wokeness and gnosticism
I enjoyed this essay from Anthony Barr on the question of “wokeness” and gnosticism: I want to suggest that “woke” is a redeemable term. If we think of wokeness as loving attentiveness to reality, a commitment to seeing the world...
the paranoid style in American Christianity
We’re doomed! Doomed, I tell you: Take this seriously. We are like people on a beach, watching a tsunami build on the horizon. You know how tsunamis work, right? There’s an earthquake far out at sea, and the shock wave...
“The FDA’s Mango-Flavored Trolley Problem”
Don’t you just love that headline? These competing concerns leave the FDA trying to thread a particularly tricky needle: How do they get these products into the hands of the people who need them, while keeping them away from people...
can white people be saved?
I know many of my followers might be skeptical of the concept of “whiteness” and may bristle at the question, “Can white people be saved?” If that’s you — and even if it’s not — I invite you to read...
we need a twenty-first century Comstock
Helen Andrews is at The Hedgehog Review with a review of a book on Anthony Comstock and censorship, subtly calling for a new Comstock for our brave new world of pornography: The problem of pornography has never been worse than it...
even surgeons agree: we hate EMRs!
Atul Gawande jumps on the anti-EMR bandwagon, and it’s a very satisfying read: There’s a techno-optimist view of how this story will unfold. Big technology companies are already circling to invest in IKS Health. They see an opportunity for artificial...
the life-changing magic of having things to share
Comment Magazine’s Seerveld Prize Winners have been announced, and the entries are a delight to read. I wanted to highlight Matt Miller’s entry in particular: Consumerism, however, is a subtle demon, and it may not be readily exorcised through the practice...
“making human life safe for human beings”
This is a fine essay by James Poulos on the failure of “mass enlightenment” to occur via technology and the urge of the institutional elites to add more technology to fix the problem: On those premises, the internet arose. By...
vulnerable children and orphanages
This investigation by ProPublica into an orphanage and school in Liberia often reads like a checklist of what not to do when running an aid project overseas: Lack of oversight on the ground. Lack of trained or experienced staff running programs....
colonizing Mars won’t be nearly as exciting as we think
Micah Meadowcroft is in top form with this essay at The New Atlantis about the letdown that colonizing Mars could be: Consider your place in our interplanetary future. Let us speculate. Suppose that SpaceX or some similar enterprise has succeeded,...