Tag: technology
Two Cheers for E-Bikes
Automobiles shield you from the outside world, its sounds, its colors. But on my bike, I encounter my environment directly.
The Final Word was Right
If there ever comes a true accounting of the costs we’re racking up for making, using, and discarding our mobile (de)vices, we will be obliged to admit that there has been no net gain. The withdrawals from the account exceed the deposits in both number and in sum.
Large Language Models and the Final Paragraph
Like the sonnet, the five-paragraph essay traps investment in truth felt in the heart and forged in the mind by means of its life-respecting limitations.
Steel-Manning the Amish: The Wisdom of Communal Discernment
What the Amish understand perhaps more than we do is the necessity of maintaining and protecting domains of embodied human agency in our lives.
Twenty-Six Theses on Textual Technologies
Language is primarily a relational (rather than a representational) technology. Words articulate our relationships to God, other humans, our environment, and even ourselves.
On Not Losing Our Minds to Technology
A machine can read books out loud to the baby. A machine can rock the baby to sleep. Smart devices and apps can do these and many other things. But they can do none of them in love.
Seeing the Stars: A Review of The Anxious Generation
If the sky clears above us, we won’t suddenly find ourselves saints. But at least, perhaps, we’ll be able to see the stars.
How to Have a Baby in the Apocalypse
It’s ironic that this whole Impossible Question — whether to have children in this age of climate change — springs from the same mentality underpinning the forces tearing the world apart, the idea that humans are in charge.
I Can Hear Music
As C.S. Lewis noted in The Abolition of Man, the souls of our youth are not jungles that need pruning but deserts that need irrigation. We could start by getting them to hear music.