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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The Phone Lady vs. Smartphone Culture

By |2023-01-10T12:31:37-06:00January 10th, 2023|Categories: Civil Society, Community, John Horvat, Technology|

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, [...]

Tolkien on Magic, Machines, & Mordor

By |2023-01-02T19:15:49-06:00January 2nd, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Christian Humanism, Conservation, Culture, Dwight Longenecker, J.R.R. Tolkien, Modernity, Senior Contributors, Technology, Timeless Essays|

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 [...]

Smart Phones and Similes

By |2022-09-15T17:16:47-05:00September 15th, 2022|Categories: Catholicism, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Technology, Wyoming Catholic College|

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 [...]

Ernst Jünger’s “The Glass Bees” & Our Dystopian Present

By |2022-08-17T16:22:26-05:00August 17th, 2022|Categories: Civil Society, Fiction, Literature, Science, Technology|

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 [...]

The Double Slavery of the Internet… and Liberation

By |2022-08-11T19:40:19-05:00August 11th, 2022|Categories: David Deavel, Information Age, Senior Contributors, Social Media, Technology|

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 [...]

The New Barbarians: Los Alamos & the End of Mankind

By |2023-07-16T00:52:42-05:00August 8th, 2022|Categories: George Stanciu, History, Science, St. John's College, Technology, Timeless Essays, War|

The Nation-State possesses an absolute moral authority that overrules the authority of any religion and every individual citizen.The new barbarians gave to the Nation-State a weapon that Genghis Khan never dreamed of, a “technically-sweet” marvel that could destroy humankind thrice over on a lazy Saturday afternoon. I am a Romanian gypsy from a long line [...]

On the Value of “Canned” Art

By |2022-07-05T16:17:22-05:00July 5th, 2022|Categories: Michael De Sapio, Music, Senior Contributors, Technology|

The development of mechanical reproduction and transmission at the dawn of the 20th century changed how we experience music. It remains true that technology has allowed us to extend, amplify, and disseminate the experience of art. This is, in itself, a good thing. The question is how we use this gift. In the past, when [...]

Tolkien on Reality

By |2022-04-27T15:59:11-05:00April 27th, 2022|Categories: J.R.R. Tolkien, Joseph Pearce, Literature, Senior Contributors, Technology|

What does Tolkien mean by insinuating that centaurs and dragons are more “alive” than cars? Well, he is referring to the fact that centaurs and dragons are animate creatures, albeit animated only by the imagination. He seems also to be saying that subcreation in the service of goodness, truth and beauty is better than subcreation [...]

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