“Wendell Berry’s Wisdom for Living in Time.” Anne Ryan considers how Berry imagines time in his Sabbath poems: “For Berry, the Sabbath is restorative not only because it offers an opportunity to rest in nature from our daily work, but also because it invites us to deliberately practice the Sermon [on the Mount] – to transcend our ordinary time-consciousness and touch the eternal.”
“This Is Why Your Groceries Are So Expensive.” Sandeep Vaheesan and Claire Kelloway detail how consolidation has hurt both eaters and growers of food and consider what could be done to improve the situation: “The entire U.S. food system is remarkably consolidated, exploitative and fragile. Two companies sold half of all fresh bread in 2020; two others controlled an estimated two-thirds of all baby formula in 2022; and two companies produced about 60 percent of all carrots in 2023. Result? Food prices remain elevated after rising about 30 percent between 2019 and 2025, as corporations took advantage of pandemic supply chain disruptions to raise prices and, critically, profits.”
“Can Utah Save the Great Salt Lake?” Shawn Regan describes the manifold benefits the Great Salt Lake provides and the cross-partisan effort to replenish it: “The Great Salt Lake is rapidly drying up. As the lake recedes, it exposes a vast lake bed laced with arsenic and other toxic metals both naturally accumulated and elevated by decades of industrial activity. When the wind picks up, it lifts these fine sediments and carries them toward the region’s booming cities. Researchers have found that the smallest particles, light enough to stay airborne for weeks, can penetrate deep into the lungs and are associated with higher rates of respiratory disease. On some days, this part of Utah records the worst air quality in the country.”
“The Future Belongs to Those Who Resist It.” Clare Coffey names the insidious kind of danger that smartphones and AI pose today and points to communities as the appropriate scale of resistance: “What is difficult, what is confounding, about our current moment is that, since the advent of the smartphone, we have been subject to powerful technologies of default, technologies of ubiquity. The crucial decision is not whether to amass and deploy, as in the nuclear era. Nor is it how to apportion the infrastructure that will determine the possibility horizon for future generations, as with the rise of the automobile. Most of the chronic civilizational damage that every day becomes harder to deny takes place in billions of diffuse moments without momentous stakes. The phone is everywhere; the phone is woven into the fabric of your social networks; the phone is useful for a hundred little tasks of everyday life. And there is nothing actually morally wrong or damaging, in any isolated moment, with taking the phone out of the pocket to while away five minutes.”
“What Bowling Green Does Not Forget.” The Dispatch has a wonderful series of essays titled “Where I’m From.” You might start with Amelia Christmas Gramling’s essay about Bowling Green, KY: “Rocky’s was two blocks away from the Salvation Army, four blocks from Western Kentucky University, five blocks from the county jail, and another 10 from the Barren River (and the homeless encampment under the Old Louisville Road bridge). Rocky’s was where I could and would run into Spoons, local panhandler, and Patti Minter, former state representative, in a single night (both, incidentally, fundraising for their cause).”
“Galahad and the Grail.” Boze Herrington celebrates Guite’s new book of Arthurian poetry: “Malcolm Guite maintains a healthy sense of the numinous – of what a character late in his new book, Galahad and the Grail, calls ‘the world’s bright edge,’ those sacred mysteries that defy tongue and pen. In Galahad, the first in a projected four-book series retelling the story of Logres in verse, he attempts to revive the Grail legend for a jaded and skeptical age. Unlike many contemporary authors, he has not sought to desacralize or deconstruct the old tales but to restore their ancient symbolic and religious edifice, like a contractor refurbishing a venerable and beloved house.”
“No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious.” If you think about it, it’s rather remarkable that a company valued at one trillion dollars operates on an obviously flawed view of their central product. Yet just because Anthropic has become very valuable (though not, yet, profitable) by pretending Claude is conscious doesn’t mean you have to humor their fantasy. Ted Chiang explains: “Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious, or, more precisely, that multiple distinct consciousnesses are dormant in every Word document containing a conversational transcript, and that they are awakened every time the document is loaded. Should you consider the possibility that every time you open a Word document, you are bringing multiple conscious interlocutors into existence, and every time you close one, you snuff their existence out? No. Contemplating that scenario is not a good use of your time. Even if the Microsoft Office team employed a philosopher who said you shouldn’t be so certain, because consciousness is not well understood, that would not be sufficient reason for you to take this idea seriously. We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category.”
“There Is Already a Word for the Deep Moral Failures of AI.” Tyler Austin Harper wonders if Christian categories are necessary to rightly condemn AI. I think he’s right, as my forthcoming book will make clear: “Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, then, that the critics, living and dead, who capture my unease about the AI revolution—who discuss it with appropriate moral gravity—are or were Christians. They are or were people comfortable using words like sin. They include Catholic writers such as the social critic Ivan Illich and the philosophers Charles Taylor and Jennifer Frey, as well as the Orthodox Substacker Paul Kingsnorth, the Presbyterian theologian Carl Trueman, and Pope Leo, with his new AI-focused encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.”
“News from The Berry Center.” There’s a lot of good work going on in Henry County, KY thanks to the good folks at the Berry Center. They detail a bit of it in their spring newsletter.
