Podcast stories, like reading, have the advantage of engaging the audience’s imagination. And lest the technophobes among us decry the dominance of gadgets, rather than the gadgetry taking us into a brave new world, the technology is actually allowing us to participate in a much older form of literature: storytelling… Some time ago, on these [...]
Contrary to popular belief, the more violent Leftists are not fanatics drawn to an extremist ideology who see themselves as its foot soldiers. They are souls full of emptiness, inhabiting a world of chaos and darkness. More often than not, they will end their lives with nihilistic fury and flourish… The rash of violence leading [...]
For the twenty-first-century disciple of Darwin, man—though he possesses no essential, intrinsic worth that separates him from his chimpanzee cousins—has proven himself a most effective destroyer of that very mother nature who evolved him into his present form... The Third Chimpanzee, by Jared Diamond (432 pages, Harper Perennial, 2006) Of the three founding fathers of [...]
To pursue The Quieter Life requires overcoming our fear of missing out, our fear that, if we let our foot off the gas and slow down, we will miss the next opportunity, the next big thing… Overload, the feeling that too much is coming at you, may be the quintessential emotional experience of modern life. [...]
The week after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress. He gave in many respects an eloquent and well-crafted speech. It set down with considerable skill the meaning of the attacks and reasons to launch the war on terrorism. Nonetheless, the President made few references [...]
To know what I was like as a teenager in the eighties, you should know this: at a time when most boys’ heroes were sports figures, mine was an antisocial weirdo who had been dead for 125 years. I first encountered Henry David Thoreau when Mrs. Meyer, my eighth-grade English teacher, assigned us his essay [...]
As one reads What Are People For?, an important underlying and unifying theme—the struggle to avoid abstraction—emerges, a theme which reveals perhaps Wendell Berry’s greatest concern about modern life... What Are People For? by Wendell Berry (224 pages, North Point Press, 1990) “We should love life,” Dostoyevski once said, “more than the idea of life.” It is [...]
Although modernity contains other and contrasting elements, it may be permissible to call the new type of person simply “modern man.” His demeanor is very different from that of premodern man. Far from discounting the opportunities of a worldly existence, this person entertains great expectations… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers [...]
What is the connection between time and eternity? Twitter and scripture? How can we use human language to speak of divine things? It’s complicated, so it’s not surprising we sometimes get it wrong. Gaudium et Spes, a document of the Second Vatican Council, says the Church should read the signs of the times, so that “in [...]
Poetry will not improve our students’ job prospects or make them better office workers, but it is more important now than ever to teach poetry because it offers a unique antidote to the superficiality that dominates American culture. Poetry calls us back to tradition and calls us out of the shallows into the deeper water [...]
Friedrich Nietzsche sought to change the world, and there is significant evidence that the existentialist philosopher succeeded. Many of the contemporary world’s assumptions regarding the primacy of individualism and the disavowal of universals were exposited by Nietzsche.[1] Yet, one of this thinker’s most important revolutions lay in his complete redefinition of philosophy. The dominant ideas [...]
Robin Sloan attempts to show the ways in which technology can improve upon our old and outdated modes of reading. But his novel, Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore, demonstrates that though Mr. Sloan knows technology, he misunderstands books and bookstores… Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan (288 pages, Picador, 2013) In the wake of [...]
Those who treat the past with contempt, refusing to learn its lessons and worshipping the imaginary machine of “progress,” will be the tools of tyranny today as they have been the tools of tyranny in the past. They are not only on the wrong side of history, they are on the wrong side of humanity… [...]
The adversaries of Modernity were raising their voices some forty years ago in Switzerland, France, Australia, and other countries; the journal Modern Age was intended to become, in considerable part, an American protest against the illusions of Modernity; and so it has remained… It was not without irony, thirty years ago, that I clapped the name [...]