Fire From the Gods: Oppenheimer as a Greek Tragic Hero

By |2024-03-11T21:33:02-05:00March 11th, 2024|Categories: Death, Film, Greek Epic Poetry, Science|

Like the Greek tragic heroes of Oedipus and Prometheus, J. Robert Oppenheimer used his almost superhuman intellect and ability to achieve something that led not only to his own suffering, but also to the suffering of others. Americans today would do well to heed the lessons passed down from the Greek tragedians about the reckless [...]

Religion & Celebrity: The Search for Meaning in the 1920s

By |2024-02-18T16:12:15-06:00February 18th, 2024|Categories: History, Religion, Science|

By the early decades of the twentieth century, at the very moment when physicists were dismantling formerly irrefutable truths about nature and the universe, science had become the foundation of the American faith in stability, order, and progress. Darwinian science had confirmed that the advent of the United States marked the apex of human evolution. [...]

This Mortal Coil: Poems of DNA

By |2023-11-12T15:52:09-06:00November 12th, 2023|Categories: Barbara J. Elliott, Books, Love, Poetry, Science|

Eric Forsbergh writes with insight, compassion, and humor, as he describes in well-honed vignettes the human condition, anchored in our DNA: love, identity, sex, families, babies, war, and death, as we go about our multifaceted lives, making music, solving crimes, surfing the internet, and coping with aging parents as we face our own mortality. This [...]

Science, Suffering, & Sanctification

By |2023-10-10T18:11:58-05:00October 10th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, John Horvat, Science|

Scientists studying the effects of great trauma more closely now find that deep suffering can transform individuals and improve their lives. It is time to take a second look at the Cross. Everyone knows about those who have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This condition develops when a person witnesses or experiences a shocking, terrifying, [...]

Salvation and Sufficiency: A Lesson from Statistics

By |2023-09-27T17:51:42-05:00September 27th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Heaven, Religion, Romano Guardini, Science, Theology, Timeless Essays|

In the world of statistics, sufficiency plays an important role in estimation. But what about sufficiency in other aspects of our lives? What about God? What about my eternal destiny? What is sufficient, here and now, to know all that I can know about my purpose in this world and my fate when my time here [...]

Science and Spirit: Beyond the Wasteland

By |2023-09-17T13:49:25-05:00September 17th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Communio, David L. Schindler, Featured, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Technology, Timeless Essays|Tags: , , , , |

The burden of Theodore Roszak’s “Where the Wasteland Ends” is to explode the myth that the problems attendant upon the technocratic society can be resolved by technology. Where The Wasteland Ends: Politics And Transcendence In Postindustrial Society, by Theodore Roszak (492 pages, Doubleday, 1972) The burden of this book is to explode the myth that [...]

Modernity: A Rebellion Against God

By |2023-07-31T19:51:59-05:00July 31st, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Existence of God, Francis Bacon, George Stanciu, Modernity, Science|

Francis Bacon imagined a glorious future for us once our ancestors made themselves the masters and possessors of Nature; however, the ever-ascending arc of science and technology turned out to be not under human control. Physicists, neuroscientists, and computer and genetic engineers are the new sorcerer’s apprentices, having summoned great forces they can now not [...]

How Modernity Diminishes the Human Person

By |2023-06-22T17:04:34-05:00June 22nd, 2023|Categories: Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Apple, Capitalism, Community, Democracy, Democracy in America, Featured, George Stanciu, St. John's College, Technology, Timeless Essays|

Because of the strong secular faith instilled in us by education, most of us trust that science and technology, democracy, and capitalism, the three legs of Modernity, can bring about only good ends and fail to see that these three triumphs of humankind can diminish the human person. With the publication of the book The [...]

Technology and Silence

By |2023-06-10T12:25:17-05:00June 10th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Glenn Arbery, Science, Senior Contributors, Technology, Wyoming Catholic College|

The obvious question is rarely asked: what is the end of this enlargement of human control and this endless technological reaching? I sense a communal dread about it. Are we building the Tower of Babel—a recurring trope this week? Are we headed for the annihilation of humankind? This past week, adults from across the country [...]

The​ ​Shattered​ ​Image of the Thirteenth Century​

By |2023-05-14T15:53:05-05:00May 14th, 2023|Categories: Art, Christianity, Culture, History, Science, St. Thomas Aquinas, Timeless Essays|

We did not discard most of the image of reality from the Middle Ages. The lovely whole image was smashed like stained glass under the hammer of zealots, but later people recovered fragments and used them to create the world in which we live. C.S. Lewis wrote a book of profound scholarship, The Discarded Image, [...]

Whose Empiricism? What Kind of Rationality?

By |2023-04-18T14:55:45-05:00April 18th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, David Deavel, Reason, Religion, Science, Senior Contributors|

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 [...]

Classical Studies & Modern Science

By |2023-04-11T19:32:49-05:00April 11th, 2023|Categories: Classical Education, Classical Learning, Liberal Learning, Science|

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 [...]

Inhuman Oracles and the True World

By |2023-03-10T11:19:42-06:00March 10th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Technology, Wyoming Catholic College|

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 [...]

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