Denzel Washington on the Enemy Within
The enemy is the inner me. The Bible says in the last days we’ll be lovers of ourselves. The No. 1 photograph today is a selfie, “Oh, me at the protest.” “Me with the fire.” “Follow me.” “Listen to me.” ¶ We’re living in a time where people are willing to do anything to get followed. What is the long or short-term effect of too much information? It’s going fast and it can be manipulated obviously in a myriad of ways. And people are led like sheep to slaughter.
Steven E. Koonin on Anthropogenic Climate Change
Here’s what I discovered: Humans exert a growing, but physically small, warming influence on the climate. The results from many different climate models disagree with, or even contradict, each other and many kinds of observations. In short, the science is insufficient to make useful predictions about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it.
In the seven years since that workshop, I watched with dismay as the public discussions of climate and energy became increasingly distant from the science. Phrases like “climate emergency,” “climate crisis” and “climate disaster” are now routinely bandied about to support sweeping policy proposals to “fight climate change” with government interventions and subsidies.
Leonard E. Read on the Invisible Hand and the Miracle of the Pencil
John Dewey on an Open Universe Without Bounds or Final Causes
To many timid, albeit sincere, souls of an earlier century, the decay of the doctrine that all true and worthful science is knowledge of final causes seemed fraught with danger to science and to morals. The rival conception of a wide open universe, a universe without bounds in time or space, without final limits of origin or destiny, a universe with the lid off, was a menace. We now face in moral science a similar crisis and like opportunity, as well as share in a like dreadful suspense.
Marriage, Scripture, and the Church
This book takes a distinctive approach to the same-sex-union debate by framing the issue as a matter of marriage. Darrin Snyder Belousek demonstrates that the interpretation of Scripture affects whether the church should revise its doctrine of marriage for the sake of sanctioning same-sex union. Engaging charitably yet critically with opposing viewpoints, he delves deeply into what marriage is, what it is for, and what it means as presented in the biblical narrative and the theological tradition, articulating a biblical-traditional theology of marriage for the contemporary church. Afterword by Wesley Hill.
Bonnie Kristian on the False Prophecies of Q
Brett McCracken on Algorithms and Aimless Folly
When we grab our phones aimlessly, scroll our feeds without a goal in mind, or suggest to our spouse that “we should watch something on Netflix,” we are susceptible to whatever voices or images are the most seductive or alluring. To use Tozer’s language, we are uncommitted, not sure what direction to go.
This makes us utterly vulnerable to the power of suggestion, cogs in the machinery of algorithms ever more sophisticated at keeping us distracted on their platforms. We are digital wanderers, and this is a dangerous thing to be. Without a purposeful direction in digital spaces, we’re open to whatever direction an algorithm thinks we’ll like—a “suggested for you” movie, article, or YouTube video that will eat up a few minutes or hours of our time.
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The antidote to dangerous distractibility in the digital age is purpose, focus, and intention. Proverbs 4:25 says, “Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you.” This is wisdom in contrast to the unwise woman of folly, who “does not ponder the path of life; her ways wander, and she does not know it” (Prov. 5:6).
CS Lewis on Aligning with Reality, with Natural Law
There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.