins de croix, statues religieuses, scènes rurales) ornent de nombreuses églises et figurent dans plusieurs musées québécois². Malgré cette importance historique indéniable, la nouvelle génération québécoise connaît peu son nom et son héritage. Ce paradoxe s’explique par un ensemble de facteurs liés à l’éducation, aux médias et aux dynamiques culturelles contemporaines.

---

Faible visibilité dans l’enseignement et les manuels scolaires

L’un des premiers freins à la notoriété de Médard Bourgault chez les jeunes est l’absence de son œuvre dans les programmes scolaires et les manuels d’histoire de l’art ou d’histoire du Québec. Le système éducatif québécois accorde peu de place à l’art populaire dans son cursus. De fait, « par sa nature, l’art populaire s’enseigne difficilement à travers le réseau scolaire régulier », et aucun cégep ni université n’offre de cours spécialisé en sculpture sur bois ou en art populaire³. Dans les écoles primaires et secondaires, on se limite aux rudiments généraux des arts plastiques, sans aborder les figures de l’art populaire québécois. Ainsi, les élèves apprennent généralement l’histoire culturelle à travers les courants artistiques majeurs (peinture des Automatistes, chanson poétique, etc.) et les personnalités politiques, mais pas à travers des artisans-sculpteurs comme Bourgault.

Même au niveau universitaire, l’art populaire reste marginal : en dix ans, à peine deux articles académiques ont été publiés sur ce sujet au Québec⁴, signe d’un intérêt institutionnel très restreint. Cette rareté dans la littérature et l’enseignement supérieurs se répercute sur les manuels du secondaire, qui omettent largement Médard Bourgault. En comparaison, d’autres figures culturelles – Paul-Émile Borduas ou Félix Leclerc – bénéficient d’une visibilité bien plus grande, car intégrées aux cours officiels. L’absence de Bourgault dans ces contenus pédagogiques fait que les jeunes terminent leur scolarité sans jamais avoir entendu parler de lui.

---

Une présence numérique et médiatique insuffisante

À l’ère du numérique, la jeunesse découvre la culture via Internet, les réseaux sociaux, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. Or :

• il n’existe pratiquement aucune capsule vidéo populaire sur Bourgault ;
• aucune série courte ou contenu viral ;
• aucune présence significative sur Instagram ou TikTok ;
• aucun parcours numérique muséal qui lui est consacré.

Cette invisibilité numérique contraste avec d’autres figures ravivées par les médias récents (par exemple La Bolduc via un film et des contenus web). Des spécialistes soulignent la nécessité de « stimuler l’intérêt par le numérique » via des vidéos, réseaux sociaux, capsules éducatives⁵ — une démarche encore largement absente pour l’héritage Bourgault.

Les musées notent aussi que l’intégration du numérique « dépoussière » leur image et brise l’aura élitiste qui tient éloignés certains jeunes⁶. Sans cette modernisation, l’héritage de Bourgault reste confiné aux canaux traditionnels, peu fréquentés par les moins de 30 ans.

---

Un héritage peu adapté aux formats contemporains

Les jeunes d’aujourd’hui consomment la culture sous des formats courts, visuels, interactifs : YouTube, mini-documentaires, animations, BD historiques, jeux éducatifs, expériences immersives. Or :

• il n’existe aucun documentaire récent sur Bourgault ;
• aucune série web vulgarisée ;
• aucune BD ou jeu éducatif ;
• aucune exposition itinérante destinée aux écoles.

À l’inverse, des figures comme Maurice Richard ou Louis Cyr ont bénéficié d’adaptations accessibles (films, BD, contenu jeunesse). Les acteurs du patrimoine recommandent pourtant d’« offrir des ateliers […] et publier davantage sur le sujet »⁷, ou d’intégrer l’art populaire à des expositions plus larges et accrocheuses⁸. Comme rien de tout cela n’a été fait pour Bourgault, les jeunes n’ont simplement pas d’occasions de découvrir son œuvre.

---

Peu d’initiatives pour faire vivre sa mémoire de manière attrayante

En dehors de Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, les initiatives pour commémorer Bourgault sont rares :

• pas de commémoration d’envergure en 1997 (centenaire) ou 2017 (50 ans du décès) ;
• peu d’efforts provinciaux ciblant les jeunes ;
• aucune campagne gouvernementale dédiée ;
• peu de financement pour les événements d’art populaire⁹.

En 2017, le ministère de la Culture a même refusé de désigner la sculpture d’art populaire comme patrimoine immatérielⁱ⁰. Ce manque de reconnaissance affaiblit la transmission du legs Bourgault. Sans médiation ludique ou participative, la mémoire de Bourgault reste confinée à un cercle d’initiés.

---

Un clivage entre culture savante, culture populaire et culture numérique

L’œuvre de Bourgault se situe à la jonction de trois sphères :

1. Culture savante — reconnue par les institutions, mais peu diffusée au grand public.

2. Culture populaire traditionnelle — celle des gosses, artisans ruraux.

3. Culture populaire numérique actuelle — TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, jeux vidéo.

Bourgault n’est pleinement présent dans aucune de ces sphères :

• absent du curriculum scolaire (culture savante) ;
• méconnu de la culture pop numérique ;
• figé dans une présentation muséale traditionnelle, statique.

Les musées notent que le numérique est un « puissant allié » pour élargir les publics et désamorcer la perception élitiste¹¹. L’héritage Bourgault n’a pas encore bénéficié de ce virage.

---

Comparaisons, politique culturelle et omissions notables

Comparer avec d’autres figures culturelles montre clairement le décalage :

• Jean-Paul Riopelle : grande médiatisation, expositions nationales, documentaires ;
• Gilles Vigneault : intégré au curriculum ;
• Denis Villeneuve : omniprésence médiatique et numérique.

Pourtant, Bourgault, artiste majeur du Québec, est absent des outils qui façonnent la mémoire publique.

La politique culturelle Partout, la culture (2018) insiste pourtant sur deux axes :

• « rapprocher la culture des jeunes » ;
• « déployer la culture québécoise dans l’espace numérique »¹².

En théorie, Bourgault devrait bénéficier de ces orientations. En pratique : il est absent des collections “figures marquantes”, absent des sites éducatifs, absent des manuels, absent des modules interactifs des musées.

Même l’émission 100 Québécois qui ont fait le XXe siècle ne le mentionne pas.

L’ensemble traduit un enchaînement de négligences institutionnelles.

---

Conclusion

La méconnaissance de Médard Bourgault chez les jeunes n’a rien de mystérieux : elle résulte d’un vide pédagogique, d’une absence numérique, d’un déficit de médiation, et d’un manque d’intégration dans la culture contemporaine.

Pour inverser cette tendance, deux voies sont essentielles :

1. Remettre l’art populaire au centre de l’éducation (ateliers, modules interactifs, contenus pédagogiques).

2. Investir sérieusement le numérique (capsules YouTube, expériences interactives, réseaux sociaux, BD éducatives, jeux, VR).

En appliquant ces solutions, le Québec pourrait enfin rendre justice au rôle historique de Médard Bourgault et rapprocher sa jeunesse d’une part fondamentale de son identité culturelle.

---

(Citation exigée) Pourquoi Médard Bourgault demeu…

Taille directe du bois : méditation sur la matière

Taille directe du bois : méditation sur la matière La taille directe est une démarche de sculpture qui ne tolère ni les esquisses préliminaires ni les rectifications a posteriori. Dans la tradition de Médard Bourgault (1897–1967) et de son atelier à Saint-Jean-Port-Joli (Québec), sculpter le bois était avant tout un dialogue silencieux avec la matière. La lignée Bourgault a ainsi « instauré une tradition en sculpture en taille directe dans la région, qui perdure depuis plus de 75 ans »¹. Être « à l’affût du grain et du sujet » signifie que le sculpteur entre tout de suite en communion avec le bois : il observe chaque veine, chaque nœud, prêt à laisser la forme latente s’y dévoiler. Cette approche requiert sobriété et précision plutôt que grandiloquence – l’œuvre naît du geste « mesuré » posé sur le bois brut, et non d’une composition sophistiquée.

Lecture attentive du bois

Sur la photographie ci-dessus, l’artisan travaille un bloc de bois avec gouge et maillet : le geste est maîtrisé, l’œil scrute le fil du bois. La taille directe commence par une longue observation silencieuse de la bûche. Avant tout coup, le sculpteur « regarde très longtemps » le tronc pour y déceler angles d’attaque et lignes de force². En épousant le grain, il anticipe le sujet : les fibres et les nœuds suggèrent des volumes, des silhouettes, qui orientent la taille. Vincent Balmes résume cette relation quasi-animiste : « la fouille de chaque bois… à la taille directe à main levée… met au jour les lignes de force qui habitent ce fragment d’arbre, enfourchure, racines ou fût ; […] c’est dans cette lecture de son histoire que je perçois les présences d’esprits qui l’auront habité »³. Autrement dit, le sculpteur perçoit dans la trame naturelle du bois l’ébauche de ce qui peut émerger – un véritable « déjà-là » qui sommeille dans la matière.

Un geste sans repentir

La taille directe exige un engagement total du geste. Contrairement au modelage où on peut recommencer, chaque coup de ciseau porté dans le bois est définitif. Comme l’écrit Nicolas Laborde à propos du travail en taille directe : « c’est un ouvrage lent, diligent, où le repentir n’existe pas. Chaque geste est pensé, mesuré, pour être exécuté avec dextérité »⁴. En d’autres termes, on ne peut pas revenir en arrière : « il n’y a pas de repentir possible », rappelle encore Denis Monfleur à propos de son travail direct⁵. L’incertitude est alors réductrice : tout doit être résolu en amont du geste. Cette contrainte rend chaque intervention extrêmement consciente. Le sculpteur est ainsi à la fois précis et concentré, car il sait que la moindre erreur, le moindre surcoup, ne pourra être corrigé ultérieurement.

Confiance dans la matière et l’intuition

Malgré la rudesse apparente de cette technique, la taille directe repose sur la confiance — en soi, en l’outil, et surtout en la matière bois. Thierry Martenon souligne que, bien que la taille directe « ne laisse que peu de place à l’erreur, son expertise [du sculpteur] lui permet d’aborder cette phase avec confiance et efficacité »⁶. Cette assurance naît de l’expérience et d’une écoute attentive du bois. Le bois est en effet une matière vivante (même morte), chargée du temps de sa croissance : sa couleur, sa dureté, sa nervosité informent le sculpteur. Faire confiance au bois revient à croire que la forme enfouie en lui attend d’être libérée. Balmes évoque cette dimension en notant que l’objet fini est un « déjà-là dévoilé »⁷. Autrement dit, le résultat final semble exister en puissance dans le bloc brut : le sculpteur l’a reconnu et manifesté par son geste. C’est donc un acte de foi et d’attention : on suit la direction des fibres, on répercute le coup sur la matière – mais on accompagne d’abord le bois, comme on suivrait doucement une énigme qui s’éclaircit.

Approches préparatoires et taille directe

La taille directe se distingue fondamentalement des approches préparées (dessin, modelage, moulage). Selon Bourdelle, au XIXᵉ siècle le sculpteur « modeleur » travaille la terre, la cire ou la plastiline de manière progressive : on fait des esquisses successives et on change la forme au fil du travail. De même, en modelage on bâtit la forme en ajoutant de la matière, ce qui autorise de multiples reprises. En taille directe, tout l’inverse se produit : on enlève la matière d’un bloc sans modèle préalable et sans dispositif de report⁸. Pour mieux saisir ce contraste, on peut comparer :

Modelage (argile, terre) : on construit et réajuste la forme en ajoutant ou en enlevant de la matière malléable⁹. L’erreur est facile à corriger, l’œuvre peut être remaniée sans dommage. Cette démarche progressive autorise le perfectionnement continu.

Moulage et tirages : à partir d’un modèle définitif, on fabrique un moule pour tirer des épreuves en plâtre ou en métal¹⁰. Cette chaîne technique permet de reproduire ou d’expérimenter librement (on peut casser des pièces de moulage sans perdre l’original). Mais elle introduit l’intermédiaire du plâtre et du métal – l’acte créateur n’est plus entièrement « sur le vif ».

Travail préparé (croquis, gabarits) : dessiner ou calquer d’avance impose des formes préétablies. Le sculpteur devient d’abord concepteur avant d’être tailleur. En taille directe pure, cette étape préparatoire est bannie : on n’« exécute » pas un plan, on découvre une forme.

Dans chacune de ces méthodes, l’esprit direct est trahi : il y a toujours un filet de sécurité ou une contrainte externe. Le modelage et le moulage renforcent le contrôle de l’artiste sur la forme, mais au prix d’un éloignement de la spontanéité et du contact intime avec le bois. C’est pourquoi Médard Bourgault et ses continuateurs insistaient sur la liberté du geste unique, préférant tailler « en direct » plutôt que de suivre un plan figé.

Discipline du regard et achèvement

La taille directe est aussi une discipline du regard : elle impose au sculpteur de toujours vérifier sa vision par le toucher. L’ébauche se façonne jusqu’aux derniers détails grâce à une observation minutieuse des plans et des textures. Même lorsque le volume général est dégrossi, le travail s’effectue souvent à mains nues (« mes mains, ce sont mes yeux » comme le dit l’adage du sculpteur) pour sentir les irrégularités. Chaque grain de bois peut influencer le relief, chaque changement de veine peut suggérer un affinage du profil. L’attention que requiert cette pratique est un véritable entraînement du regard, qui devient sensible aux moindres variations de la surface.

Ce chemin de l’attention rejoint l’esprit méditatif : l’action du sculpteur s’apparente à un dialogue silencieux. C’est dans le rythme lent et posé des coups de gouge, dans l’écoute du mouvement des copeaux, que s’exprime la connexion intime entre l’homme et la nature du bois. Cette démarche humble et rigoureuse impose de la retenue : le sculpteur sert le matériau plutôt qu’il ne l’exploite. Il fait confiance à ses intuitions et à l’information que lui donne le grain, et ainsi laisse enfin surgir le sujet qui sommeillait dans le bois. Au final, la taille directe se révèle moins comme une conquête que comme une révérence – un acte confiant où le sculpteur offre à la forme naissante l’intégralité de son regard et de son geste.

---

Sources

(identiques au PDF, dans le même ordre)

1. https://www.irepi.ulaval.ca/fiches/andre-medard-bourgault

2. https://dambrine.com/texts/7-sculptures/#:~:text=Dans%20la%20taille%2C%20une%20seule

3. https://plastik.univ-paris1.fr/2020/09/14/lesprit-des-bois/

4. https://dambrine.com/texts/7-sculptures

5. https://domaine-chaumont.fr/.../denis-monfleur

6. https://artistics.com/fr/artiste/thierry-martenon

7. https://plastik.univ-paris1.fr/2020/09/14/lesprit-des-bois/

8. https://www.bourdelle.paris.fr/explorer/ressources/les-techniques-de-la-sculpture

9. https://www.bourdelle.paris.fr/explorer/ressources/les-techniques-de-la-sculpture

10. https://www.bourdelle.paris.fr/explorer/ressources/les-techniques-de-la-sculpture

Médard Bourgault (1897-1967) : un pionnier de la sculpture populaire québécoise

Médard Bourgault (1897-1967) : un pionnier de la sculpture populaire québécoise Médard Bourgault est un sculpteur sur bois québécois autodidacte, originaire de Saint-Jean-Port-Joli. Il est considéré comme l’un des premiers et des plus influents artistes de l’art populaire au Québec, ayant contribué à faire de la sculpture sur bois un élément phare du patrimoine culturel québécois¹. À travers sa vie et son œuvre, il a su allier tradition rurale, foi catholique et transmission du savoir, laissant un héritage durable dans sa communauté et au-delà.

Biographie et formation

Médard Bourgault naît le 8 juin 1897 à Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, un village côtier du Bas-Saint-Laurent². Issu d’une famille de seize enfants, il grandit dans un milieu modeste où le travail du bois est familier : son père, ancien marin devenu charpentier-menuisier, lui transmet dès l’enfance le goût du bricolage et de la sculpture au canif³. Dans sa jeunesse, Médard devient marin à son tour, naviguant sur le Saint-Laurent et jusqu’en Europe et en Afrique du Nord pendant la Première Guerre mondiale⁴. Revenu au pays, il exerce le métier de menuisier-charpentier tout en sculptant pour son plaisir durant son temps libre⁵. Autodidacte, il apprend seul les techniques de la sculpture sur bois, s’inspirant des sculptures d’église qu’il a l’occasion d’observer et de restaurer lors de travaux de menuiserie au village⁶.

La crise économique de 1929 le laisse sans emploi, situation qui pousse Bourgault à tenter de vivre de son art⁷. Peu sûr de son talent au départ, mais déterminé à nourrir sa jeune famille, il installe un petit kiosque en bord de la route principale pour vendre ses premières sculptures aux passants⁸. Cette initiative attire l’attention de Marius Barbeau, éminent ethnologue canadien, qui voyage dans la région en 1929. Barbeau est frappé par les pièces exposées dans la cour de Médard et l’encourage vivement à poursuivre dans cette voie⁹. Grâce à l’appui de Barbeau – qui le met en contact avec des collectionneurs et des réseaux culturels – et au soutien de personnalités politiques comme le premier ministre Alexandre Taschereau, le ministre Ernest Lapointe ou le député Adélard Godbout (tous acquéreurs de ses œuvres), Médard Bourgault décide dès le début des années 1930 de se consacrer entièrement à la sculpture¹⁰.

Fort de ses premiers succès, Médard invite en 1931-1932 ses deux frères Jean-Julien et André à se joindre à lui dans son atelier familial¹¹. Ensemble, les trois frères Bourgault – bientôt surnommés « les trois Bérets » en raison de leur couvre-chef favori – forment un collectif dynamique qui allait révolutionner la sculpture sur bois au Québec. En 1940, avec l’appui du gouvernement provincial, leur atelier devient officiellement la première École de sculpture de Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, une école-atelier subventionnée par l’État pour former de « mains habiles » et perpétuer la tradition artisanale¹². Médard Bourgault, marié depuis 1923 à Marie-Rose Bourgault, est par ailleurs père de seize enfants, dont bon nombre travailleront à ses côtés et suivront ses traces dans l’art du bois¹³. Médard poursuit son travail de création jusqu’à la fin de sa vie : il s’éteint le 21 septembre 1967 dans son village natal, à l’âge de 70 ans¹⁴.

Une œuvre ancrée dans le terroir et la vie quotidienne

Les premières œuvres de Médard Bourgault puisent leur inspiration dans la vie rurale traditionnelle du Québec. Durant les années 1930, il sculpte de nombreuses scènes du terroir – paysannes et villageoises – observées dans son entourage quotidien¹⁵. Ces sculptures figuratives témoignent des coutumes et des métiers d’autrefois, et représentent souvent des personnages canadiens-français typiques, tels que des paysans au travail, des artisans ou des vieillards du village¹⁶. Parmi ses œuvres de cette période dite populaire et paysanne, on peut citer par exemple L’arracheur de souches (1931), Le joueur de dames (1932) ou Les moissonneurs (1940), qui illustrent chacune une scène rustique avec un grand sens du détail¹⁷. Ces représentations précises de la vie d’antan rencontrent un certain succès et valent à Bourgault d’être invité à participer à plusieurs expositions au Canada, contribuant à faire connaître son travail¹⁸.

Le milieu marin et la vie côtière ont également influencé l’imaginaire de Bourgault. Ayant lui-même navigué dans sa jeunesse, il connaît bien le monde des marins et des pêcheurs de la côte du Saint-Laurent¹⁹. S’il est surtout connu pour ses scènes paysannes, l’artiste a aussi côtoyé l’univers maritime : certains de ses contemporains à Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, comme le modeleur de bateaux Eugène Leclerc, créaient des maquettes de navires qui ont participé à l’engouement artisanal local dès les années 1940²⁰.

Médard Bourgault a principalement travaillé le bois provenant de sa région, pratiquant la taille directe (sculpture à même le bloc de bois) sans formation académique²¹. Dans les premières années, lui et ses frères peignaient parfois leurs sculptures, mais sur le conseil du professeur Jean-Marie Gauvreau, ils ont limité la polychromie afin de ne pas faire ressembler leurs œuvres à de banales statuettes en plâtre coloré²². Plus tard dans sa carrière, Bourgault expérimente aussi des matériaux inusités : il réalise notamment des sculptures à partir de souches d’arbres échouées et de branches tordues, transformant ces bois flottés en créations originales²³.

Au total, l’œuvre de Médard Bourgault est aussi prolifique que variée. On estime qu’il a créé plus de 4 000 sculptures au cours de sa carrière²⁴. Celles-ci vont de la petite statuette souvenir destinée aux touristes jusqu’aux grands ensembles décoratifs pour des églises ou des bâtiments publics. On en retrouve aujourd’hui un peu partout en Amérique du Nord et même sur les cinq continents²⁵.

Foi catholique et art religieux

La foi catholique occupe une place centrale dans la vie et la création de Médard Bourgault. Profondément croyant et surnommé « le Pieux » par son entourage²⁶, il puisait dans sa spiritualité une inspiration quotidienne. Dès les années 1930, Bourgault se consacre largement à l’art religieux²⁷.

Il réalise un très grand nombre d’œuvres pour des lieux de culte, cherchant toujours à insuffler une touche personnelle et locale à ces créations d’inspiration biblique²⁸. À une époque où de nombreuses églises s’équipaient de statues de plâtre fabriquées en série, Bourgault voulait proposer au contraire des sculptures en bois originales, reflétant la sensibilité canadienne-française²⁹.

Parmi ses réalisations religieuses les plus notables, on compte des dizaines de statues de saints, de Vierges et de Christs grandeur nature, ainsi qu’un nombre impressionnant de chemins de croix sculptés en bas-relief. On estime qu’il a créé pas moins de 88 chemins de croix destinés à des églises du Québec, du Nouveau-Brunswick, de l’Ontario et même des États-Unis³⁰ – un record qui témoigne de son expertise. L’un des plus célèbres est celui de l’église de L’Islet-sur-Mer, particulièrement apprécié pour sa finesse³¹. À Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, il a laissé sa marque dans l’église paroissiale avec la chaire, un bas-relief de la Sainte Famille et plusieurs statues³².

La dévotion de Bourgault se reflète aussi dans sa vie personnelle. Il aménage sur son propre terrain un petit sanctuaire extérieur, où il installe une statue de Vierge qu’il appelle Notre-Dame de la Falaise, ainsi que des statues de saints qu’il affectionne³³. Parmi ses créations marquantes, la Notre-Dame des Habitants – une Vierge paysanne québécoise portant un épi de blé et une miche de pain – a même été présentée dans l’ouvrage américain The World’s Great Madonnas³⁴.

Malgré son attachement à la tradition, Bourgault restait un artiste libre. Il déplorait que les églises québécoises se remplissent de copies italiennes ou françaises au détriment de la créativité locale : « Pourquoi pas, nous aussi, notre style canadien ? » écrit-il dans son journal³⁵. Dans les années 1960, alors que la demande d’art religieux décline, il se tourne vers une production plus personnelle : nus, figures mythologiques, sculptures explorant l’imaginaire³⁶. Certains critiques de l’époque, plus conservateurs, accueillent froidement cette évolution³⁷, mais Bourgault poursuit son chemin artistique avec conviction.

---

Transmission du savoir et école de sculpture

L’une des contributions majeures de Médard Bourgault réside dans la transmission de son savoir. Dès les années 1930, l’atelier des trois frères attire de nombreux apprentis³⁸. En 1940, la fondation officielle de l’École de sculpture de Saint-Jean-Port-Joli – soutenue par Adélard Godbout – vient consacrer cette mission³⁹. Il s’agit de la première école de sculpture subventionnée par l’État au Québec⁴⁰.

L’enseignement y reste entièrement pratique : aucune méthode écrite, pas de programme formel⁴¹. Pendant des décennies, les frères Bourgault forment plusieurs générations de sculpteurs⁴². Beaucoup ouvrent leur propre atelier, perpétuant l’héritage Bourgault dans tout le Québec⁴³. La relève se trouve aussi dans la famille : les enfants de Médard, d’André et de Jean-Julien deviennent eux aussi sculpteurs⁴⁴.

Après la mort d’André en 1958, Jean-Julien dirige l’école. À la fin des années 1960, un fils de Jean-Julien reprend la structure et élargit l’enseignement à d’autres matériaux⁴⁵. L’impact économique est considérable : la sculpture sur bois fait vivre de nombreuses familles de la région⁴⁶. L’atelier Bourgault contribue à faire de Saint-Jean-Port-Joli un important pôle artisanal⁴⁷.

L’école évolue : en 1992, elle devient le Centre Est-Nord-Est, un centre international de résidences d’artistes⁴⁸. Mais la tradition de formation des sculpteurs sur bois se poursuit dans d’autres ateliers de la région⁴⁹. Depuis 1984, le village accueille aussi des symposiums internationaux de sculpture et, depuis 1994, L’Internationale de la sculpture⁵⁰.

---

Héritage culturel et reconnaissances

Le rôle des frères Bourgault est reconnu dès les années 1940-1950 : leur travail fait l’objet de nombreux reportages⁵¹. Saint-Jean-Port-Joli reçoit le titre de « Capitale de l’artisanat »⁵², puis, en 2005, celui de Capitale culturelle du Canada⁵³.

Après le décès de Médard en 1967, sa maison familiale devient un musée : le Domaine Médard Bourgault⁵⁴. On y présente ses œuvres et celles de sa descendance. En 2023, la Municipalité de Saint-Jean-Port-Joli désigne Médard comme personnage historique et l’inscrit au Registre du patrimoine culturel du Québec⁵⁵. Son nom apparaît aussi dans la toponymie : une rue à Québec et une autre à Laval⁵⁶.

Son influence artistique dépasse largement sa famille : il inspire des générations d’artistes québécois. En 1989, le Musée Laurier de Victoriaville organise l’exposition Médard Bourgault et ses fils : 60 ans de sculpture sur bois au Québec⁵⁷.

---

Un pionnier de l’art populaire québécois

Avant Médard Bourgault, la sculpture sur bois était perçue comme un artisanat utilitaire ou comme un art importé par les sculpteurs européens⁵⁸. En lançant, dès les années 1930, un mouvement de sculpture enraciné dans le terroir québécois, il brise ces catégories⁵⁹.

Avec ses frères, il contribue à faire reconnaître Saint-Jean-Port-Joli comme capitale de la sculpture sur bois au pays⁶⁰. En combinant thèmes religieux, maritimes et populaires, il crée un style identitaire qui touchera un large public au Québec et à l’étranger⁶¹.

Considéré comme le père de la sculpture figurative québécoise du XXᵉ siècle⁶², il ouvre la voie aux artistes autodidactes qui raconteront, après lui, l’âme du Québec à travers le bois sculpté⁶³.

Son influence se ressent encore aujourd’hui : festivals, musées, écoles et ateliers perpétuent sa tradition. Son nom demeure associé à l’authenticité et à la passion d’un artisan profondément enraciné dans sa culture.

---

Sources

(Je recopie ici la liste complète telle qu’elle apparaît dans ton document, sans rien modifier.)

Bourgault, Médard – Répertoire du patrimoine culturel du Québec https://www.patrimoine-culturel.gouv.qc.ca/rpcq/detail.do?methode=consulter&id=9563&type=pge

La sculpture à Saint-Jean-Port-Joli en 14 superbes photos | JDQ https://www.journaldequebec.com/2023/05/07/la-sculpture-a-saint-jean-port-joli-en-14-superbes-photos

Médard Bourgault — Wikipédia https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Médard_Bourgault

Les trois Bérets et la sculpture sur bois – Saint-Jean-Port-Joli https://saintjeanportjoli.com/les-trois-berets-et-la-sculpture-sur-bois/

Médard Bourgault | Domaine Médard Bourgault https://medardbourgault.org/medard-bourgault/

BOURGAULT, Médard (1897-1967) | Dictionnaire historique de la sculpture québécoise au XXe siècle https://dictionnaire.espaceartactuel.com/en/artistes/bourgault-medard-1897-1967/

Médard Bourgault, maître d’art, 1930-1967 https://ethnologiequebec.org/2021/04/medard-bourgault-maitre-dart-1930-1967/

test 33

The numbers tell a revealing story about the current state of artificial intelligence. Academic researchers continue to generate the overwhelming majority of highly-cited AI breakthroughs, with AlphaFold's protein structure predictions having earned a Nobel Prize in 2024. Yet simultaneously, industry is abandoning AI projects at rates far exceeding initial predictions. What Gartner forecast in mid-2024 has proven conservative: whilst they predicted at least 30% of generative AI projects would be abandoned after proof of concept by year's end, a stark MIT report from August 2025 revealed that approximately 95% of generative AI pilot programmes are falling short, delivering little to no measurable impact on profit and loss statements. Meanwhile, data from S&P Global shows 42% of companies scrapped most of their AI initiatives in 2025, up dramatically from just 17% the previous year.

This disconnect reveals something more troubling than implementation challenges. It exposes a fundamental misalignment between how AI capabilities are being developed and how they're being deployed for genuine societal impact. The question isn't just why so many projects fail. It's whether the entire enterprise of AI development has been optimised for the wrong outcomes.

The Academic-Industrial Divide

The shift in AI research leadership over the past five years has been dramatic. In 2023, industry produced 51 notable machine learning models whilst academia contributed only 15, according to Stanford's AI Index Report. By 2024, nearly 90% of notable models originated from industry, up from 60% in 2023. A handful of large companies (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft) have produced most of the world's foundation models over the last five years. The 2025 AI Index Report confirms this trend continues, with U.S.-based institutions producing 40 notable AI models in 2024, significantly surpassing China's 15 and Europe's combined total of three.

Yet this industrial dominance in model production hasn't translated into deployment success. According to BCG research, only 22% of companies have advanced beyond proof of concept to generate some value, and merely 4% are creating substantial value from AI. The gap between capability and application has never been wider.

Rita Sallam, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, speaking at the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in Sydney in mid-2024, noted the growing impatience amongst executives: “After last year's hype, executives are impatient to see returns on GenAI investments, yet organisations are struggling to prove and realise value. Unfortunately, there is no one size fits all with GenAI, and costs aren't as predictable as other technologies.”

The costs are indeed staggering. Current generative AI deployment costs range from $5 million to $20 million in upfront investments. Google's Gemini 1.0 Ultra training alone cost $192 million. These figures help explain why 70% of the 2,770 companies surveyed by Deloitte have moved only 30% or fewer of their generative AI experiments into production.

Meanwhile, academic research continues to generate breakthrough insights with profound societal implications. AlphaFold, developed at Google DeepMind, has now been used by more than two million researchers from 190 countries. The AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, which began with approximately 360,000 protein structure predictions at launch in July 2021, has grown to a staggering 200 million protein structures from over one million organisms. The database has been downloaded in its entirety over 23,000 times, and the foundational paper has accumulated over 29,000 citations. This is what genuine impact looks like: research that accelerates discovery across multiple domains, freely accessible, with measurable scientific value.

The Economics of Abandonment

The abandonment rate isn't simply about technical failure. It's a symptom of deeper structural issues in how industry frames AI problems. When companies invest millions in generative AI projects, they're typically seeking efficiency gains or productivity improvements. But as Gartner noted in 2024, translating productivity enhancement into direct financial benefit remains exceptionally difficult.

The data reveals a pattern. Over 80% of AI projects fail, according to RAND research, which is twice the failure rate of corporate IT projects that don't involve AI. Only 48% of AI projects make it into production, and the journey from prototype to production takes an average of eight months. These aren't just implementation challenges. They're indicators that the problems being selected for AI solutions may not be the right problems to solve.

The situation has deteriorated sharply over the past year. As mentioned, S&P Global data shows 42% of companies scrapped most of their AI initiatives in 2025, up dramatically from just 17% in 2024. According to IDC, 88% of AI proof-of-concepts fail to transition into production, creating a graveyard of abandoned pilots and wasted investment.

The ROI measurement problem compounds these failures. As of 2024, roughly 97% of enterprises still struggled to demonstrate business value from their early generative AI efforts. Nearly half of business leaders said that proving generative AI's business value was the single biggest hurdle to adoption. Traditional ROI models don't fit AI's complex, multi-faceted impacts. Companies that successfully navigate this terrain combine financial metrics with operational and strategic metrics, but such sophistication remains rare.

However, there are emerging positive signs. According to a Microsoft-sponsored IDC report released in January 2025, three in four enterprises now see positive returns on generative AI investments, with 72% of leaders tracking ROI metrics such as productivity, profitability and throughput. McKinsey estimates every dollar invested in generative AI returns an average of $3.70, with financial services seeing as much as 4.2 times ROI. Yet these successes remain concentrated amongst sophisticated early adopters.

Consider what success looks like when it does occur. According to Gartner's 2024 survey of 822 early adopters, those who successfully implemented generative AI reported an average 15.8% revenue increase, 15.2% cost savings, and 22.6% productivity improvement. The companies BCG identifies as “AI future-built” achieve five times the revenue increases and three times the cost reductions of other organisations. Yet these successes remain outliers.

The gap suggests that most companies are approaching AI with the wrong frame. They're asking: “How can we use AI to improve existing processes?” rather than “What problems does AI uniquely enable us to solve?” The former leads to efficiency plays that struggle to justify massive upfront costs. The latter leads to transformation but requires rethinking business models from first principles.

The Efficiency Paradigm Shift

Against this backdrop of project failures and unclear value, a notable trend has emerged and accelerated through 2025. The industry is pivoting toward smaller, specialised models optimised for efficiency. The numbers are remarkable. In 2022, Google's PaLM needed 540 billion parameters to reach 60% accuracy on the MMLU benchmark. By 2024, Microsoft's Phi-3-mini achieved the same threshold with just 3.8 billion parameters. That's a 142-fold reduction in model parameters whilst maintaining equivalent performance. By 2025, the trend continues: models with 7 billion to 14 billion parameters now reach 85% to 90% of the performance of much larger 70 billion parameter models on general benchmarks.

The efficiency gains extend beyond parameter counts. Inference costs plummeted from $20 per million tokens in November 2022 to $0.07 by October 2024, representing an over 280-fold reduction in approximately 18 months. For an LLM of equivalent performance, costs are decreasing by 10 times every year. At the hardware level, costs have declined by 30% annually whilst energy efficiency has improved by 40% each year. Smaller, specialised AI models now outperform their massive counterparts on specific tasks whilst consuming 70 times less energy and costing 1,000 times less to deploy.

This shift raises a critical question: Does the move toward smaller, specialised models represent a genuine shift toward solving real problems, or merely a more pragmatic repackaging of the same pressure to commodify intelligence?

The optimistic interpretation is that specialisation forces clearer problem definition. You can't build a specialised model without precisely understanding what task it needs to perform. This constraint might push companies toward better-defined problems with measurable outcomes. The efficiency gains make experimentation more affordable, potentially enabling exploration of problems that wouldn't justify the cost of large foundation models.

The pessimistic interpretation is more troubling. Smaller models might simply make it easier to commodify narrow AI capabilities whilst avoiding harder questions about societal value. If a model costs 1,000 times less to deploy, the financial threshold for justifying its use drops dramatically. This could accelerate deployment of AI systems that generate marginal efficiency gains without addressing fundamental problems or creating genuine value.

Meta's Llama 3.3, released in summer 2024, was trained on approximately 15 trillion tokens, demonstrating that even efficient models require enormous resources. Yet the model's open availability has enabled thousands of researchers and developers to build applications that would be economically infeasible with proprietary models costing millions to access.

The key insight is that efficiency itself is neither good nor bad. What matters is how efficiency shapes problem selection. If lower costs enable researchers to tackle problems that large corporations find unprofitable (rare diseases, regional languages, environmental monitoring), then the efficiency paradigm serves societal benefit. If lower costs simply accelerate deployment of marginally useful applications that generate revenue without addressing real needs, then efficiency becomes another mechanism for value extraction.

The Healthcare Reality Check

Healthcare offers a revealing case study in the deployment gap, and 2025 has brought dramatic developments. Healthcare is now deploying AI at more than twice the rate (2.2 times) of the broader economy. Healthcare organisations have achieved 22% adoption of domain-specific AI tools, representing a 7 times increase over 2024 and 10 times over 2023. In just two years, healthcare went from 3% adoption to becoming a leader in AI implementation. Health systems lead with 27% adoption, followed by outpatient providers at 18% and payers at 14%.

Ambient clinical documentation tools have achieved near-universal adoption. In a survey of 43 U.S. health systems, ambient notes was the only use case with 100% of respondents reporting adoption activities, with 53% reporting a high degree of success. Meanwhile, imaging and radiology AI, despite widespread deployment, shows only 19% high success rates. Clinical risk stratification manages only 38% high success rates.

The contrast is instructive. Documentation tools solve a clearly defined problem: reducing the time clinicians spend on paperwork. Doctors are spending two hours doing digital paperwork for every one hour of direct patient care. Surgeons using large language models can write high-quality clinical notes in five seconds versus seven minutes manually, representing an 84-fold speed increase. The value is immediate, measurable, and directly tied to reducing physician burnout.

At UChicago Medicine, participating clinicians believed the introduction of ambient clinical documentation made them feel more valued, and 90% reported being able to give undivided attention to patients, up from 49% before the tool was introduced. Yet despite these successes, only 28% of physicians say they feel prepared to leverage AI's benefits, though 57% are already using AI tools for things like ambient listening, documentation, billing or diagnostics.

But these are efficiency plays, not transformative applications. The harder problems, where AI could genuinely advance medical outcomes, remain largely unsolved. Less than 1% of AI tools developed during COVID-19 were successfully deployed in clinical settings. The reason isn't lack of technical capability. It's that solving real clinical problems requires causal understanding, robust validation, regulatory approval, and integration into complex healthcare systems.

Consider the successes that do exist. New AI software trained on 800 brain scans and trialled on 2,000 patients proved twice as accurate as professionals at examining stroke patients. Machine learning models achieved prediction scores of 90.2% for diabetic nephropathy, 85.9% for neuropathy, and 88.9% for angiopathy. In 2024, AI tools accelerated Parkinson's drug discovery, with one compound progressing to pre-clinical trials in six months versus the traditional two to three years.

These represent genuine breakthroughs, yet they remain isolated successes rather than systemic transformation. The deployment gap persists because most healthcare AI targets the wrong problems or approaches the right problems without the rigorous validation and causal understanding required for clinical adoption. Immature AI tools remain a significant barrier to adoption, cited by 77% of respondents in recent surveys, followed by financial concerns (47%) and regulatory uncertainty (40%).

The Citation-Impact Gap

The academic research community operates under different incentives entirely. Citation counts, publication venues, and peer recognition drive researcher behaviour. This system has produced remarkable breakthroughs. AI adoption has surged across scientific disciplines, with over one million AI-assisted papers identified, representing 1.57% of all papers. The share of AI papers increased between 21 and 241 times from 1980 to 2024, depending on the field. Between 2013 and 2023, the total number of AI publications in venues related to computer science and other scientific disciplines nearly tripled, increasing from approximately 102,000 to over 242,000.

Yet this productivity surge comes with hidden costs. A recent study examining 4,051 articles found that only 370 articles (9.1%) were explicitly identified as relevant to societal impact. The predominant “scholar-to-scholar” paradigm remains a significant barrier to translating research findings into practical applications and policies that address global challenges.

The problem isn't that academic researchers don't care about impact. It's that the incentive structures don't reward it. Faculty are incentivised to publish continuously rather than translate research into real-world solutions, with job security and funding depending primarily on publication metrics. This discourages taking risks and creates a disconnect between global impact and what academia values.

The translation challenge has multiple dimensions. To achieve societal impact, researchers must engage in boundary work by making connections to other fields and actors. To achieve academic impact, they must demarcate boundaries by accentuating divisions with other theories or fields of knowledge. These are fundamentally opposing activities. Achieving societal impact requires adapting to other cultures or fields to explain or promote knowledge. Achieving academic impact requires emphasising novelty and differences relative to other fields.

The communication gap further complicates matters. Reducing linguistic complexity without being accused of triviality is a core challenge for scholarly disciplines. Bridging the social gap between science and society means scholars must adapt their language, though at the risk of compromising their epistemic authority within their fields.

This creates a paradox. Academic research generates the breakthroughs that win Nobel Prizes and accumulate tens of thousands of citations. Industry possesses the resources and organisational capacity to deploy AI at scale. Yet the breakthroughs don't translate into deployment success, and the deployments don't address the problems that academic research identifies as societally important.

The gap is structural, not accidental. Academic researchers are evaluated on scholarly impact within their disciplines. Industry teams are evaluated on business value within fiscal quarters or product cycles. Neither evaluation framework prioritises solving problems of genuine societal importance that may take years to show returns and span multiple disciplines.

Some institutions are attempting to bridge this divide. The Translating Research into Action Center (TRAC), established by a $5.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation, aims to strengthen universities' capacity to promote research translation for societal and economic impact. Such initiatives remain exceptions, swimming against powerful institutional currents that continue to reward traditional metrics.

Causal Discovery and the Trust Deficit

The failure to bridge this gap has profound implications for AI trustworthiness. State-of-the-art AI models largely lack understanding of cause-effect relationships. Consequently, these models don't generalise to unseen data, often produce unfair results, and are difficult to interpret. Research describes causal machine learning as “key to ethical AI for healthcare, equivalent to a doctor's oath to 'first, do no harm.'”

The importance of causal understanding extends far beyond healthcare. When AI systems are deployed without causal models, they excel at finding correlations in training data but fail when conditions change. This brittleness makes them unsuitable for high-stakes decisions affecting human lives. Yet companies continue deploying such systems because the alternative (investing in more robust causal approaches) requires longer development timelines and multidisciplinary expertise.

Building trustworthy AI through causal discovery demands collaboration across statistics, epidemiology, econometrics, and computer science. It requires combining aspects from biomedicine, machine learning, and philosophy to understand how explanation and trustworthiness relate to causality and robustness. This is precisely the kind of interdisciplinary work that current incentive structures discourage.

The challenge is that “causal” does not equate to “trustworthy.” Trustworthy AI, particularly within healthcare and other high-stakes domains, necessitates coordinated efforts amongst developers, policymakers, and institutions to uphold ethical standards, transparency, and accountability. Ensuring that causal AI models are both fair and transparent requires careful consideration of ethical and interpretive challenges that cannot be addressed through technical solutions alone.

Despite promising applications of causality for individual requirements of trustworthy AI, there is a notable lack of efforts to integrate dimensions like fairness, privacy, and explainability into a cohesive and unified framework. Each dimension gets addressed separately by different research communities, making it nearly impossible to build systems that simultaneously satisfy multiple trustworthiness requirements.

The Governance Gap

The recognition that AI development needs ethical guardrails has spawned numerous frameworks and initiatives. UNESCO's Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, adopted by all 193 member states in November 2021, represents the most comprehensive global standard available. The framework comprises 10 principles protecting and advancing human rights, human dignity, the environment, transparency, accountability, and legal adherence.

In 2024, UNESCO launched the Global AI Ethics and Governance Observatory at the 2nd Global Forum on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Kranj, Slovenia. This collaborative effort between UNESCO, the Alan Turing Institute, and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) represents a commitment to addressing the multifaceted challenges posed by rapid AI advancement. The observatory aims to foster knowledge, expert insights, and good practices in AI ethics and governance. Major technology companies including Lenovo and SAP signed agreements to build more ethical AI, with SAP updating its AI ethics policies specifically to align with the UNESCO framework.

Looking ahead, the 3rd UNESCO Global Forum on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence is scheduled for 24-27 June 2025 in Bangkok, Thailand, where it will highlight achievements in AI ethics since the 2021 Recommendation and underscore the need for continued progress through actionable initiatives.

Yet these high-level commitments often struggle to translate into changed practice at the level where AI problems are actually selected and framed. The gap between principle and practice remains substantial. What is generally unclear is how organisations that make use of AI understand and address ethical issues in practice. Whilst there's an abundance of conceptual work on AI ethics, empirical insights remain rare and often anecdotal.

Moreover, governance frameworks typically address how AI systems should be built and deployed, but rarely address which problems deserve AI solutions in the first place. The focus remains on responsible development and deployment of whatever projects organisations choose to pursue, rather than on whether those projects serve societal benefit. This is a fundamental blind spot in current AI governance approaches.

The Problem Selection Problem

This brings us to the fundamental question: If causal discovery and multidisciplinary approaches are crucial for trustworthy AI advancement, shouldn't the selection and framing of problems themselves (not just their solutions) be guided by ethical and societal criteria rather than corporate roadmaps?

The current system operates backwards. Companies identify business problems, then seek AI solutions. Researchers identify interesting technical challenges, then develop novel approaches. Neither starts with: “What problems most urgently need solving for societal benefit, and how might AI help?” This isn't because individuals lack good intentions. It's because the institutional structures, funding mechanisms, and evaluation frameworks aren't designed to support problem selection based on societal impact.

Consider the contrast between AlphaFold's development and typical corporate AI projects. AlphaFold addressed a problem (protein structure prediction) that the scientific community had identified as fundamentally important for decades. The solution required deep technical innovation, but the problem selection was driven by scientific and medical needs, not corporate strategy. The result: a tool used by over two million researchers generating insights across multiple disciplines. The AlphaFold Database has grown from just over 360,000 protein structure predictions at launch in July 2021 to a staggering 200 million protein structures from over one million organisms, with the entire archive downloaded over 23,000 times.

Now consider the projects being abandoned. Many target problems like “improve customer service response times” or “optimise ad targeting.” These are legitimate business concerns, but they're not societally important problems. When such projects fail, little of value is lost. The resources could have been directed toward problems where AI might generate transformative rather than incremental value.

The shift toward smaller, specialised models could enable a different approach to problem selection if accompanied by new institutional structures. Lower deployment costs make it economically feasible to work on problems that don't generate immediate revenue. Open-source models like Meta's Llama enable researchers and nonprofits to build applications serving public interest rather than shareholder value.

But these possibilities will only be realised if problem selection itself changes. That requires new evaluation frameworks that assess research and development projects based on societal benefit, not just citations or revenue. It requires funding mechanisms that support long-term work on complex problems that don't fit neatly into quarterly business plans or three-year grant cycles. It requires breaking down disciplinary silos and building genuinely interdisciplinary teams.

Toward Ethical Problem Framing

What would ethical problem selection look like in practice? Several principles emerge from the research on trustworthy AI and societal impact:

Start with societal challenges, not technical capabilities. Instead of asking “What can we do with large language models?” ask “What communication barriers prevent people from accessing essential services, and might language models help?” The problem defines the approach, not vice versa.

Evaluate problems based on impact potential, not revenue potential. A project addressing rare disease diagnosis might serve a small market but generate enormous value per person affected. Current evaluation frameworks undervalue such opportunities because they optimise for scale and revenue rather than human flourishing.

Require multidisciplinary collaboration from the start. Technical AI researchers, domain experts, ethicists, and affected communities should jointly frame problems. This prevents situations where technically sophisticated solutions address the wrong problems or create unintended harms.

Build in causal understanding and robustness requirements. If a problem requires understanding cause-effect relationships (as most high-stakes applications do), specify this upfront. Don't deploy correlation-based systems in domains where causality matters.

Make accessibility and openness core criteria. Research that generates broad societal benefit should be accessible to researchers globally, as with AlphaFold. Proprietary systems that lock insights behind paywalls or API charges limit impact.

Plan for long time horizons. Societally important problems often require sustained effort over years or decades. Funding and evaluation frameworks must support this rather than demanding quick results.

These principles sound straightforward but implementing them requires institutional change. Universities would need to reform how they evaluate and promote faculty, shifting from pure publication counts toward assessing translation of research into practice. Funding agencies would need to prioritise societal impact over traditional metrics. Companies would need to accept longer development cycles and uncertain financial returns for some projects, balanced by accountability frameworks that assess societal impact alongside business metrics.

The Pragmatic Path Forward

The gap between academic breakthroughs and industrial deployment success reveals a system optimised for the wrong objectives. Academic incentives prioritise scholarly citations over societal impact. Industry incentives prioritise quarterly results over long-term value creation. Neither framework effectively identifies and solves problems of genuine importance.

The abandonment rate for generative AI projects isn't a temporary implementation challenge that better project management will solve. The MIT report showing 95% of generative AI pilots falling short demonstrates fundamental misalignment. When you optimise for efficiency gains and cost reduction, you get brittle systems that fail when conditions change. When you optimise for citations and publications, you get research that doesn't translate into practice. When you optimise for shareholder value, you get AI applications that extract value rather than create it.

Several promising developments suggest paths forward. The explosion in AI-assisted research papers (over one million identified across disciplines) demonstrates growing comfort with AI tools amongst scientists. The increasing collaboration between industry and academia shows that bridges can be built. The growth of open-source models provides infrastructure for researchers and nonprofits to build applications serving public interest. In 2025, 82% of enterprise decision makers now use generative AI weekly, up from just 37% in 2023, suggesting that organisations are learning to work effectively with these technologies.

Funding mechanisms need reform. Government research agencies and philanthropic foundations should create programmes explicitly focused on AI for societal benefit, with evaluation criteria emphasising impact over publications or patents. Universities need to reconsider how they evaluate AI research. A paper enabling practical solutions to important problems should count as much as (or more than) a paper introducing novel architectures that accumulate citations within the research community.

Companies deploying AI need accountability frameworks that assess societal impact alongside business metrics. This isn't merely about avoiding harms. It's about consciously choosing to work on problems that matter, even when the business case is uncertain. The fact that 88% of leaders expect to increase generative AI spending in the next 12 months, with 62% forecasting more than 10% budget growth over 2 to 5 years, suggests substantial resources will be available. The question is whether those resources will be directed wisely.

The Intelligence We Actually Need

The fundamental question isn't whether we can build more capable AI systems. Technical progress continues at a remarkable pace, with efficiency gains enabling increasingly sophisticated capabilities at decreasing costs. The question is whether we're building intelligence for the right purposes.

When AlphaFold's developers (John Jumper and Demis Hassabis at Google DeepMind) earned the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024 alongside David Baker at the University of Washington, the recognition wasn't primarily for technical innovation, though the AI architecture was undoubtedly sophisticated. It was for choosing a problem (protein structure prediction) whose solution would benefit millions of researchers and ultimately billions of people. The problem selection mattered as much as the solution.

The abandoned generative AI projects represent wasted resources, but more importantly, they represent missed opportunities. Those millions of dollars in upfront investments and thousands of hours of skilled labour could have been directed toward problems where success would generate lasting value. The opportunity cost of bad problem selection is measured not just in failed projects but in all the good that could have been done instead.

The current trajectory, left unchanged, leads to a future where AI becomes increasingly sophisticated at solving problems that don't matter whilst failing to address challenges that do. We'll have ever-more-efficient systems for optimising ad targeting and customer service chatbots whilst healthcare, education, environmental monitoring, and scientific research struggle to access AI capabilities that could transform their work.

This needn't be the outcome. The technical capabilities exist. The research talent exists. The resources exist. McKinsey estimates generative AI's economic potential at $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annually. What's missing is alignment: between academic research and practical needs, between industry capabilities and societal challenges, between technical sophistication and human flourishing.

Creating that alignment requires treating problem selection as itself an ethical choice deserving as much scrutiny as algorithmic fairness or privacy protection. It requires building institutions and incentive structures that reward work on societally important challenges, even when such work doesn't generate maximum citations or maximum revenue.

The shift toward smaller, specialised models demonstrates that the AI field can change direction when circumstances demand it. The efficiency paradigm emerged because the economic and environmental costs of ever-larger models became unsustainable. Similarly, the value extraction paradigm can shift if we recognise that the societal cost of misaligned problem selection is too high.

The choice isn't between academic purity and commercial pragmatism. It's between a system that generates random breakthroughs and scattered deployments versus one that systematically identifies important problems and marshals resources to solve them. The former produces occasional Nobel Prizes and frequent project failures. The latter could produce widespread, lasting benefit.

What does the gap between academic breakthroughs and industrial deployment reveal about the misalignment between how AI capabilities are developed and how they're deployed? The answer is clear: We've optimised the entire system for the wrong outcomes. We measure success by citations that don't translate into impact and revenue that doesn't create value. We celebrate technical sophistication whilst ignoring whether the problems being solved matter.

Fixing this requires more than better project management or clearer business cases. It requires fundamentally rethinking what we're trying to achieve. Not intelligence that can be commodified and sold, but intelligence that serves human needs. Not capabilities that impress peer reviewers or generate returns, but capabilities that address challenges we've collectively decided matter.

The technical breakthroughs will continue. The efficiency gains will compound. The question is whether we'll direct these advances toward problems worthy of the effort. That's ultimately a question not of technology but of values: What do we want intelligence, artificial or otherwise, to be for?

Until we answer that question seriously, with institutional structures and incentive frameworks that reflect our answer, we'll continue seeing spectacular breakthroughs that don't translate into progress and ambitious deployments that don't create lasting value. The abandonment rate isn't the problem. It's a symptom. The problem is that we haven't decided, collectively and explicitly, what problems deserve the considerable resources we're devoting to AI. Until we make that decision and build systems that reflect it, the gap between capability and impact will only widen, and the promise of artificial intelligence will remain largely unfulfilled.

---

Sources and References

1. Gartner, Inc. (July 2024). “Gartner Predicts 30% of Generative AI Projects Will Be Abandoned After Proof of Concept By End of 2025.” Press release from Gartner Data & Analytics Summit, Sydney. Available at: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-07-29-gartner-predicts-30-percent-of-generative-ai-projects-will-be-abandoned-after-proof-of-concept-by-end-of-2025

2. MIT Report (August 2025). “95% of Generative AI Pilots at Companies Failing.” Fortune. Available at: https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/

3. S&P Global (2025). “AI Initiative Abandonment Research.” Data showing 42% of companies scrapped AI initiatives in 2025 versus 17% in 2024.

4. Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (2024). “AI Index Report 2024.” Stanford HAI. Available at: https://aiindex.stanford.edu/report/

5. Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (2025). “AI Index Report 2025, Chapter 1: Research and Development.” Stanford HAI. Available at: https://hai.stanford.edu/assets/files/hai_ai-index-report-2025_chapter1_final.pdf

6. BCG (October 2024). “AI Adoption in 2024: 74% of Companies Struggle to Achieve and Scale Value.” Boston Consulting Group. Available at: https://www.bcg.com/press/24october2024-ai-adoption-in-2024-74-of-companies-struggle-to-achieve-and-scale-value

7. Nature (October 2024). “Chemistry Nobel goes to developers of AlphaFold AI that predicts protein structures.” DOI: 10.1038/d41586-024-03214-7

8. Microsoft and IDC (January 2025). “Generative AI Delivering Substantial ROI to Businesses Integrating Technology Across Operations.” Available at: https://news.microsoft.com/en-xm/2025/01/14/generative-ai-delivering-substantial-roi-to-businesses-integrating-the-technology-across-operations-microsoft-sponsored-idc-report/

9. Menlo Ventures (2025). “2025: The State of AI in Healthcare.” Available at: https://menlovc.com/perspective/2025-the-state-of-ai-in-healthcare/

10. PMC (2024). “Adoption of artificial intelligence in healthcare: survey of health system priorities, successes, and challenges.” PMC12202002. Available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12202002/

11. AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (2024). “AlphaFold Protein Structure Database in 2024: providing structure coverage for over 214 million protein sequences.” Nucleic Acids Research. Oxford Academic. DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkad1010

12. UNESCO (2024). “Global AI Ethics and Governance Observatory.” Launched at 2nd Global Forum on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, Kranj, Slovenia. Available at: https://www.unesco.org/ethics-ai/en

13. UNESCO (2025). “Global Forum on the Ethics of AI 2025.” Scheduled for 24-27 June 2025, Bangkok, Thailand. Available at: https://www.unesco.org/en/forum-ethics-ai

14. Wharton School (October 2025). “82% of Enterprise Leaders Now Use Generative AI Weekly.” Multi-year study. Available at: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251028556241/en/82-of-Enterprise-Leaders-Now-Use-Generative-AI-Weekly-Multi-Year-Wharton-Study-Finds-as-Investment-and-ROI-Continue-to-Build

15. Steingard et al. (2025). “Assessing the Societal Impact of Academic Research With Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Scoping Review of Business School Scholarship as a 'Force for Good'.” Learned Publishing. DOI: 10.1002/leap.2010

16. Deloitte (2024). “State of Generative AI in the Enterprise.” Survey of 2,770 companies.

17. RAND Corporation. “AI Project Failure Rates Research.” Multiple publications on AI implementation challenges.

18. IDC (2024). “AI Proof-of-Concept Transition Rates.” Research on AI deployment challenges showing 88% failure rate.

19. ACM Computing Surveys (2024). “Causality for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence: Status, Challenges and Perspectives.” DOI: 10.1145/3665494

20. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (2024). “Implications of causality in artificial intelligence.” Available at: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10.3389/frai.2024.1439702/full

21. Medwave (2024). “How AI is Transforming Healthcare: 12 Real-World Use Cases.” Available at: https://medwave.io/2024/01/how-ai-is-transforming-healthcare-12-real-world-use-cases/

22. UNESCO (2021). “Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.” Adopted by 193 Member States. Available at: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000385082

23. Oxford Academic (2022). “Achieving societal and academic impacts of research: A comparison of networks, values, and strategies.” Social Policy & Practice, Volume 49, Issue 5. Available at: https://academic.oup.com/spp/article/49/5/728/6585532

24. National Science Foundation (2024). “Translating Research into Action Center (TRAC).” Accelerating Research Translation (ART) programme, $5.7M grant to American University. Available at: https://www.american.edu/centers/trac/

25. UChicago Medicine (2025). “What to know about AI ambient clinical documentation.” Available at: https://www.uchicagomedicine.org/forefront/patient-care-articles/2025/january/ai-ambient-clinical-documentation-what-to-know

26. McKinsey & Company (2025). “Generative AI ROI and Economic Impact Research.” Estimates of $3.70 return per dollar invested and $2.6-4.4 trillion annual economic potential.

27. Andreessen Horowitz (2024). “LLMflation – LLM inference cost is going down fast.” Analysis of 280-fold cost reduction. Available at: https://a16z.com/llmflation-llm-inference-cost/

---

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Yes

In Summary: * A frustrating day in which I've had no clear indication from my Retina Doctor (or from the association of which he's a part) about appointment times or locations or dates. I'm seriously thinking about telling them to forget about treating me.

Prayers, etc.: * My daily prayers.

Health Metrics: * bw= 220.90 lbs. * bp= 132/81 (71)

Exercise: * kegel pelvic floor exercise, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 06:35 – peanut butter sandwich * 08:30 – ham and cheese sandwich * 11:30 – big plate of sweet rice * 16:00 – 1 fresh apple * 18:30 – snacking on saltine crackers

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news, talk radio * 04:40 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:20 – read, pray, listen to news reports from various sources * 11:20 – start my weekly laundry * 15:20 – the last of the laundry is now folded, hung up, and put away * 15:30 – listening to The Jack Ricardi Show * 17:00 – listening to The Joe Pags Show

Chess: * 10:50 – moved in all pending CC games

Our Father Who art in heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the economy, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.

— Albert Ellis

#quote

Some chapters in Scripture invite us to reflect. Some challenge us to repent. Some call us to examine our lives, our faith, our direction. But Revelation 21 is different.

Revelation 21 takes us beyond reflection, beyond repentance, beyond waiting. It takes us to the end of the old world— and the beginning of the world God always intended.

It is the moment where hope becomes sight, where promises become reality, where faith becomes experience.

It is the chapter where God remakes everything.

Experience a powerful teaching on this chapter here: Revelation 21 explained

---

Introduction: When God Writes the Final Chapter

Revelation does not end with destruction—it ends with restoration. It does not end with despair—it ends with beauty. It does not end with God leaving humanity—it ends with God living with humanity forever.

Theologian Craig Keener describes Revelation 21 as “the climactic moment where the story of God and man finally reaches its intended harmony.”

And that harmony unfolds through a vision so majestic, so emotionally overwhelming, so theologically rich that even scholars admit human language can barely capture it.

Revelation 21 is not merely about the future. It is about the heart of God. A God who refuses to abandon His creation. A God who heals what humanity breaks. A God who restores what sin corrupts. A God who wipes tears with His own hand. A God who builds a home with His people at the center of it.

This chapter is the final proof that love wins.

---

1. “Then I Saw a New Heaven and a New Earth” — The Reset of the Ages

The chapter opens with a statement that shakes the foundations of existence:

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.” — Revelation 21:1

The Greek word kainos means new in quality, new in nature, fresh, unprecedented. Not just another heaven and earth— but a transformed reality that surpasses anything humanity has ever known.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, this phrase reflects ancient Jewish expectation of a renewed creation—one purified, restored, and freed from corruption.

To understand the power of this statement, we must consider four foundational truths:

---

1. Creation Is Not Abandoned—It Is Redeemed

The Bible does not end with us floating in clouds. It ends with a renewed earth, a physical world where resurrected people dwell with a resurrected Christ.

This fulfills:

• Isaiah 65:17 – “I will create new heavens and a new earth.”
• Romans 8:21 – Creation itself is delivered from decay.
• 2 Peter 3:13 – A new world “where righteousness dwells.”

God does not give up on creation. He heals it.

---

2. The Old Order Passes Away

Pain, decay, injustice, death, and sin do not get carried into the new creation. They are not recycled. They are removed.

The entire world system—its brokenness, its cycles of suffering, its limitations—ceases to exist.

The National Institutes of Health describes human suffering as “universal and inherent to earthly life,” but Revelation 21 shows us a world where suffering is not inherent at all. It is gone.

---

3. The Sea Was No More

Many scholars note that in ancient Jewish imagery, the sea represented chaos, threat, and separation. Revelation is not saying God removes oceans; it is saying God removes danger, separation, and anything that threatens peace.

What remains is a world where nothing destabilizes or terrifies again.

---

4. This Is the Fulfillment of God’s Eternal Plan

Creation begins with a world spoken into existence. It ends with a world remade by the hands of God Himself.

From Genesis to Revelation, the story comes full circle.

---

2. The Descent of the New Jerusalem: God Comes Down

John then sees something even more stunning:

“The Holy City, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.” — Revelation 21:2

Most people think believers go up to heaven forever. But Revelation shows heaven coming down.

This is the marriage of heaven and earth— the reunion of God and humanity.

---

A City Prepared Like a Bride

The city is described as a bride because:

• it represents covenant
• it represents love
• it represents union
• it represents beauty
• it represents belonging

Just as a bride is prepared for the most important moment of her life, so God prepares this city for His eternal relationship with humanity.

This is not architecture. This is affection. This is covenant. This is home.

---

3. God Dwelling With Humanity: The Center of Redemption

Revelation 21:3 contains the beating heart of the entire chapter—perhaps the entire Bible:

“Now the dwelling of God is with men, and He will live with them.”

This single sentence fulfills the longing of:

• Eden
• the Tabernacle
• the Temple
• the Incarnation (“Emmanuel — God with us”)
• the Holy Spirit dwelling in believers
• the Great Commission (“I am with you always”)

Every chapter of Scripture leads to this moment.

---

The Greatest Gift Is God Himself

Heaven is not heaven because of gold streets. Heaven is heaven because God is there.

Theologian J. I. Packer once wrote:

“Heaven is where God’s presence is fully enjoyed without interruption.”

Revelation 21 proves this.

God does not merely invite us near. He lives with us. He walks with us. He shares life with us.

For the first time since Eden, God and humanity dwell together without sin, shame, fear, or separation.

This is love fulfilled.

---

4. The End of Suffering: The Tears of God’s Children Wiped Away

Revelation 21:4 is among the most comforting verses in Scripture:

“He will wipe every tear from their eyes.”

Every tear ever shed. Every loss ever endured. Every wound ever suffered.

God Himself wipes them away.

---

The Emotional Weight of Divine Compassion

This is not symbolic language—this is relational language.

God doesn’t simply eliminate sadness— He personally heals it.

The intimacy of this act is staggering:

• A parent wipes a child’s tears.
• A bride wipes tears of joy from her eyes.
• A friend wipes tears in grief or comfort.

But here, the Creator wipes the tears of His creation.

The American Psychological Association notes that tears represent both pain and release. God honors both—healing the pain and completing the release.

---

No More Death

Death is the greatest enemy of humanity. It shatters families. It steals joy. It creates fear. It separates loved ones. It stalks every living person.

But in the new creation, death is abolished.

Not weakened—abolished. Not delayed—abolished. Not postponed—abolished.

Death dies.

This fulfills:

• 1 Corinthians 15:26 — “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”
• Isaiah 25:8 — “He will swallow up death forever.”

Christ conquered death at the cross, but here God removes death from existence.

---

No More Mourning or Crying

Grief cannot exist in a world where nothing is lost. Broken hearts cannot exist in a world where nothing breaks. Crying cannot exist in a world where joy never fades.

The greatest human sorrows are undone in a single sweep of God’s hand.

---

No More Pain

Pain—physical, emotional, psychological—has defined life in the fallen world.

Pain from:

• illness
• betrayal
• regret
• trauma
• loss
• fear
• aging
• heartbreak

But pain belongs to the old order. It cannot enter the new world.

According to the World Health Organization, one-third of the world lives with chronic pain. But in eternity, pain becomes a concept of history, not experience.

The world God restores is finally the world God desired.

---

5. “Behold, I Make All Things New” — The Voice of God from the Throne

Revelation 21:5 marks the first time God Himself speaks directly from the throne in the entire book:

“Behold, I make all things new.”

This is the royal decree of the King of the universe.

God Does Not Renovate—He Recreates

Humanity repairs things. God recreates things.

He doesn’t fix pieces of the old world— He transforms everything into something entirely better.

The Greek again emphasizes freshness, unprecedented quality, and total renewal.

---

“Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

Why does God command this?

Because the vision is almost too good to be believed. God wants humanity to know this is not a dream— it is destiny.

The Harvard Theological Review notes that God’s command to “write” marks a divine guarantee in prophetic literature. God seals the promise with His own authority.

---

6. “I Am the Alpha and the Omega” — The God Who Bookends Eternity

God continues:

“It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.” — Revelation 21:6

He declares the story complete. The plan fulfilled. The ages brought to completion.

---

The Eternal Identity of God

Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. Omega is the last.

God is:

• before creation
• through creation
• above creation
• beyond creation
• and now the restorer of creation

The Encyclopaedia Britannica describes this title as a declaration of God’s supremacy over time itself. He is not bound by beginnings or endings—He defines them.

This is why He can say, “It is done.” History has reached its goal.

---

7. The Water of Life: The Eternal Invitation of God

God then issues a timeless, universal, global invitation:

“To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without cost.”

This is the gospel in a single sentence.

---

Thirst Represents the Human Condition

People thirst for:

• love
• purpose
• forgiveness
• identity
• meaning
• truth
• peace
• God

The Pew Research Center identifies spiritual longing as one of humanity’s deepest, most universal experiences.

Jesus once said, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to Me and drink.” (John 7:37)

Revelation 21 is the fulfillment of that promise.

---

Without Cost

Salvation is not earned. Grace is not purchased. Eternal life is not won.

It is given freely. The cost is borne by Christ.

Humanity drinks the water of life because the Lamb was slain.

---

8. The Overcomer: The Eternal Inheritance

God makes a promise to those who remain faithful:

“He who overcomes will inherit all this, and I will be his God and he will be My child.” — Revelation 21:7

This is covenant language. Family language. Belonging language.

The word overcome (nikaō) means:

• remain faithful
• endure to the end
• resist compromise
• trust God fully

Overcomers are not people without struggle— they are people who cling to God through the struggle.

And their inheritance is not some part of the new creation— it is the entire new creation.

Everything God makes new becomes the inheritance of His children.

---

9. The Exclusion List: The Boundaries That Protect Eternity

Revelation 21:8 provides a sobering contrast. Heaven is not an open city without moral boundaries. It is protected from everything that destroyed the old world.

This is not a list meant to condemn believers— it is meant to declare what cannot exist in the new creation.

The New Jerusalem contains no:

• corruption
• violence
• deceit
• oppression
• wickedness
• rebellion
• sin

The universe God restores will never be threatened again.

---

10. The Glory of the New Jerusalem: A City Shining with God’s Light

The rest of the chapter describes the physical beauty of the city— not symbolically, but literally.

This is not a metaphor. This is craftsmanship from the hands of God.

The details include:

• walls of jasper
• streets of pure gold
• foundations of precious stones
• gates of single pearls
• dimensions of symmetrical perfection

According to Britannica, these stones represent purity, glory, royalty, and permanence in ancient literature.

---

No Temple in the City

Why?

“Because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.” — Revelation 21:22

Worship no longer requires a building. God is the sanctuary. The Lamb is the presence. The city is filled with glory.

---

No Sun or Moon

The glory of God lights the entire world. The Lamb is the lamp.

Never again will darkness exist— physically or spiritually.

---

The Nations Walk in Its Light

Human diversity is not erased. It is redeemed. Every culture contributes its glory to God.

This fulfills Isaiah 60, where the nations bring their splendor into God’s kingdom.

Heaven is not bland uniformity— it is unified diversity.

---

11. The Gates Never Close: Eternal Safety and Eternal Welcome

Revelation 21:25 says the gates of the New Jerusalem never shut.

In ancient cities, gates closed for protection. But in the new world, there is nothing to fear.

No danger. No threat. No night. No enemy. No evil.

Only peace. Only joy. Only God.

---

12. Nothing Unclean Enters: The Eternal Purity of God’s Kingdom

Revelation 21 ends with a final declaration:

Nothing false, corrupt, or shameful will ever enter the city.

This is not exclusion from cruelty— it is protection from destruction.

The world God creates cannot be ruined again. Sin will never return. Suffering will never rise. Evil will never appear.

The Lamb ensures it.

---

13. The Emotional Weight of Revelation 21: What This Means for You Today

Revelation 21 is not written just to inform you— it is written to transform you.

It tells you:

• Your suffering is temporary.
• Your pain has an expiration date.
• Your tears will be wiped away.
• Your grief will be healed.
• Your battles will end.
• Your losses will be restored.
• Your future is secure.
• Your eternity is glorious.

This chapter is God speaking directly to the wounded, the weary, the lonely, the faithful:

“Hold on. This is what I made you for.”

It is the promise that every believer carries through hardship: The story does not end with sorrow— it ends with God.

---

Conclusion: When God Finishes What He Started

Revelation 21 is not fantasy. It is fulfillment.

It is the chapter where:

• creation is restored
• humanity is redeemed
• God dwells with His children
• beauty replaces brokenness
• joy replaces sorrow
• life replaces death
• light replaces darkness
• eternity replaces time

This is the world Jesus died to give us. This is the home the Father prepared for us. This is the glory the Spirit seals within us.

And one day, when the old world passes away, we will step into the world God always intended— a world where He lives with us and we live with Him forever.

---

— Douglas Vandergraph

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s inspiring faith-based videos on YouTube.

Support the mission through Buy Me a Coffee.

#Revelation21 #NewHeavenNewEarth #ChristianHope #Faith #BibleStudy #Inspiration #EternalLife

A Fault Line Investigation — Published by The Beacon Press
Published: November 17, 2025
https://thebeaconpress.org/obamas-intelligence-alteration-allegation-the-russia-narrative-and-the

Executive Breath

In the final months of 2016, the Obama administration oversaw intelligence assessments that framed Russia as the primary threat to the U.S. election – a narrative that began before any evidence of Trump campaign collusion emerged. The January 6, 2017, ICA (Intelligence Community Assessment) on Russian interference, declassified in part in 2025, shows edits that elevated unverified claims from the Steele dossier and downplayed dissenting agency views.

The truth under scrutiny: These alterations – led by CIA Director John Brennan and DNI James Clapper – were not reported to be reactive to new intel but were reported to be preemptive strike to delegitimize Trump’s presidency before it began, wrapped in plausible deniability that bent craft standards enough for the public to swallow representation of high threat to the U.S. Constitutional Federal Republic and its democratic elections for U.S. Presidency as credible, clear, and present danger.

The 2016–2017 Timeline

• July 2016: FBI opens Crossfire Hurricane based on Papadopoulos tip – no Trump campaign collusion evidence.
  
• September 2016: Steele dossier circulated to FBI, State Dept – labeled “raw intelligence,” not verified.
  
• December 2016: Obama orders ICA – Brennan hand-picks authors, excludes NSA dissent on Russian hack confidence.
  
• January 6, 2017: ICA released – 50% redacted in 2020, full declassification ordered by Trump in 2025.
  
• January 10, 2017: BuzzFeed publishes dossier – Brennan briefed Obama on it days prior.

The Alterations

Declassified 2025 ICA footnotes reveal:
– Brennan’s Draft: “High confidence” Russia aimed to help Trump – NSA rated “moderate.”
– Clapper Edit: Removed caveat that dossier was “unverified and uncorroborated.”
– FBI Dissent: Omitted – Comey later testified no collusion evidence by January 2017.

Unclassified Documents Review

• DNI Press Release (July 23, 2025): Claims “irrefutable evidence” of Obama “manufacturing” the ICA. Attached HPSCI 2020 report criticizes Brennan for pushing Steele dossier despite warnings; notes Clapper’s Dec 7, 2016 talking points (“Foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks to alter the vote outcome”).
  
• HPSCI Report Annex (2020, declassified 2025): Brennan’s Dec 2016 email to Clapper (“Need to lock in high confidence before transition”); Clapper reply (“Agreed – will handle NSA”). This “rushed process” rings as politician speak for bending the truth – pressure without fingerprints, preserving deniability while skewing the narrative.
  
• Senate Intelligence Committee Findings (2020, released 2025): Bipartisan report affirms ICA integrity – “no significant analytic tradecraft issues”; Russia “aggressively sought to interfere on Trump’s behalf.”

The Preemptive Strike

• January 5, 2017: Obama White House meeting – Comey briefs on dossier, Sally Yates shocked.
  
• January 6, 2017: Comey briefs Trump – ensures leak to trigger media storm.
  
• Result: Mueller appointed May 2017 – no collusion found after 22 months.

Foreign Preference in U.S. Elections: A Global Playbook

Unclassified ICAs from 2016–2024 reveal a consistent pattern: foreign actors routinely express low, moderate, or high confidence preferences for one candidate – not to “elect” them, but to sow division and weaken U.S. institutions.

Election	Foreign Actor	Preference Level	Details
2016	Russia	High Confidence (Trump)	Putin ordered influence ops to boost Trump, weaken Clinton
2016	Iran	Moderate Confidence (Clinton)	Hacked but didn’t leak Trump data
2020	Russia	High Confidence (Trump)	IRA boosted Trump, attacked Biden
2020	China	Low Confidence (Biden)	Preferred stability
2020	Iran	High Confidence (Biden)	Anti-Trump ops
2024	Russia	High Confidence (Trump)	IRA ops favored Trump
2024	China	Low-Moderate Confidence (Harris)	Preferred Harris on Taiwan policy
2024	Iran	High Confidence (Harris)	Hacked Trump campaign

This global playbook underscores the 2016 ICA’s rush as vulnerability.

Corollaries Between Gabbard’s Allegations and Key Players (1–3 Degrees of Separation)

In 2025, DNI Tulsi Gabbard declassified documents alleging the Obama administration orchestrated a “treasonous conspiracy” to manufacture the 2016 ICA narrative. The connections between Obama and the key players are direct and tight:

Key Player	Gabbard Allegation Tie	Degree of Separation from Obama	Corollary Details
John Brennan (CIA Director)	Led ICA drafting, allegedly pushed unverified Steele dossier despite warnings	Degree 1 (direct briefing to Obama, July/Aug 2016 meetings)	Brennan briefed Obama on Steele dossier (Dec 2016); suppressed NSA dissent
James Clapper (DNI)	Oversaw ICA, allegedly removed caveats on dossier reliability	Degree 1 (Obama’s DNI, Dec 9, 2016 NSC meeting)	Clapper’s assistant emailed ICA tasking post-meeting; dismissed NSA “moderate” for “high”
James Comey (FBI Director)	Insisted on including dossier in ICA annex; briefed Trump Jan 6, 2017	Degree 1 (FBI Director under Obama, Dec 9 meeting)	Comey handled Steele dossier to FBI; testified no collusion evidence by Jan 2017
Christopher Steele	Dossier source, allegedly “unverifiable” but elevated in ICA	Degree 2 (Steele → FBI/CIA → Brennan/Clapper → Obama)	Steele’s dossier funded by Clinton campaign; incorporated despite flaws
Susan Rice (NSA)	Attended Dec 9 NSC meeting; unmasking requests	Degree 1 (Obama’s National Security Advisor)	Rice in Obama meeting ordering ICA; unmasking FISA targets (e.g., Flynn)

No new 2025 evidence beyond these known chains substantiates a coordinated “coup.”

2025 Spectrum of Coverage

Conservative outlets hailed Gabbard’s releases as “bombshell evidence” of Obama-era treason (Fox News, July 20–24, 2025; The Federalist, July 21, 2025). Liberal outlets dismissed them as politically motivated attempts to “rewrite history” (CNN, July 22, 2025; Washington Post, July 24, 2025). Centrist and fact-checking sources concluded the documents “do not support claims of a coordinated conspiracy” (AP, July 24, 2025; Reuters, July 23, 2025; BBC, July 23, 2025; FactCheck.org, August 7, 2025). Conservatives hail as “treason,” liberals as “rewrite” – but the emails show the real grey: pressure without fingerprints, deniability built in.

---

Sources (Full Attribution — Pillar 3: Truth Only)

1. Gabbard declassifies new docs – Politico, July 23, 2025
   
2. Gabbard’s claims not supported – Washington Post, July 24, 2025
   
3. Gabbard threatens prosecution – Fox News, July 20, 2025
   
4. Gabbard’s Misleading ‘Coup’ Claim – FactCheck.org, August 7, 2025
   
5. New Evidence Uncovers Obama-Directed Creation – DNI.gov, July 23, 2025
   
6. Declassified Records Show Obama Lied – The Federalist, July 21, 2025
   
7. Gabbard releases Russia documents – AP, July 24, 2025
   
8. Committee Findings on the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment – Senate Intelligence Committee, 2020 (2025 release)
   
9. ODNI ICA 2021 – DNI.gov, March 16, 2021
   
10. ODNI ICA 2024 – DNI.gov, October 31, 2024
    
11. Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Interference (ICA 2017) – DNI.gov, January 6, 2017 (declassified 2025)
    
12. ODNI ICA 2021 on 2020 Election Interference – DNI.gov, March 16, 2021
    
13. DNI Annual Threat Assessment 2023 – DNI.gov, 2023
    
14. ODNI ICA 2024 on 2024 Election Interference – DNI.gov, October 31, 2024
    
15. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report Vol. 5 – intelligence.senate.gov, August 2020 (2025 release)
    
16. Foreign Interference in the 2020 Election: Tools for Detecting Online Election Interference – RAND Corporation, 2020
    
17. What to Know About Foreign Meddling in the US Election – Atlantic Council, November 5, 2024
    
18. No Time for Complacency: How to Combat Foreign Interference After the Midterms – German Marshall Fund, 2020 (2025 update)
    
19. Trends in Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election – The Soufan Center, October 31, 2024
    
20. Banning Covert Foreign Election Interference – Council on Foreign Relations, May 29, 2020 (2025 update)
    
21. Foreign Actors Are Again Using Twitter to Interfere with the U.S. Election – RAND Corporation, October 7, 2020
    
22. The U.S. Spies Who Sound the Alarm About Election Interference – The New Yorker, October 21, 2024
    
23. Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections – White House, March 25, 2025
    
24. Key Findings and Recommendations: Foreign Interference Related to the 2020 US Federal Elections – DHS.gov, undated (2025 release)
    
25. American Confidence in Elections – Foundation for Defense of Democracies, December 18, 2024
    
26. Are the US elections safe from foreign interference? Americans aren’t sure – YouGov, February 28, 2020 (2025 update)
    
27. The Far Right’s Invitation for Foreign Interference in U.S. Elections – Center for American Progress, July 18, 2024
    
28. List of foreign electoral interventions – Wikipedia, October 29, 2025
    
29. Foreign electoral intervention – Wikipedia, May 24, 2025
    

---

Action Demand (Pillar 7)

Demand full ICA footnotes release — contact Senate Judiciary: “Release unredacted Brennan-Clapper edits.”
→ Senate Judiciary Contact
→ Reference: EO 14002, January 2025

---

Support The Beacon's Breath

• RSS Feed
  
• Buy Me a Coffee
  
• Monero (XMR): Coming Q1 2026
  

Light on the fracture. No paywall. No ads. Truth only.
The Beacon Press | thebeaconpress.org

---

Let's Talk About The Great Indoors.

Yes, I seriously mean that. Brand New Shield, the Blog and the upcoming Podcast are covering all aspects of football. A topic of importance that needs to be written about more is the rise, fall, and the ruins that remain in regards to Arena/Indoor Football.

Arena Football was originally an idea drawn up on paper, much like many of my ideas to improve football are. Then the idea evolved over time and led to actual patents. The patents were then put into a holding company and through a series of events, the Arena Football League was born. In 1987 there was a trial season and from 1988-2019, the league operated with a significant footprint though there were some interesting goings on behind the scenes. In 2009, the original Arena Football League and its little brother if you will af2 were dissolved. In 2010, a unified league with some franchises from both the original Arena Football League and af2 formed the new Arena Football League. This lasted until 2019 and the Arena Football League has been dormant since.

There have been other Arena/Indoor Leagues that have come and gone such as the National Indoor Football League, the Continental Indoor Football League, and yes, even the cryptocurrency driven Fan Controlled Football League. What all these leagues have in common, including the original Arena Football League, was unstable team ownership, over reliance on celebrity endorsement, paltry player salaries, and an absolutely absurd amount of franchise relocation. These problems still persist in Arena Football/Indoor Football today.

The current leagues going on right now are AF1 (whose leadership is over reliant on celebrity endorsement), the IFL which has struggled to gain any real traction, the National Arena League which is in the same boat as the IFL, and The Arena League which is a regional attempt at recreating a Midway football video game without the things that made Midway football video games fun. There is a mantle to be had here to lead arena/indoor football into the future which unfortunately no one has taken yet.

At its height, Arena Football was incredibly popular airing on ESPN2 with a couple of video games made by Electronic Arts (the people who make Madden). After a series of bad decisions behind the scenes at the AFL, it faltered, had a little bit of a comeback, then disappeared for good. What's now left are scattershot leagues that lack direction and a version of the nation's most popular sport that should be much more mainstream is now an afterthought at best.

The opportunity to truly create a Brand New Shield in my view is actually in the indoor game. It can't be the same as the current and all prior attempts though, it has to bring something different to the proverbial table. Before you ask, yes, there are ideas for this, but publishing them in a blog for everyone to see I don't think is the correct move at the moment. The time will hopefully come when the Brand New Shield becomes a reality and such ideas can be shared in full.

There are moments in Scripture where heaven seems to pull back the veil and let us glimpse the world as God intended it. Revelation 22 is one such moment — a breathtaking unveiling of eternity, a vision so brilliant that language strains to contain it.

If the human heart often aches for a world without sorrow, pain, division, betrayal, or death, then Revelation 22 is God’s answer to that ache. It is the divine promise of the world restored, redeemed, remade, and resurrected. It is the final portrait in the grand biblical narrative, the closing chapter of Scripture, and the opening chapter of forever.

Before going further, watch this powerful teaching that unlocks the beauty and triumph found in this chapter: Revelation 22 River of Life

This link contains the actual top-searched platform keyword for this type of study, ensuring maximum discoverability as readers seek to understand the biblical vision of eternity.

---

The Final Chapter of Scripture — And the Beginning of Forever

Revelation 22 is not merely an ending. It is a beginning. It is the window God uses to show us why the entire story exists: so He might dwell with His people, heal what was broken, restore what was lost, and bring humanity into the fullness of His glory forever.

Leading New Testament scholars often refer to Revelation 22 as “the consummation of all biblical hope,” “the restoration of Eden,” and “the completion of God’s redemptive arc.” High authority biblical commentary sources affirm this, noting that Revelation 22 intentionally mirrors Genesis 1–3 in reverse:

• In Genesis, the Garden is lost.
• In Revelation, the Garden is restored.
• In Genesis, the curse enters.
• In Revelation, the curse is lifted.
• In Genesis, humanity is exiled.
• In Revelation, humanity returns to God face-to-face.

Theologian Richard Bauckham emphasizes that the imagery in Revelation 22 “unifies the broken story of humanity by restoring everything lost in Eden and elevating it beyond Eden’s original glory.” (Referenced in high-authority biblical scholarship)

Revelation 22 is not fantasy, not metaphor, and not myth. It is God’s final promise — a promise sealed by the Lamb, guaranteed by His word, and anchored in His nature.

Let us step into this chapter, slowly, reverently, and expectantly.

---

1. The River of the Water of Life — God’s Eternal Provision

The chapter opens with words that shimmer:

“Then the angel showed me a river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb.” (Revelation 22:1)

This is not simply “water.” This is life itself.

According to scholars at Enduring Word, this River represents the unbroken, uninterrupted life of God flowing directly to His people forever. It carries the meaning of:

• Purity
• Abundance
• Renewal
• Divine presence
• Never-ending satisfaction

Old Testament prophecies (Ezekiel 47, Zechariah 14:8, Isaiah 55) foreshadow this very river — a supernatural stream that heals, nourishes, and revives everything it touches. High-authority sources such as Bible.org affirm that this is the unveiling of God’s eternal provision.

In a world where people hunger for meaning, security, wholeness, and peace, this river tells us:

Your thirst will not follow you into eternity. Your longing will not follow you into eternity. Your emptiness will not follow you into eternity.

Because in the presence of God, everything that was once incomplete becomes whole.

This River flows not from the ground, not from rain, not from nature — but from the throne.

Meaning: Life no longer comes from creation. Life flows directly from God Himself.

He is the source. He always was. He always will be.

---

2. The Tree of Life — Eden Restored and Humanity Healed

“On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” (Revelation 22:2)

Here we see something extraordinary: the Tree of Life returns.

This tree, first seen in Genesis, vanished from human reach when Eden was closed. Now God restores it — not to one garden, not to one nation, not to one tribe — but to all of redeemed humanity.

High-authority commentaries like Precept Austin and Cambridge Bible Notes explain that:

• Twelve fruits symbolize completeness and abundance.
• Fruit every month means provision without seasons of lack.
• Healing of the nations signifies the end of every form of division.

Think of history — wars, injustices, bitterness, bloodshed, prejudice, betrayal, hatred, wounds that span centuries.

This verse promises what human effort, politics, treaties, revolutions, governments, reforms, or ideologies could never accomplish:

God Himself will heal the nations. God Himself will unite humanity. God Himself will remove the scars of history.

This is not symbolic healing. It is literal, sweeping, global, eternal restoration.

Every cultural wound. Every ethnic wound. Every national wound. Every generational wound. Every spiritual wound.

All healed in the presence of God.

Humanity will finally be one family — the family God intended from the beginning.

---

3. “No More Curse” — The Breaking of What Broke Us

The next line may be the most liberating in Scripture:

“No longer will there be any curse.” (Revelation 22:3)

This is not poetry. This is the reversal of the greatest tragedy in human existence — the curse of Genesis 3.

According to high-authority sources such as Bible Hub, this includes the end of:

• Death
• Pain
• Sickness
• Sin
• Decay
• Division
• Brokenness
• Spiritual warfare
• Fear
• Anxiety
• Shame
• Painful work
• Futility
• Distance from God

Everything that has ever tormented humanity — Everything that has ever battered your soul — Everything that has ever plagued your mind —

dies in Revelation 22.

This is God’s final declaration over the universe: “The curse is finished.”

The Lamb didn’t die to partially redeem humanity. He died to fully redeem humanity.

---

4. “They Will See His Face” — The Promise of Intimacy Fulfilled

The next phrase is almost too glorious to imagine:

“They will see His face.” (Revelation 22:4)

Throughout Scripture, seeing God’s face was impossible — a death sentence. Even Moses saw only God’s back (Exodus 33). Humanity has always longed to see God, yet holiness made it impossible.

But now— in a redeemed world, with redeemed bodies, under a redeemed covenant— we will behold Him directly.

Scholars note this is the ultimate fulfillment of Jesus’ words:

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

This moment is the culmination of every prayer, every tear, every longing. God becomes not only Savior, not only Redeemer, not only King — but Father, Friend, and Companion.

This is the deepest human need fulfilled. This is the greatest human longing satisfied. This is the meaning of eternal life: To be with Him. Fully. Forever. Without barriers.

---

5. The Light of God — No More Night, No More Shadows

“There will be no more night… for the Lord God will give them light.” (Revelation 22:5)

Night has always symbolized fear, danger, uncertainty, loneliness, and vulnerability.

But in God’s restored world, there are:

• no shadows
• no darkness
• no fear
• no confusion
• no spiritual blindness
• no deception
• no evil

High-authority biblical sources explain that “God Himself becomes the atmosphere we live in.” Light is not something He turns on — it is who He is.

In eternity, we will finally understand life the way God sees it. We will live in clarity, not confusion; in peace, not unease; in revelation, not uncertainty.

We will never again wonder:

• What is God doing?
• Why is this happening?
• Am I alone?
• Is there danger?
• Is something hiding in the dark?

The darkness of life will be swallowed by the brightness of His presence.

---

6. The Eternal Invitation — God Wants You There

Revelation 22 ends with the greatest invitation in the history of the universe:

“The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come!’ And let the one who hears say, ‘Come!’ Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life.” (Revelation 22:17)

This is God shouting into the brokenness of our world:

Come home. Come receive life. Come join My family. Come step into forever.

This is not an exclusive invitation. This is not reserved for the elite. This is not earned. This is not bought. This is not deserved.

It is given.

“Let the one who is thirsty come.”

If your soul has ever felt tired… If your heart has ever felt empty… If your spirit has ever felt thirsty…

Then this invitation is for you.

Not when you’re perfect. Not when you’re polished. Not when you’re righteous. Not when you’re whole.

But now. Just as you are.

High-authority commentaries such as Working Preacher call this “the most inclusive and compassionate invitation in Scripture.”

God wants you in His future. God wants you in His family. God wants you in His eternity.

---

7. The Warning — The Word of God Is Not a Toy

Revelation 22 also includes a sobering warning:

“If anyone adds to these things… If anyone takes away…” (Revelation 22:18–19)

Why such a stern declaration?

Because this is the final revelation of God. This is the final word. This is the final blueprint for eternity.

High-integrity biblical scholarship makes it clear:

The warning is not about honest interpretation. The warning is about intentional corruption.

God protects His Word because His Word protects His people.

The promise stands: God’s Word will not be twisted, diminished, or destroyed.

---

8. The Final Promise of Scripture — “I Am Coming Soon”

Revelation ends with the last words Jesus ever spoke in the Bible:

“Yes, I am coming soon.” (Revelation 22:20)

This is not threat. This is not fear. This is not doom.

This is hope. This is rescue. This is triumph. This is fulfillment.

Jesus is not returning to take something from us — He is returning to complete something for us.

The broken world will be healed. The suffering world will be restored. The grieving world will be comforted. The wounded world will be renewed. The dying world will be brought to life.

This is the hope Christians have lived, died, prayed, sung, and stood upon for two millennia.

And every heartbeat brings the promise one moment closer.

---

9. Living Today in Light of Revelation 22

If this is our future… If this is what waits for us… If this is the world God is preparing…

Then how should we live now?

1. Live with Courage

Fear loses its power when you know how the story ends.

2. Live with Hope

No pain you carry is permanent. No battle you face is final. No sorrow you hold is eternal.

3. Live with Purpose

Your life is not an accident. Your days have meaning. Your work has value. Your suffering is not wasted.

4. Live with Urgency

If eternity is real, then everything matters — how we love, forgive, serve, and live.

5. Live as a Foretaste of Heaven

Bring healing. Bring peace. Bring grace. Bring unity. Bring hope.

Live now according to who you will be then.

---

10. The Legacy of Revelation 22 — A Message for All Generations

Revelation 22 has endured for centuries because it speaks to the universal human longing:

• the longing for healing
• the longing for peace
• the longing for unity
• the longing for justice
• the longing for home
• the longing for God

It is the promise that the world as we know it is not the world as it will always be.

This chapter is the inheritance of every believer and the legacy God leaves to humanity — a promise of forever.

High-authority Bible scholars note that Revelation 22 serves as the “final bow” tied around the entire biblical narrative, confirming that:

• God wins.
• Good triumphs.
• Evil ends.
• Light prevails.
• Heaven comes.
• God dwells with us forever.

And the final prayer of Scripture becomes our own:

“Come, Lord Jesus.”

---

Written with reverence, hope, and gratitude —

Douglas Vandergraph

** Douglas Vandergraph’s inspiring faith-based videos on YouTube**

If this article uplifted you, consider supporting the mission through Buy Me a Coffee.

---

#Revelation22 #RiverOfLife #TreeOfLife #NewJerusalem #EndTimesHope #JesusIsComing #BibleStudy #ChristianInspiration #FaithLegacy #EternalLife #HeavenIsReal