nature
Last Call at Descartes’ Bar and Grill
Washington, Connecticut. The urge, some might say mania with which our species has attempted to distance itself from Nature is a defining occupation and...
A Long, Long Row
“Hontar: We must work in the world, your eminence. The world is thus.
Altamirano: No, Señor Hontar. Thus have we made the world. Thus have...
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...
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...