Tag: nature

Of Games, Gadgets, and God

Coeur d'Alene, ID. One evening our family and two cousins were playing Uno. It’s a simple game requiring nothing more than a deck of...

Descartes, Algebra, and Alienation

Democratizing eighth-grade algebra promotes social justice. (Brookings Institution) Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization. Complete analogy. (Simone Weil) Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. ...

Brave New World Reconsidered: A Tale of Two Gnosticisms

Many who are alarmed at the prospect of the “abolition of man” have found in Huxley’s Brave New World a dark and salutary warning...

Against the Environment

Alexandria, VA The other night I happened to catch the second half of an ABC special program, "Earth 2100."  The program was a "speculative...

Science and the Spirit in an Age of Hostile Presumption

Washington, CT. Winter was a hard-nosed professional this season just past. It sunk its icy teeth in long and hard and mocked us with...

Why we do not own a Television

April was "Media Awareness Month" at our sons' school. I took a couple weeks off from the Porch, and I also published a...

The Wise Old Œconomist

Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. Before it became a science of supply and demand and the circulation of commodities, economics was originally understood as the...

Crunchy Pope, Part Two: Against Gnostic Economics

The obscuring of the faith in creation is a fundamental part of what constitutes modernity. As I survey all the perplexing shifts in the spiritual...

The (“Post-“) Modern Cave: An Allegory of the University

Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. Imagine human beings brought up from childhood in a cave, bound fast with their heads all facing one direction. On...

What the Fork; Or, Why You Should Not Eat the Person...

  Alexandria, VA . The causes of the current economic collapse have been widely discussed and minutely explored.  However, to date I do not believe...