A review of Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi, and some thoughts. Eboli is not the disease, it’s a little village in southern Italy. In that part of the world at mid-20th century, they would say Christ stopped at the next village south, Eboli (pronounced probably A-boll-e), as a way of saying civilization did […]
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Absence
Christian Wiman, from his book My Bright Abyss: “On the radio I hear a famous novelist praising his father for enduring a long, difficult dying without ever ‘seeking relief in religion.’ It is clear from the son’s description that the father was in absolute despair, and that as those cold waters closed over him he […]
Read more...Funny Computer
Some follow-up on “Artificial Intelligence,” plus some odds and ends. I wrote about “Artificial Intelligence” a couple of weeks ago, putting the phrase in quotes so I could say we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that what these machines do, does not include actual “intelligence” in the way human beings have intelligence. We shouldn’t assume […]
Read more...“Artificial Intelligence”
What the words mean It seems like there’s a new article or book almost weekly on the coming impact of Artificial Intelligence. The phrase, “artificial intelligence,” has always been puzzling to me, however, and I think we should stop and consider it, the more so if the phenomenon it denotes is actually introducing a disruptive […]
Read more...Rugby, Youth, Loss
I was sitting at my desk minding my own business when I went on facebook and learned that a friend had died. I haven’t sorted this out yet. He was right at my age. We played rugby together back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I haven’t seen him in almost 40 years. I think we were […]
Read more...Tripping Truth
What might be the connection among love, evil, free will, and psychedelic drugs? Argument From Evil You may be familiar with the “argument from evil;” the idea that there cannot be a God because God as He is conceived would be all-powerful and all-good, and therefore would not allow evil. But there is evil, therefore […]
Read more...Beautyway
Paradigm Setting I’ve been thinking a lot about the story of Cain and Abel. It’s obviously a very important story, being one of the stories in the first part of Genesis that sets the paradigm for our understanding of reality, as with Creation, the Fall, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel. To our ears […]
Read more...Station Eleven
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel What I liked: the writing. The writing, the writing, the writing. So this book was especially meaningful to me, because I write, too. She jumps back and forth through time but you don’t have to work at it to keep up. You know, there’s some art to misdirection; […]
Read more...Good Sites
I commend to you a process I stumbled into, for selecting websites. Maybe in doing so I’ll be stating the obvious, but maybe not. I found it to be a great boon to be able to enter my email address at various blog sites for my interests, in philosophy, politics, literature, and humor. At first I […]
Read more...All-Seeing Eye
I wrote about Jordan Peterson in Psychological Avatar, in particular his understanding of God. Or “God,” as he might say. The question is whether there is a “God Who is There,” in Francis Schaeffer’s phrasing, or whether “God” is only a representation of ultimate human aspiration, an avatar for the ground-up Darwinian psychological development to […]
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