“Between Scylla & Charybdis—Literally.” Antonio Spadaro responds to plans to build a bridge across the Strait of Messina: “Every place has its own genius loci, and the Strait of Messina is not an absence but a fullness, dense with myth, literature, history, and memory. To reduce it to an infrastructural gap would be like claiming that The Odyssey is merely the diary of a boat trip. To treat the Strait like a problem to be solved by civil engineering is to imagine that a myth can be resolved by a calculation. The Strait demands to be properly seen and considered in its own right, long before it is crossed.” (Recommended by Christian Casper.)
“Wendell Berry’s Grief and Gratitude.” Russell Moore reviews Wendell Berry’s forthcoming novel: “Maybe the right response is to pray for Wendell Berry—not the old Wendell Berry in Henry County right now, but somehow the young Wendell Berry making the decision Andy Catlett once made: to root himself in a place where he could tell us these stories that require of us to be certain kinds of people, with certain kinds of things we must love and certain kinds of things we must do.”
“The Federal Farm Policy Trap: Why Some Farmers Are Stuck Raising Crops That No Longer Thrive.” Molly Parker, Julia Rendleman, and Lylee Gibbs detail a bureaucratic nightmare that keeps some farmers planting seeds in sand they know won’t grow crops: “While farmers have struggled to access funds to help them get off flood-prone land, federal programs to keep their crops in the ground have long been the safer bet. Over the past three decades, Illinois has received $35 billion in farm support — more than any state but Texas and Iowa — mostly through insurance subsidies and price supports for growing corn and soybeans. Some of that bounty is grown on flood-prone ground along the Mississippi and other river bottoms.”
“The Question All Colleges Should Ask Themselves About AI.” Tyler Austin Harper has a plan for any college wanting to stake out a distinctive identity: “They should commit to a ruthless de-teching not just of classrooms but of their entire institution. Get rid of Wi-Fi and return to Ethernet, which would allow schools greater control over where and when students use digital technologies. To that end, smartphones and laptops should also be banned on campus. If students want to type notes in class or papers in the library, they can use digital typewriters, which have word processing but nothing else. Work and research requiring students to use the internet or a computer can take place in designated labs. This lab-based computer work can and should include learning to use AI, a technology that is likely here to stay and about which ignorance represents neither wisdom nor virtue.”
“One Machine to Rule Them All.” Justin Ariel Bailey reviews Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: “The Machine might expand our menu of lifestyle options. Yet in embracing it, Kingsnorth argues, we unmake our humanity, losing our roots and plunging ourselves into a crisis of meaning. We have sought autonomy, but its price has been alienation—from the land, from each other, even from our own bodies. As Kingsnorth argues, proceeding along this path will destroy our planet, our cultures, and our homes, leaving us to gamble on new technologies to rescue us from the wreckage.”
“I Hate My Friend.” Boone Ashworth and Kylie Robison spend a couple of weeks trying out a new AI “friend”: “If the idea of a microphone-packed wearable that’s always listening to your conversations raises privacy concerns for you, just know that you’re not alone. If your experience is anything like ours, wearing the Friend will likely earn you the ire of everyone around you. Curiously, you might even end up being bullied by the chatbot itself.”
“Fantasy or Faith? One Company’s AI-generated Bible Content Stirs Controversy.” Geoff Brumfiel asked several people, including me, to weigh in on one company’s quest to animate the Bible with AI: “The medium matters, [Brad] East said. For Christians, the Bible is the word of God, and turning that word into short-form viral content robs it of its power. . . . Pray.com’s Ryan Beck said this isn’t AI slop. Care and time is put into each video. The images may be AI, but the voices are real actors, and the music is composed especially for each episode. A pastor reads the scripts, which often closely follow the biblical verses they describe. At the same time he said the content is meant as ‘edutainment.’”
“Charlie Kirk Embodied Mass-Culture Conservatism.” Ross Douthat responds to the assassination of Kirk and describes what made him so popular: “I was interested in talking to Kirk about stabilization — whether there can be a real center for conservatism as we move toward the last years of President Trump and whatever lies beyond; whether his particular persona, and especially his evolution from college bro to Christian dad, was modeling a more fundamentally normal future for the right than some of the later-Trump-era alternatives. Now I won’t be asking him those questions, and he won’t be helping to answer them. God be with his wife and children, God be with our country, and may he rest in peace.”
“Gifts Given, Gifts Received.” Elizabeth Stice reviews Stephen Starring Grant’s book about his experience as a rural mailman: “In terms of topics and themes, the book has it all: a white-collar guy forced into a blue-collar job; a regular civilian becoming a public servant and representing the government at a time when people are skeptical of the government; and the emotional quest to feel at home in one’s own hometown. It is also a book about spiritual disorientation and how one man got himself reoriented while delivering rural mail.”
“The Priesthood of All Chatbots?” Zac Koons asks what jobs the church should not turn over to AI: “I’m sure we can find good uses for AI in our churches. What I want to explore is the extent to which our humanity is theologically inextricable from the various tasks and vocations of the church and of individual Christians. Which things do we need to fight to hold onto ourselves? Which can we, with clear consciences, hand over to the robots, for the good of the church and our overbooked calendars? And what filter ought we to use in trying to tell the difference?”
