“Against Syncretism, For Christians Building Like Christians.” Jake Meador provides a good summary of and response to Paul Kingsnorth’s recent lecture: “Bucer’s measure of judging a Christian society was not its technological advancement, its political power, or its wealth; his measure was to what degree the poor were cared for (he held that any society that tolerated levels of poverty which forced people to beg could not possibly regard itself as Christian) and whether or not the vocations that members of that society pursued were conducive to love of neighbor.”
“All the Saints, and the Ones They Leave Behind.” Logan Hoffman considers All Saints Day in light of Eugene Vodolazkin’s brilliant novel: “The truth evoked by Vodolazkin in Laurus, however, is that eternity is not simply history extended out to the distant horizon. ‘Eternity’ denotes a fundamentally different relationship to time than that which we experience in the present.”
“Seeing AI, Seeing Ourselves.” I review on Shannon Vallor’s AI Mirror and try to take stock of what she does well while also identifying the ways her book falls short of the kind of analysis it calls for: “I’m still waiting for this pre-technical book on AI, one that articulates a theological anthropology, distinguishes clearly between technologies that erode our relationships and those that sustain them, and helps readers imagine how to live well as humans in a world shaped by digital replicas of human intelligence.”
“A Patron Saint for Migrants in the Rural Midwest.” Nathan Beacom looks to an Italian immigrant who served as the leader of Catholic Rural Life as a guide for navigating today’s immigration debates: “I don’t know which policies will best care for rural people and migrants alike, and I do not mean to comment on any specific border policy. Rural America is facing economic and technological trends that are leaving a great deal of suffering in their wake. In some ways, migration is helping these problems, but in some ways, in some places, it makes them more difficult. We have to look toward these places, their old residents and new arrivals alike, with sympathetic eyes first. Monsignor Ligutti can be a kind of patron saint for these issues.”
“A Lion in Phnom Penh.” J. Daniel Sims draws on his experience in Cambodia as he wrestles with complicity and the difficulties of doing good work in profoundly broken systems: “Love cannot exist in philosophical abstractions or contractual arrangements. It cannot exist in powerful institutions or other macro forms of social organization. Rather, love is personal and particular. Love looks like longevity and commitment, and a willingness to sacrifice our desires for the good of another.”
“Don’t Be a Tool.” Jon Schaff reviews my book Words for Conviviality: “Bilbro uses this nineteenth-century story to remind us that our concerns over information technology are not new. Earlier generations had their techno-optimists and -pessimists too. Some still dream that technology will create community, spread knowledge, and be the foundation for a better informed democracy. Similarly, both today and in the past, there are those who fear that faster access to information only makes us more manipulable, empowering the confidence men of each age with new tools for spreading misinformation.”
“Auden’s Island.” Alan Jacobs reviews Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island, which argues Auden’s early life and work was rooted in an effort to make sense of Englishness: “Thanks to the power of backshadowing, we who know about Auden’s departure from England, his return to Christianity, his localism and cosmopolitanism, may well feel that, equipped with that knowledge, we can look at his early career and see all the ways it pointed to his later one. But if we deprive ourselves of that knowledge and look at the first decade of Auden’s career with unprejudiced eyes, what do we see? Jenkins believes that we see a poet whose entire conception of his calling is bound up with his Englishness, with the history and destiny of his native island.”
“What We Just Went Through Wasn’t an Election. It Was a Hostage Situation.” Tyler Austin Harper responds to the recent presidential election by urging both political parties to stop posturing about the existential evils of the other side and actually put forward substantive policies that address real needs: “If we are ever to exit the emergency spiral we are trapped in — in which Republicans and Democrats accuse each other of Book of Revelation horrors while each shoehorns policies that cater only to their respective elites — then we need to be willing to demand better.”
“The Absurdity of Trying to Capture Childhood on Your Phone.” Bonnie Nichols Scott describes the reductive tendencies of capturing the joys of children with photos: “With each picture, a parent expresses a desire to capture and remember everything perfectly – to hold a moment in time which, even as we click the button, slips immediately from our fingers. Beneath this action, I think, lies a longing to honor a time of life that we feel and know to be uniquely precious. In all our business of pickling and preservation, we are laying flowers at the feet of moments of unutterable beauty, attempting to capture something true.”
“Why We Need Gardeners.” Brian Lee Crowley draws a helpful contrast between those who imagine themselves as social engineers and those who aspire to be political and cultural gardeners: “Those who think of society more as a garden than a machine might be called ‘gardeners.’ They see humans as autonomous beings whose choices and actions allow the unfurling of their character over time, not as dials to be twiddled. For gardeners, therefore, grown institutions are, on the whole, more effective and held in higher esteem than invented ones. Gardeners in nature are mindful of the fact that while they certainly wish to put their stamp on their garden, they are very far indeed from being in total control. They are only one participant among many, not master of all the others. They must make their peace with the effects of predators, of climate, of weather, of soil, of nutrients, and of the life cycle and characteristics of the plants they seek to cultivate. Gardeners know that they can create the conditions in which a garden will flourish, but they cannot overmaster the natural processes on which they depend; you cannot make flowers grow faster by pulling on them.”
