“The Big AI Risk Not Enough People Are Seeing.” Tyler Austin Harper draws on Ivan Illich to distinguish between technologies that empower us and those that erode our human nature: “we need to adopt a more sophisticated approach to...
That’s the great cultural task now: to relearn this old language, to keep it from dying out, to nurture it and refine and expand it, to develop new idioms and accents. Holston’s book is part of that project.
Rational ideas create hell on earth. Just ask a kulak. Or just ask the lettuce plants in my garden.
Whether the experience goes beautifully or our best-laid plans go awry, hand cranking ice cream with a few dozen kids is a whole lot more powerful than dithering in paralyzing despair. As always, and as we so often forget, the light wins out.
A robin or chicken that seems to die in a totally senseless way is viewed by humans only in its individuality, without seeing the universal order underlying this suffering.
But there is something more going on. We also face a new “transcendent reality,” as Klass puts it, in which we see the spiritual world with new eyes. This may include changed views of the sacred, nature, and time itself.
“Hope for the Organization Kid.” Joshua Hochschild revisits David Brooks’ classic 2004 essay on college students and considers what’s changed in the two decades since: “I doubt that the keenest college students will embrace AI as another shortcut to...
Andrew Petiprin is co-author of a new book from Word on Fire called Popcorn With the Pope, which examines all the movies on the 1995 Vatican movie list. Did you know there was a 1995 Vatican movie list? Me,...
This talk was delivered earlier this year at a conference on wellbeing held at the Sorbonne.
Disagreements aside, however, Byung-Chul's argument remains a valuable one: the cultures of consumption that rule the modern world are death to the cultures of community that give life meaning.