Paul Kingsnorth believes that the Machine Age has replaced the four P's of traditional culture (the past, the people, place, and prayer) with four S's: science, self, sex, and the screen. Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, by Paul Kingsnorth. (348 pages, Random House, 2025) Paul Kingsnorth is right about much, and he [...]
The machine we face today is an all-encompassing technological, cultural, and economic system oppressing us—driven by profit and a misguided ambition. In the name of public health and progress we have allowed ourselves to be enslaved to the machine. You will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery [...]
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 [...]
By doing a certain thing, by perfecting a certain skill, by learning a certain trade, a man becomes specific, becomes particular. Today, however, labor no longer helps us become who we are, and so trivial things, like taste in music, rush in to fill the gap. The most tiresome part of living in a faux [...]
Joel J. Miller is as much a movement as a man. Of everything his new book "The Idea Machine" has to offer, I most appreciate his argument that books not only reflect our humanity, but they also, in dialogue with one another, teach us to be more humane. Joel J. Miller, The Idea Machine: How [...]
There is something undemocratic in a society of machines. Men receive more or less power, honor, and esteem because of their capacity to purchase the use of certain devices—not because of who they are. The capacity to “go camping” proves to a man and his fellows that his access to this or that machine is [...]
Pope Leo’s educational vision aligns directly with the Catholic understanding of God’s creative goodness: He sees education as proceeding from our foundation as made in God’s image, which sees us as more than mere passive recipients of being, but cooperative causes in its creation. “The authentic teacher arouses the desire for truth” is found early [...]
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 [...]