fbpx
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Search
Close this search box.
Search Results For:

Search Results for: machines

iPhone

The Age of Miracles and Misery Machines

By
We have more material comforts than kings and merchant princes of old, and technological progress has wrought what would once be considered miracles. Yet our culture makes every effort to promote dissatisfaction, for there is money to be made when people are unhappy or bored with what they have. In an age of miracles, our phones are becoming misery machines.
anxious kid

Taking The Anxious Generation Further

By
Haidt’s work points us toward reclaiming childhood. Let’s go further and reclaim our humanity.
shopping

A Family-Focused Approach to Consumption

By
Our consumption decisions should be focused on the needs of our family members. This requires attention to unglamorous factors such as budgets and nutritional requirements, instead of being up-to-date with the brands and campaigns that purport to solve the world’s problems by selling us products. 
homemaking

When We Outsource Every Hard Thing, What Do We Lose?

By
Popular culture tells us it is often more efficient to outsource routine household tasks than do them yourself. This leaves an important question unanswered, however: efficient at what? 
Summer camp

Summer Camp: An Ailing American Institution

By
The original rationale for summer camp is more valid than ever. Young people are struggling with mental health, addiction to technology, disconnection from the body, isolation, and many other painful realities. Summer camps cannot fix these problems. But for many adolescents, the experience of traditional summer camps might help them see that life is about more than accomplishment, and that is a start.
remote work

The Conservative Case for Remote Work

By
If conservative organizations want to promote an economy that centers around the family, one that rebuilds the small town and restores a healthy culture, they need to do more than promote the right family policies and tax credits.
intellectual friendship

Intellectual Friendship: Why It Matters

By
In an age of atomization, polarization, and powerful new AI technologies, we must recover a vision of intellectual friendship in which we share our lives and loves with each other, contemplate the highest truths together, and cultivate the neglected virtues of humility, generosity, and charity. 
Medical school

The Dark Kenosis of Medical Education

By
Instead of submitting to the “thin” proposal for medical professional identity formation now advocated by the medical educational establishment, we should encourage our learners to lean into the richness of the various religious moral and faith commitments that are already manifest in them as they enter the profession.
Networking

The World, the Flesh, and the Young Professional: Reforming How We Approach Networking

By
To the extent that networking preoccupies us with appearances, it distracts us from real professional excellence. This excellence is the basis for truly enriching professional relationships, and it can serve as an alternative to the spirit of unbridled acquisitiveness that usually drives how we network.
AI/ GPT3

What Makes Us Human?

By
At the moment, large language models are nothing like us, however easy it is for us to anthropomorphize their outputs. But as AIs develop, it will become increasingly necessary to ask: How much do we want them to become like us? Answering that question will certainly require human wisdom.
IVF

Elon Musk and the Reproductive Revolution

By
What the sexual revolution began by upsetting gender roles and obscuring the necessary link between marriage and procreation, the reproductive revolution continues, shattering our conceptions of motherhood and fatherhood and severing the bond between parents and children.
Technology

The Psychology of Digital Dehumanization

By
A Web of Our Own Making overflows with disquieting observations about the ways digital technology is reshaping human nature. Antón Barba-Kay puts into haunting words the anxiety, exhaustion, and emptiness that most of us feel but cannot put into words because we are too busy scrolling and ogling.
Photo of Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy and the Possibility of Faith

By
Cormac McCarthy, who passed away today, gives readers reason to suspect that he did not shut the door on God before his life ended. His last two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, offer more than just an artistic representation of reality’s inescapable brutality. They forcefully struggle with the greatest questions of human existence. Like any good work of art, these books don’t allow any reader—religious, atheist, materialist, Christian—to walk away feeling perfectly comfortable in their understanding of the world.
Person taking photo of red roses bush

Resisting Tech’s Coercions

By
Ernst Jünger’s 1957 novel, The Glass Bees, is prescient. But it also clarifies many of our own present challenges as we struggle with the role of technology over our lives. In a society defined by sound bites, 280-character tweets, three-minute TikTok videos, and deep fake videos, the line between what is authentically real and what is mere performance or imitation is blurred.

The Semiconductor Industry and the Future of the World Economy (II)

By
My reading of the current economic and geopolitical situation is that at least in the short term, the United States will control enough pressure points to make life seriously difficult for the Chinese semiconductor industry.
Computer support engineer installing processor. Microprocessor with clearly visible silicon core and cache chip. Installation of computer processor in the socket.

The Semiconductor Industry and the Future of the World Economy (Part I)

By
Without a leading semiconductor industry of its own, China will not have the military capability to challenge the United States for world military leadership and, for example, be able to “reconquer” Taiwan. Similarly, without the best in-house processors, it is difficult to exploit all the advantages promised by artificial intelligence, including its military applications such as programming advanced drones.
Assembly line

The Burden of Being a Family

By
As some of the financial benefits to marriage have eroded, it can be tempting to use policy to make family formation more attractive. The rising median age at first marriage and first birth, however, largely arise from a mix of technological progress and preference for career, which aren’t things policies can reverse. Better solutions come from civil society, where entrepreneurs work to find solutions to the everyday problems modern parents face and religious communities help young adults order their priorities.
Catholic Church filled with people

The Catholic Church Must Be Allowed to Serve the Victims of Gender Ideology

By
It is precisely to express Christ’s love that the Catholic Church has so many caring ministries: for the sick, for women in crisis pregnancies, for migrants, for the poor, and for others on the margins—including transgender-identifying people. Amid the debates over how to best care for those struggling with gender identity, the Department of Health and Human Services proposes so-called “nondiscrimination” rules that would prevent our ministries from helping people.
Photo of Kristin Collier

The Meaning of Medicine: Dr. Kristin Collier’s Speech at the University of Michigan Medical School

By
The suffering you’ll see as a physician can either harden you and make you into a burned-out machine, or you can allow the vocation to soften you. It can help you cultivate compassion, love, justice, and mercy. Let medicine do the latter of the two for you.
male, female, symbols

Anthropological Fallacies

By
Body-self dualism, and its social manifestation in expressive individualism, underlie the rejection of our given human natures. Rather than seeing ourselves as somehow inhabiting bodies that are used as mere instruments, we should see ourselves as incarnate, bodily beings embedded in communities and bound by natural and supernatural laws.
Group of people on phones and laptop

Technology and the Soul: The Spiritual Lessons of Digital Distraction

By
The age of digital media has unleashed a profoundly threatening human experiment. By drawing us to waste not only our time, but our attention, social media seduces us to waste our souls. Our brightest engineers have trained our most powerful technology to act with the psychological craftiness of demons. Neuroscience helps us understand how digital media is changing us, but we need a more classical language about the soul to understand, and protect ourselves from, the most ominous of these changes.
Group of people using their smartphones

On Tech and Dignity: The Posthuman Technology That Threatens Us All (Part I)

By
Part I addresses the threat that technology poses to human dignity because of the threat it poses to humanity itself—both elites and non-elites. Transgenderism is the first step on the road to a miserable posthuman future. Part II argues that we must recommit to the virtue of religion if we’re to resist this technologized, posthuman threat.
Textile workers in factor

The Bad Old Days: How Scientism and Market Logic Corroded the Family Long Before the Sexual Revolution

By
American “family values” before the baby boomers and Roe v. Wade and second-wave feminism were shaped more by modern notions of industrial progress than by eternal truths about the human person. The sexual revolution emerged from axioms that had already permeated the mainstream for decades. Even among social conservatives, those axioms still shape our discourse about the family today.
Mechanic working on car

Why College Degrees Might Not Be Worth It: A Response to Phillip Dolitsky

By
Why do we so closely associate having degrees with the scholarly life? Most jobs, including the highest-prestige white-collar jobs, do not involve sitting around thinking lofty thoughts and reading deeply fascinating books all day. Instead, you could go to college to learn how to read Plato and Dante and Locke, and then go off to find a job which presents genuine intellectual puzzles that interest you, regardless of whether that job requires a college degree or not.
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Public Discourse © 2024 | All Rights Reserved