My rather simple contention is that AI is essentially duplicitous. The duplicity is built into the thing, and cannot be any other way, regardless of how much I may remind myself that this is just a bunch of plastic, metal, and wires. When we use it, we cannot but attribute to it supra-human powers, and [...]
The problem of authority is not merely a political problem or even simply a problem of faith. It instead requires a gathering up of the whole of life, indeed the world in all of its rich multitude of aspects, in relation to its meaning-granting center. Anxious about trends he was witnessing in the ’60s and [...]
Sexual difference is a symbol of one’s relation to the world, the whole of reality, to all others (and even to oneself), and ultimately to God. Initially, it may seem that the answer to the question that forms the title of this brief reflection would depend on the way one chose to define the first [...]
What is needed in understanding childhood is a profound reflection on the nature of man, one that begins with the notion that being is a gift, and so one able to interpret the special qualities of the child—wonder, dependence, receptivity, naive assent, and so forth—as genuinely positive, even if they do not come as easily [...]
The classical tradition considered the hands the bodily expression of intelligence, and therefore understood work as a way of knowing the world. A program of education centered on mentorship in forms of human work is indispensable in this regard. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, by Matthew B. Crawford, (246 pages, [...]
Work is given to man principally as a gift, as a particular way to commune, so to speak, with God, by imitating his own absolute creativity, his perfect work. In an address to the “ministers of the world of culture,” given in 2008, Benedict XVI recalled the central role monasteries played in the development of Europe: [...]
When the law reckons with the matter of life, it inevitably reckons with its own foundation and its own essence. When we attempt to define life in law, in other words, we are necessarily, though implicitly, defining law in an analogous sense at the same time. The background assumption of my brief essay is that [...]
While preceding generations have simply taken liberalism for granted as the given context within which we make practical judgments about many other things, the current generation seems willing to raise astonishingly bold questions regarding liberalism itself. Is it the only possible way to think about politics? Is it the “best regime”? Essential questions are “untimely” [...]
The evident chaos of the contemporary “cancel culture”—which is coming to resemble something like a cyber version of The Terror in late 18th-century France during which the revolutionaries began cutting off even their own heads—is due to an abuse of language. There is a profound sort of cultural suicide occurring in this phenomenon. We are [...]
Christ assumed the whole of humanity in his assumption of the individual human nature received from and through his mother Mary. Politics is about the final end of human existence, and so politics has an essential relation to the Christian claim. The claim cannot be avoided; it can only be affirmed or denied. When thinking [...]