Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what’s fun?
By: Alan Jacobs
March 14, 2014
In this interview, the philosopher Rebecca Roache speculates about the future of punishment: It’s one thing to lose your personal liberty as a result of being confined in a prison, but you are still allowed to believe whatever you want while you are in there. In the UK, for instance, you cannot withhold religious manuscripts from a...
March 12, 2014
1) “Your post reminds of of something totally random and irrelevant in my own life.” 2) “You’re making this way too complicated.” 3) “You’re making this way too simple.” 4) “You’re stupid.” 5) “You’re evil.”
March 12, 2014
One small cause of satisfaction for me in the past few years has been the decline of the use of the word “postmodern” as a kind of all-purpose descriptor of anything the speaker thinks of as recent and different. The vagueness of the term has always bothered me, but even more the lack of historical awareness embedded in most uses of...
March 11, 2014
March 10, 2014
Kevin Kelly’s theology is a contemporary version of the one George Bernard Shaw articulated a hundred years ago. In “The New Theology: A Sermon,” Shaw wrote, In a sense there is no God as yet achieved, but there is that force at work making God, struggling through us to become an actual organized existence, enjoying what to many of...
March 10, 2014
A few days ago I read an interesting article in the New Republic on “trigger warnings” in college syllabi. The topic intrigued me, and I decided I wanted to write about it — but then I got busy. Way too much to do. And by the time I got a few minutes to think about what I wanted to say, so many people have written about it...
March 7, 2014
I just came across this 2013 post by Peter Enns: I’ve had far too many conversations over the last few years with trained, experienced, and practicing biblical scholars, young, middle aged, and near retirement, working in Evangelical institutions, trying to follow Jesus and use their brains and training to help students navigate the...
March 5, 2014
Freddie deBoer: Now people have a variety of ways to dismiss these issues. For example, there’s the notion of intelligence as an ‘emergent phenomenon.’ That is, we don’t really need to understand the computational system of the brain because intelligence/consciousness/whatever is an ‘emergent phenomenon’ that somehow arises...
March 4, 2014
Ed Finn: The idea that a computer might know you better than you know yourself may sound preposterous, but take stock of your life for a moment. How many years of credit card transactions, emails, Facebook likes, and digital photographs are sitting on some company’s servers right now, feeding algorithms about your preferences and...
February 25, 2014
Y’all haven’t heard much from me here lately, and that may not change in the near future. I am loving my new gig here at Baylor, but I’m also teaching books I haven’t taught before or haven’t taught in a long time, and that’s keeping me quite busy. Happily busy — but busy. So forming posts worthy of your time is a little...