“AI and All Its Splendors.” I continue my mulling on AI and its underlying temptations in this lengthy essay for Christianity Today. I aim to craft a book proposal this summer that gathers together and brings some order to the various responses to AI I’ve been thinking about in recent years: “An encounter with God and his kingdom is necessarily slow and inefficient. The means of the Incarnation are its ends, and divine presence can’t be automated any more than human presence can be. Jesus must heal person by person, touch by touch.”
“What Satan’s Biographer Can Teach Us About Tyranny and Resistance.” Ed Simon reviews what sounds like a fascinating new book on the reception of Paradise Lost: “Orlando Reade’s enlightening and enthusiastic new book, What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost, resurfaces James’s work to make the point that, in the Luciferian figure of Ahab, Herman Melville had foreseen the “rise of a personality who, in championing American values, would lead America astray.” Melville was an adept reader, and Ahab can be traced directly back to the subject of Reade’s study, John Milton and his rendering of Satan in the 17th-century epic Paradise Lost.”
“Wendell Berry’s New Decade of Sabbath Poems.” Shirley Kilpatrick meditates on Berry’s new collection of Sabbath poems: “The lowdown man sits in his room and looks out the window, watching for signs that reveal the passings of this passing place. He is a poet of the lands the river slowly carries away. He knows people see him as a poet of a backwater. Perhaps he is that; but he is also a tree rooted in the dark earth the river gnaws. He depends on this dark earth for life; indeed, he is a lowman of the deepest depths, but all the while he aspires upward, seeking the light on which he also depends.”
“Girlatee: Acclaimed Poet A. M. Juster’s First Book for Children.” Alfred Nicol, and his five-year-old granddaughter, reviews A.M. Juster’s new book: “The look on my five-year-old granddaughter’s face when Girlatee was reunited with her family was one of sheer joy—not mere relief. When we got to ‘The End,’ she asked, ‘Are there any more stories?’”
“A Linkless Internet.” Collin Jennings traces the philosophy of mind behind internet links and considers what might be lost by a media ecosystem that relies on AI bots: “The work of making connections both among websites and in a person’s own thinking is what AI chatbots are designed to replace. Most discussions of AI are concerned with how soon an AI model will achieve ‘artificial general intelligence’ or at what point AI entities will be able to dictate their own tasks and make their own choices. But a more basic and immediate question is: what pattern of activity do AI platforms currently produce?”
“Irving Babbitt and Populism.” Michael Federici revisits Irving Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership on its 100th anniversary and draws wise lessons from Babbitt’s understanding of human nature and politics: “Babbitt’s theory of democracy is derived from a philosophy of moral realism that is at odds with radical forms of democracy such as populism. His argument for aristocratic democracy reminds us that the American constitutional system depends for its success on the presence of imaginative leaders who are attuned to the inner life and who possess a quality of character that prepares them to exercise the responsibilities of constitutional politics.”
“Haunted by Home.” James Chappel reviews a new biography of Auden that focuses on the youthful Auden’s relationship to his homeland: “Jenkins’s new book, The Island, emerges from a thought experiment. What if Auden had died on the cusp of exile? If, say, his first airplane flight, to Denmark in 1935, had crashed into the sea? Auden would still be remembered. He was, after all, an astonishingly prolific poet, already well known in Europe and America. But he would not be known as a poet of anxious urbanity, and certainly not as a Christian, or even as a leftist. Instead, he would be defined, as many young people are, by the land of his parents and ancestors. The young Auden was, first and foremost, an Englishman, haunted by England’s tortured landscape and its war-battered population.” (Recommended by Jason Peters.)
“Where the Magic Doesn’t Happen.” Andy Crouch details why technological devices are particularly pernicious in life’s formative stages and experiences (I would just question the bright line he seems to draw between formative places like home, school, and church, and other places: every place and act is formative): “But there are some places, and some times, where we should absolutely resist the magic of technology, and where, if it has managed to insinuate itself, we should move as quickly as possible to limit it. Because there is one thing magic is absolutely terrible for, and that is the formation of healthy, thriving human beings—or to use a better and deeper word, the formation of persons at their best. The reason magic is so bad at, and so bad for, the formation of persons is simple. Persons are not formed instantly, and persons are not formed effortlessly. And persons do have to be formed.”
“Technology for the American Family.” Jon Askonas and Michael Toscano lay out some principles to guide technological development so that it might bolster family life rather than attenuate it: “Today, advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, energy, aerospace, and the like are on the cusp of unleashing changes at least as unsettling as those of the past 150 years. If conservatives wish to restore the family as the foundation of our civilizational order, they must develop a comprehensive theory of technological change. Without a coherent set of principles and policy prescriptions on the subject, new technologies will continue to heap disaster on the American family. But if properly guided, such innovations can help uplift the family and usher it into a new era of flourishing.” (Recommended by Adam Smith.)
“How the DOGE Could Succeed.” Yuval Levin outlines the approach that DOGE would have to take to effect any substantive, lasting change: “The question reformers must ask can’t be, ‘What will arise if we blow up this system?’ It must be more like, ‘How could we run this system differently and better?’ Asking that question requires acknowledging that running things, not just breaking things, is the challenge you face.”
“5 Things Every Creative Person Should Consider (Inspired By Wendell Berry).” Musician Joshua Heath Scott records an effusive appreciation of Wendell Berry on his YouTube channel. (Recommended by Josh Kearns.)
