If empirical science itself does not lead to atheism, the approach to science that has been taken surely has. For modernity to give way to something better, we need to trust our reason in an expansive sense as a gift of God to know our own hearts and minds—and to know the whole of his [...]
There is perhaps nothing more old-fashioned and tradition-minded than classical studies, which focus upon the dead languages, fables, and philosophies of bygone civilizations. So what could the classics have to do with cutting-edge science and technology? Quite a lot, according to Werner Heisenberg, who testified that “the sciences cannot but benefit from classical studies.” In [...]
The self-absorption that is so prominently on display in the present day precludes such transcendence. It involves an inflation of the self that results in the eclipse of all phenomena transcendent to it. The question that materializes in this age is not so much, what do I matter, but what does anything else matter but [...]
In these strange times, the arrival of ChatGPT, a dispassionate voice that draws upon vast resources of knowledge (far beyond human capacity), might seem like a good thing. Late last semester, the mother of one of our freshmen sent me an article about a professor who had stopped assigning essays. He had realized that with the [...]
Trained to believe that every object as well as every act in the universe is matter, an aspect of matter, or produced by matter—that is, schooled to be a materialist—I scoffed at the two fellow students of mine in graduate school who regularly attended church. For me, at that time, the brain was the mind [...]
One enterprising lady has noticed the social void caused by texting and instant messaging and has started a company that teaches phone skills to young people. But can she help resolve the moral problems of an age of superficial and self-centered relationships? Smartphones supposedly made possible an age of unprecedented communication. Everyone, especially young people, [...]
Do we use our increasingly sophisticated gadgetry and expanding knowledge in an elvish, creative, and artful way to foster beauty and truth? Or do we use technology to manipulate, make money, and gain more power in the world? One of the stress points of the modern age is the pace and power of technology. Will [...]
Science writing, especially about the quantum world, has come far as a sub-genre of intellectual historiography. Yet it never occurred to me that a narrative of twentieth-century experimentation, let alone one that engages—even grips—the lay reader, could attain the status of dispositive intellectual history. Such is the achievement of Dr. Suzie Sheehy, whose "The Matter [...]
When the power of technology is put at the service of the power of pride, there can only be one outcome. Indeed, for those with eyes to see, the writing is already on the wall. “The high tide!” King Alfred cried. “The high tide and the turn!” G. K. Chesterton (The Ballad of the White [...]
Last week, my wife, a painter-friend of ours, who wishes to be anonymous, and I did the Friday night walk down Canyon Road, the site of numerous galleries in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a small town that is the third-largest art market in the United States. Halfway down Canyon Road, we stopped in at a [...]
One of the most delightful things about John Keats's early sonnet, “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,” is that Keats uses images from the age of global exploration and modern science to describe the feeling of first experiencing what the Homeric poems really are. The classics of the deep past become a vast, unexplored expanse, a [...]
In our protean age of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and virtual reality, Ernst Jünger’s uncanny vision of a dystopian world dominated by the machinations of high tech seems strikingly prescient. “The secret force behind technology appears to be the intention to make things insipid. The flower without fragrance is its emblem.” ~Nicolás Gómez Dávila When Ernst [...]
Is the presumptuous mapping of all material reality a boon to humankind, or will it prove a curse? Might an acknowledgment of mystery as a steady and enduring feature of our condition be key to our mental and moral health, and our sense of our own freedom? This essay was co-authored with Donald A. Yerxa.* [...]
External shackles we will always have with us. Internal ones are the more worrisome, for they are the ones we forge ourselves. My all-too-modern soul requires a great deal of fasting from news, memes, and viral videos lest I develop eyes that do not see, ears that do not hear, and a mind that merely bobs [...]