Category: Technology
Holographic Spurgeons and AI Sermons
At a fête for one of evangelicalism’s largest online media outfits, a colleague shared how he asked GPT-3, a language AI, what the Bible says about transgenderism. The AI produced a cogent theological explanation with Biblical citations. A senior editor...
Platforms Aren’t the Problem
In How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt explore how healthy democracies descend into authoritarianism. Counterintuitively, “Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box.” A nation elects a demagogic figure who uses executive power to take control of the...
The Great Unmooring
Richard Sennett. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: WW Norton, 2000. 176pp, $15.99. Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel. Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from...
Following Christ in the Machine Age: A Conversation with Paul Kingsnorth
How do we stay human in a technocratic age? How do we live rooted lives —spiritually and otherwise — in an unsettled time? How do we make sense of life in the modern world? English writer Paul Kingsnorth has been...
Living By Kairos Time in a Chronos World
Lewis Mumford wrote in his 1934 classic Technics and Civilization that “the clock, not the steam-engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age.” Due to the mechanical clock, “time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing.” Mumford explains...
When Should I Write? Brief Reflections on the Relationship Between Writing and Expertise
It was a Thursday afternoon; I was perched up in the corner of my favorite local coffee shop with a back-pack full of books that teetered somewhere between impressive and embarrassing. I was in the middle of what I refer...
Why People Don’t Leave Social Media
Social media makes us unhappy. Or, more precisely, social media increases unhappiness for many of us. I spend a lot of time interacting with University students, many of whom are becoming aware that their use of social media is bad...
Our Fugitive Senses and Sensibilities
Throughout the archaeological, biological, and literary records of homo sapiens emerges a common trait: the species best capable of lifting eyes and mind heavenward has not found this earth to be enough. However murkily understood, the great mounds of earth...
We All Have the Power of Caligula Now
The logic, spirit, and economy of contemporary pornography is a near-perfect reflection of society’s failure to provide us with the tools necessary to meet the Responsibilities of Self-Belonging. Pornography assumes that we are each our own and belong to ourselves....
What Is a Smartphone?: A Thomistic Analysis
You understand almost nothing about your smartphone. I can prove it by asking a simple question: what is a smartphone? I suspect you will find difficulty articulating a definition which avoids either tautology or obvious error. But another simple question...