Articles Archive

We’re looking back with a golden haze this week on A Symposium of Popular Songs, listening to songs about nostalgia (and its high-class cousin, antiquarian feeling). Send your song suggestions…

If you think an algorithmic function can have a moral character, I’m not sure you’ll have a productive conversation about aligning AI with human goods.

There is no substitute for long-term volunteer commitments.

My real fear is not so much that the Internet makes us bad readers, but that it makes us bad writers.

What will it take to sustain the remnants of a contemporary republic of letters on the margins of a public square blasted by machine-speak?

Hope remains, and it is the hope of the incarnation, which the Archbishop describes as the “technology of Catholicism.”

This week on A Symposium of Popular Songs, we’re listening to songs about success—its joys, its sorrows, and its dangers. Send your song recommendations to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com!

Maybe my reading taste buds are dull. Maybe I’m in a lazy slump. Do I need more books? More appealing choices? Am I even asking the right question?

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn expresses gratitude for Wendell Berry’s latest novel and his faithful voice speaking truth over many decades.

A healing vision for America, Orr suggests in his writings, is one faithful to the great nearby, to the gospel of the local.

Maybe we ought to use our being and thinking not to decide what our lives should be “for” or “against,” but rather what we would like our lives to define.

Altman, while acknowledging that people can and have parented before AI, stated that he cannot imagine parenting without it.

What is the ideal that we sometimes glimpse within the world and which thus inspires our own attempts at order-making, at meaning-making?

Boy, I had very little idea what I wanted to say about sincerity when I started recording, so you’ll hear me sincerely try to figure it out as we listen…

McCarthy, a little before the rest of us, had caught a glimpse of Western Civilization’s end.

This excerpt from Christopher Beha’s new book draws on John Stuart Mill to probe the flaw at the heart of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s technocratic vision of liberalism.

For humility, there is nothing like gardening.

Emerging tools have to justify themselves to us more than we have to justify ourselves to emerging tools.

Land is only going to become more expensive and thus ever more unaffordable and inaccessible for the agrarians of the future.

The 1890s gave rise to the journalistic trope, if it bleeds, it leads. And news has never been the same since.

A friend of mine recently asked me for a Spotify playlist of alternative rock—but I don’t use Spotify, so I decided to make the playlist here. This week on A…

However strained, the bonds of affection must not be broken.

It’s been a rough week for those committed to Wendell Berry’s Terrapin Theory of Technology.

If desecration is the pervasive problem our day, then nothing less than consecration is the answer.