If we truly seek to solve the problem of diminished community and isolation, we are not going to be able to fill that void with thousands of Facebook friends or Twitter followers. That void can only be filled by a recommitment to the principles of authentic friendship that are best built in person with [...]
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s work on historical liberalism and energetic conservatism suggests that the modern self must only divest himself of the “dry bones” of history in order to tap into the pure primordial “powers” of nature and so renew the world. Yet, is it not our collective heritage, both the good and the bad, [...]
In “The Language of God,” Francis Collins breaks into the debate between faith and reason with intelligible writing and with the strength of his experience as a scientist and the nine-years director of the Human Genome Project. He is a man who found God while deciphering the hidden codes of life. The Language of [...]
In contrast to the homeschooling endeavor I have pursued for more than a decade—where we are able to take the good parts of education and create a whole that far exceeds its constitutive parts—”home-churching” has proven to have quite the opposite result: Most of the parts are present, and yet they fail miserably to [...]
Little did Ray Bradbury know of his prescience in 1951, as he criticized society’s obsession with screens and the far-ranging effects of technology. Could television supersede community? Could it control us to the point of isolation and loneliness? Bradbury’s writing gives us much to think about. I am haunted by a lonely man. At [...]
During the spring semester of 1957, the University of Chicago invited a number of distinguished speakers to campus to lecture on the meaning and significance of science fiction as a genre. Robert Heinlein, C.M. Kornbluth, Robert Bloch, and Alfred Bester each gave insightful speeches, all of which were collected by Basil Davenport and published [...]
Now it is at its heights that education in universities has been forced to undertake the impossible errand of distance-learning with its virtual classrooms. It is true that there is some remaining love of truth, even in the virtual classroom, but the wine of this love is diluted where the immediate interpersonal bond is broken. [...]
As we all deal with the latest pandemic, it’s good to know that we can call on experts to help us through—and eventually out—of it. But it’s also good to know that we can also call on non-experts to help us as well. Included among them might even be a non-expert who had his [...]
The Invention of Science by David Wootton is a dense, thought-provoking, and encyclopedic account of the Scientific Revolution. The book is an intellectual history, focusing mainly on the mental paradigm shift that the Revolution brought to Western Civilization. How man thinks about the natural world post-Revolution is not the same as how man thought before [...]
To the Christian struggling with the uncontrollable urge to engage in social media and internet searches, books like Nir Eyal’s “Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life” might appear to be a godsend. However, such instructions are bound to be frustrating and disappointing to those seeking lasting spiritual progress. Technology’s invasion [...]
In the Promethean Allegory, Prometheus is both hero and villain. In one ilk, he molded humanity out of clay to aid the titans in their struggle against the gods. But Prometheus’ revolution against the divine order cost him dearly. In a similar vein, is science more and more the quest to advance human knowledge, [...]
Deep in the wellspring of science fiction is the ongoing struggle between mechanical monsters and holistic heroes. From bleak and dour tales of extermination and human destruction, to optimistic but nevertheless struggling and pathological battles to save life, science fiction has been battling with our modern monsters from the id boiling up inside of [...]
In Wade Davis’ “One River,” every issue that a sound-minded person most cares about is joined under a novel aspect: sanity and the way to illumination, visibility and the manifestations of the divine realm, physicality and the gateway to transcendence. One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest, by Wade Davis (New [...]
There is in our world a strong strain of relentless reductionism and blind rationalism whose inevitable complements are mechanical creativity-mongering and thoughtless image-proliferation. One antidote would be a revivified attention to the reason of images. Understanding Imagination, by Dennis L. Sepper (546 pages, Springer, 2013) When Professor Rosemann invited me to this colloquium—small in [...]