Public screens and background music are a form of theft. They are a way of enclosing common spaces. They ordain a mood and mandate a climate, which would not be so bad, if making a climate was not a particular (and wonderful) power of each and every man. My wife and I have a wonderful [...]
The Vatican has issued an official document on AI. The Church is willing, in the face of an aggressively rising transhumanistic tide, to state the obvious: machines do not—and cannot—do what humans do or be who humans are. There are many—myself included—who are tempted to give a knee-jerk reaction, one that goes something like this: [...]
To the 21st-century reader, the suggestion that cinema is a destructive and corrosive force will likely appear absurd. To attentive cultural critics of the early 20th century, however, it was all but self-evident. You’ve heard it before, certainly: The screens are killing us. They play to our basest passions and appetites, rendering us passive, and [...]
AI pronouncements mine our natural hope for an impersonal truth, not by outlasting man like granite, but by appearing to not need him at all. In truth, however, we make the word-collating machines, they feed on our words, and we intervene into their operations in order to produce correct and pleasing results. But in appearance, [...]
In the heavenly city, darkness and night are dispelled by the constant radiance of God. Our earthly cities have made a parody of this. “If universe big how God real?” So goes the tongue-in-cheek version of an atheist argument against God’s existence. More seriously: If the claims of Christianity and the other monotheistic religions are [...]
Jesus did not preach an escape from earth to an immaterial Heaven. Rather, he preached the coming of God’s kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven,” a redemption of God’s good creation. We hope in the completion of God’s grand rescue project, which is taking shape as we speak and which will reach fulfillment [...]
The purpose of human conversation is not limited to pragmatic ends, as if we only spoke in order to learn new recipes and get salient tips on what stocks to invest in. A good conversation is always a discovery of the person who reveals himself in speech. So much fighting concerning AI is really no [...]
The political circus that rode into Dayton, Tennessee in the summer of 1925 must have been something, even though its conclusion was anti-climactic. Still, the case lives on, as it has for a century now. Did life come from nothing or something: or from Someone? The summer of 2025 should not come to an end [...]
Must Artificial Intelligence open the door to "that hideous strength" described by C.S Lewis? Time will tell, though I suspect the answer to the juggernaut that is Artificial Intelligence may well be the Babel scenario. In recent online postings, writer Rod Dreher has been commenting on various predictions of an apocalypse caused by Artificial Intelligence. [...]
The heightened pace of life in industrial societies, Charles Lindbergh realized, necessitated reflection on what type of life is best suited for man. Which of the two, reason or vital instinct, constitutes the best function of human beings? Which of the two contributes best to man’s happiness and lasting well-being? Charles Lindbergh begins his Autobiography [...]
Why would Christoph Schönborn—a Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church and a theologian who specialized in Patristic studies—dedicate so many essays and conferences to a doctrine that appears to overlook the Christian faith? Theology in The New York Times In the context of the debates caused by the “Intelligent Design” movement, an important Catholic contribution [...]
The affair of Galileo was not played out in the atmosphere of inquisitorial terror that some writers have imagined; one cannot even say that the high ecclesiastical authorities posed systematically as enemies of scientific progress. How did the Church react in face of perils she could not ignore? The secular arm, whose aid she had [...]
Yuval Harari, in his latest book, "Nexus," believes that AI endangers the utopian dream of unbridled license that has long been the goal of countless revolutionaries on the left and libertarian anarchists on the right. Modernity is replete with philosophers who interpret reality through prisms. By simplifying their perceptions, such figures seek to change history. [...]
Some observations: 1. The singular (classic) Greek contribution to liberty is freedom of the mind. That means, more or less, the freedom of Socrates. 2. Well, there’s also the freedom of the citizen. The freedom to participate in ruling and so be more than a merely material or economic or tribal or familial being. 3. [...]