Very much looking forward to One in a Million when it airs on PBS Frontline.
The impulse is to imagine a utopia and then back up from that into some sort of organization of how do we get there. And the minute that that happens, that utopia is kind of like a thief because it robs us of all of the possible complex, emergent relational chaos that actually is filled with possibility.
(NB: Goals like this — utopian or otherwise — should not be mistaken for those quintessential banners.)
The Trump administration has brought back the entire 14th Amendment into our discourse.
Interview with David W. Blight • The 14th Amendment as an answer — a Republican answer — to the Dred Scott decision and to the waves of immigration of the 1840s and 1850s.
Several times in the last week I’ve been reminded of Kosuke Koyama and a book I’d like to get back to this summer.
Nice conversation between Jonah Goldberg and Luke Burgis about his book The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion.
Three things that stuck out toward the end:
- Jonah’s anecdote that quality time with your kids is overrated and quantity time is underrated
- Jonah also mentions two categories of thinking: stuff that pops in my head and I immediately want to write about it, and stuff that I think about and care about so much that I don’t want to write about it, or at least have a much harder time writing about it. Yes! And I’ve been thinking a lot lately/for the last couple years about how much of this falls into things that writing should and should not be used for.
- Given the negative responses to Magnifica humanitas on the topic of AI, it was nice to hear some praise from Burgis here:
He was wise not to weigh into the specifics. And some people were like, “Ah, you should have said more specifically about AI.” Paragraph 99 is the most important one in the encyclical, which is [where] he talks about the difference between machines and the human person. It’s an encyclical about the human person. It’s about anthropology. It’s not really about AI.
All of our biblical knowledge, doctrinal articulation, and apologetic prowess fail to resist the lure of cultural liturgies that so often bypass our intellects and shape our imaginations.
Excellent short foreword by James KA Smith for the German translation and ten year memory of his book You Are What You Love.
Presented without comment:
