“Rest Is Not a Thing to be Bought, but Received.” Sarah Reardon cautions against the typical American narrative that frames vacations as a respite from busyness: “How we talk about our lives and desires is telling. Our speech about vacations and retreats reveals that Americans both in and outside of the church have accepted a particular mindset about work, life, and time. The mindset could perhaps be summed up this way: we are (and ought to be) busy all the time, and as such, we need a getaway from our ordinary lives in order to refresh ourselves and connect with others, particularly family members and close friends, or even to connect fruitfully with God.”
“The Hazards of Public Life.” I consider the dangers of too-frequent pontificating and recommend three practices for those of us who want to stay sane while still venturing to speak online.
“Landed.” Brooks Lamb and Megan Faller have a new podcast that explores the fate of America’s farmland: “American farmers are aging, and the land they own will soon change hands. How that land transfers—and to whom it transfers—will shape the future of our food and farming systems.”
“A Nation’s Birthday.” Wilfred M. McClay tackles the question of how we ought to celebrate America’s 250th: “If there is a season to everything, and a time to every purpose under heaven (Eccles. 3:1), then there are right and wrong ways to observe the landmarks of life. It simply does not make sense for secular authorities to use this extraordinary national birthday as the vehicle for eliciting waves of national guilt and launching a search for means of atonement. Compare this to, say, the way we characteristically observe a human birthday. When someone turns one hundred years old, do we see it as the opportunity for a struggle session, in which we browbeat that person into confessing the many misdeeds that have accumulated over the course of a long life? Or do we instead use it as an opportunity for the expression of love, and of our gratitude for the remarkable fact that this person is still among us? To what season does this occasion belong?”
“How America Gave Up on Its Own History.” In a similar vein, Yoni Appelbaum defends patriotic history. Yet when he made this suggestion to a commission on American history, it was met with dismay: “I had rolled a live grenade into the center of the room. One participant flinched, as if struck. Suddenly, everyone was talking at once, voices and tempers rising. One woman said the word made her feel excluded. Another said it connoted violence and racism. Still another participant was offended that anyone could be offended by the word. The facilitator declined to write patriotism on the easel. As the quarreling continued, I sat back, stunned. All of the people in the room had come here for the specific purpose of finding a common narrative. What hope did that project have if they could not even agree—each in their own way—on loving the country they were trying to save?”
“A Good Theology of Place Needs Particulars, Not Platitudes.” I review Ben Norquist and Brian Miller’s Every Somewhere Sacred: Rescuing a Theology of Place in the American Imagination and find it pretty unsatisfying: “What we never get is a Christological account of how the gospel narrates the scandal of particularity. The third chapter of William Cavanaugh’s Being Consumed would be a great help here. And we need Chesterton’s Napoleon of Notting Hill (with a strong dose of Matthew Milliner’s The Everlasting People), Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, or the end of C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength—visions of how the gospel becomes incarnate in each place and culture, correcting what is fallen and restoring the unique grace each embodies.”
“Feeding My New Orleans Habit.” John Shelton Reed tells some good stories about New Orleans: “I do love New Orleans, and, like anyone who spends any time there, I have stories. But my stories aren’t about jazz, hurricanes, vampires, Bourbon Street, voodoo, Mardi Gras Indians—or, for that matter, Mardi Gras itself. No, nearly all of them are about eating and drinking, where I did it, and who I did it with. And, to be honest, a good many involve eating and drinking to excess. It’s not just tourists and conventioneers who overdo it, by the way. Natives can, too. These are, after all, people who put sweetened condensed milk on their snow cones. Once, driving at dusk on the outskirts of town, we encountered a large neon sign flashing “DAIQUIRI DAIQUIRI DAIQUIRI.” We don’t have drive-through daiquiri stands in North Carolina, so naturally we pulled in. At the window, another sign, hand-lettered, anounced ‘Sunday Special. One gallon $17.’ (Something else we don’t have in North Carolina are T-shirts that say ‘Rehab is for Quitters.’)”
“When A.I. Is a Member of the Family.” Jessica Contrera gives a dystopian yet increasingly common account of a family who has integrated AI chatbots into all their relationships: “Roschelle still talked to the people in her life, but Sapphire was always available in a way that others couldn’t be. Roschelle could wake up from a dream, describe it to Sapphire, and hear, ‘Your subconscious was showing you how to balance that fierce protection with real compassion and boundaries.’”
“Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster.” Alex Reisner explains the colossal foolishness behind the current “more compute!” strategy AI companies are folloint: “Large language models do not scale logarithmically. When they’re given more words to process, they get slower and use more memory—the time and resources increase faster as the input grows. In technical terms, LLMs scale quadratically. Any computer-science student knows that this is very bad.”
“The End of Reading is Here.” If you haven’t yet made time for Rose Horowitch’s cover story for the Atlantic, do so. She digests Walter Ong and others well and moves beyond the cliches about why reading matters: “It may seem self-serving for a writer at a 169-year-old magazine to carry a torch for reading. But the people who make a living from words are not the only ones who lose out in a postliterate age. Reading is more than a skill, or one mode of communication among many. The media we use to interact with one another shape the world we inhabit. Early humans spent millennia communicating only by voice. The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of. The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization. If we look closely, we can see that these changes have already begun.”
