I’ll be logging off the internet for a few weeks and thus pausing these Water Dippers. I aim to resume them in early August. “What Pope Francis and Ivan Illich Prioritize in Common: Anti-clericialism, the Global South and the Cry of the Poor.” Elias Crim surveys the growing inter … | Continue reading
AI promises free cheese, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. Although we often boast about AI’s ability to create, we should instead focus the conversation on the kind of society AI produces. | Continue reading
Perhaps Pippin is right, but none of the friends call Fredegar Fatty anymore, and those chaps know something about heroics. | Continue reading
Here, on a little patch of field in a North Texas suburb, I found life being played out in simple but significant ways. | Continue reading
Wallie is gone; no visible scar remains. Mourning provides no lesson, no answers, no closure. The poet is not decrying grief for its lack of utility. | Continue reading
“Ideas and Historical Consequences.” Mars Hill Audio released the full version of an old interview with John Lucaks. FPR readers can up for a free FPR affiliate membership at Mars Hill Audio. “Dreamers and Plagiarists.” Jacob Howland draws on Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz and Fyodo … | Continue reading
In this way, “idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; quite the contrary, it is a truly divine way of life so long as one is not bored.” | Continue reading
Her heart is for those little ones, that they might come to know The One who became a child for our salvation and for the glory of God. | Continue reading
And this progression from the raw, unabated natural Florida to the ever-more artificial Florida, has grave consequences for both the geographical locale and the people who inhabit it. | Continue reading
God is perverted in our minds from a giver into an imminent enemy. He becomes the all-knowing one who alone reads our hearts’ desires and who alone, in His power, can prevent their satisfaction. | Continue reading
This driving principle of love and human flourishing, rooted in the Christian understanding of humanity being made in the image of God, has spurred the great social and political reform movements in American history like abolitionism and civil rights. | Continue reading
“Computers Can’t Do Math.” David Schaengold has a clear and provocative essay on the differences between computer “thinking” and human thinking: “we can be sure there are world states beyond the comprehension of any AI. And I suspect those world states will not necessarily be one … | Continue reading
Men often reflect on their relationship with their fathers during these coincidences of milestones; a similar thing often happens when a son reaches the age his father was when the son was born. | Continue reading
The healthy sorrow of our most melancholy president | Continue reading
As is clear to see, Business Insider's portrayal of 3D printing as a panacea for America's housing crisis falls short upon closer examination. | Continue reading
Only in Israel, I think in retrospect, would twelve-year-olds be this intimately familiar with the history of the Holocaust, the violence and suffering of oppression in the Warsaw Ghetto, and the horrifying events of the uprising and the final destruction of the ghetto. | Continue reading
Do we love the soil and the creatures put in our stead, or do we prefer the images our devices project at us? While the choice is not always so cut and dry, Mannon’s book can help us begin to retool our imaginations and ennoble common labor again. | Continue reading
“The Cultural Roots of Our Demographic Ennui.” Patrick Brown argues that affluence—what regular FPR contributor John de Graaf labeled “affluenza”—lies behind many of our cultural ills: “A world of creature comforts is not one that demands sacrifice. And with greater wealth comes … | Continue reading
Eloquent and nuanced, never pompous, The Rector’s Daughter sets before us the inexhaustible mystery of persons and the ways they manage to live together. | Continue reading
Rather than empowering us to live in humble confidence in relationship with others and our maker, AI offers us a choice similar to that which confronted Esau. | Continue reading
Rosen contends that we have lost touch with a classical understanding of happiness, in part because of a shift of cultural emphasis from “being good to feeling good.” Fortunately, social and behavioral psycho | Continue reading
We’re not crazy — and we’re not alone | Continue reading
“DIY.” Bud Smith details the joys of fixing anything that’s broken with the help of the Internet: “YouTube has all the right answers and all the wrong answers. All you have to do is scroll down and look for the worst one. The one with the worst sound and video quality has the bes … | Continue reading
How has your intellectual practice prepared you not just for success but also for failure? | Continue reading
Kennard himself, though worrying about his legacy during his last illness, seemed remarkably free of bitterness. Concerning a prison guard who had abused him, he thought that the abuse had harmed the guard more than himself. | Continue reading
“They see us as deeply lonely people,” Barry told Fred, “and one of the reasons we’re lonely is that we’ve cut ourselves off from the nonhuman world and have called this ‘progress.’” Maturity in Christ is not escape but presence. | Continue reading
And so the shotgun sits in our home like a quiet benediction. It dreams—as I do—of long walks in the valleys of my youth and whispers of future pastures that are untrod and unspoiled. | Continue reading
“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 artificial intelligence, one that allows us to di … | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
Rational ideas create hell on earth. Just ask a kulak. Or just ask the lettuce plants in my garden. | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
“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 thinking. Twenty-three years a … | Continue reading
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, either! Andrew is a former fellow at Word on Fire, a co-founder of the Sp … | Continue reading
This talk was delivered earlier this year at a conference on wellbeing held at the Sorbonne. | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
As-Long-As-Your’re-Happy . . . Follow-Your-Heart . . . Be-True-To-Yourself . . . Believe-In-Yourself . . . Live-Your-Truth . . . Be-Your-Best-Self . . . Do-What-You-Love — the aphorisms of our day are elegant. They sound like beautiful advice. They’re certainly enticing. Who woul … | Continue reading
Seen through his most redemptive lens, Bjartur stands as a cautionary tale for those who would pursue independence as an end in itself. | Continue reading
In his brief and not altogether satisfying rejoinder to the question, “why write?” Berry says, “To serve that triumph I have done all the rest,” and he ends the poem there. “That triumph” is the triumph of the way of love, the life of silence. | Continue reading
“Our Draymond Green Problem.” Elizabeth Stice draws on Draymond Green and Hannah Arendt to consider what responsibilities we might have for our allies: “What we need then is not exactly less politics, it is more “civic virtue,” which will involve a kind of politics. We actually h … | Continue reading
Our mothers and our children will always be part of our lives, in life and death. Surprisingly, grief does not dominate our existence, it informs it. | Continue reading
In our daily lives, we need activities that aren’t driven by our left hemispheres. We need leisure (as understood by Josef Pieper). We need to waste time. We need to do nothing . . . a thing that rankles the left hemisphere’s productive disposition. | Continue reading
Let’s point to the wiser and the well off and ask people if they want what those people have–often they do. Many times, those people have a love for the liberal arts. | Continue reading
Arched doorways, private courtyards, personal craftsmanship, a sense of place, and almost everything else we love about buildings has been taken away by the modernist ethos intent on depriving the public of a choice, as architects are left unchecked to focus more on how their bui … | Continue reading
Longtime ghostwriter Nancy French tells her own tale in the Ghosted: An American Life. French was raised in rural Tennessee and would later provide the words behind famous talking heads but found her own enchanting voice amid political and personal tumult. Highlights 1:15 Mud pie … | Continue reading
Reading for the shape of a life can be medicinal, especially when we allow that life to diagnose and heal ourselves. And maybe then that understanding can encourage doctors of all kinds–but especially scholars of the humanities–to think differently about their life. | Continue reading
“Is Ethical Shopping Only for Hipsters?” Kate Lucky wrestles with ethical shopping, effective charity, and the upside down extravagance of the Kingdom of God: “We anticipate an abundant new earth, and pray for its arrival. Also, we accommodate the world we have now. I aim to give … | Continue reading