Black Mirror succeeds at making viewers consider the ways humanity is being changed by technology. In its last season, the show considered the idea of uploading consciousness into a computer-generated world. But can the soul be reduced to a collection of data in this way?…… Apparently starved for new ideas, the popular science-fiction television series [...]
Patrick Deneen has entitled his book Why Liberalism Failed, but by his own analysis, he could have entitled it Why Liberalism Succeeded… Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen (248 pages, Yale University Press, 2018) In his comprehensive condemnation of three hundred years of modern liberalism, Patrick Deneen at one point speaks of “advanced liberalism,” and [...]
If we want to raise children who can hold a conversation, they need actual people with whom to converse. Likewise, if we want to raise readers, they need, more than anything else, real and worthy books to read… A young lady I know won a Kindle in an academic contest. She is a voracious reader. In [...]
An Internet-free Sunday honors the Sabbath and allows us to leave our daily rat-race for at least one day, to ponder and prepare for the week ahead. It is a perfect occasion to visit and converse with others. Last year, I made a New Year’s resolution that I would make my Sundays Internet-free. It was [...]
The students of our college talk to each other without electronic distraction, they look adults in the eye, they laugh often and easily, they exercise wit without reflexive cynicism, they love dancing and singing and playing instruments; they love the classics and the outdoors… When Wyoming Catholic College admitted its first students ten years ago, [...]
The point of going to the bookstore is to experience its glorious inefficiency, its Romantic signaling of something transcendent, its countercultural cultivation of quietude and dignity… Our family lives in the kind of town most people only see in fiction: an archetypal, small, Midwestern town of picket fences and blocks of mostly modest bungalows. Homes [...]
When Facebook came on the scene, I immediately saw this new online forum as a platform from which to express my opinion about current events like I did as a newspaper editorialist. It was all just so easy and convenient. Except for one thing. For about a decade before joining Facebook, I wrote weekly opinion [...]
The conduct of the tourists in Florence, as they aimed their smart phone cameras at one great work of art after another and quickly moved on, puzzled me. What was this strange behavior?… It was with mixed emotions that I anticipated a few days in Florence this summer. I had first visited the city thirty [...]
A democratic society requires an informed base of voters making political judgments on the basis of commonly accepted information. When reliable authorities no longer hold sway, unscrupulous authoritarians can step in to fill the void… “We have a risk of getting to a place where we don’t have shared public facts. A republic will not [...]
Trying to put science in a classical paradigm is putting new wine into old wineskins. Modern science just does not easily fit into a classical paradigm… STEM, or science, technology, engineering, and math, is the newest acronym for what is considered a great education, and it often leads to a satisfying and financially rewarding career [...]
It might be too early to say, but the present recoil from fake news might prove that we are not quite ready to abandon the values we once thought so completely debunked. Truth might still stand a chance… Over the last few months, a number of publications have been running articles about what may be [...]
Those who don’t want to miss out on an “urgent” text message or email must reorient their desires toward those spiritual goods found in the good, true, and beautiful… Everyone has seen it happen. Suddenly, in the middle of a conversation at an event, a person feels compelled to answer an “urgent” message, frequently without [...]
Capitalism offers us outstanding new ways to be good. As a civilization, we should concentrate on taking advantage of these remarkable opportunities rather than entertaining idle suggestions, born of intellectual confusion if not sloth and envy, that the great boon of capitalistic plenty is undesirable or an illusion… Around the year 1885, the American economy [...]
The romanticized idea of a “gig economy” is something that should worry Americans. It is not the market economy at work. It is, rather, abuse of political power to undermine labor market forces for the benefit of a few very rich and powerful manipulators… Until relatively recently, most people hearing that someone had a “gig” [...]