News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
There's lots going on these days: school is in full swing, the garden is producing loads of tomatoes and peppers and potatoes and leeks, and we got out for one last camping trip this week. There's also lots going on at FPR. If you're in Tennessee, consider visiting Brian Miller's farm for a BBQ, and the FPR conference in Grand Rapids with Ross Douthat, Nathan Beacom, Tim Carney, Elizabeth Corey, Kate Dalton, Bill Kauffman, Jason Peters, and Micah Watson is just two weeks away. It will be a grand time, and I hope to see many of you there.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about work, repair, and reading.
- Joshua Pauling looks to the Amish for insights into how we might shape communities to use technology in wise ways: "What the Amish understand perhaps more than we do is the necessity of maintaining and protecting domains of embodied human agency in our lives."
- Teddy Macker ponders the dynamics beneath RFK Jr.'s alignment with Trump: "Contemplating this turn of events in our politics reminds me that we human beings have a strong desire for tidy coherence. Sometimes this desire can be a kind of sickness."
- Antoine E. Davis relates the power--and the challenges--of pastoral ministry in a prison: "Pastoral ministry in prison can change lives, but it doesn’t magically erase the pain of incarceration."
- Collin Slowey reluctantly listened to the Rest is History and then found much to praise about the podcast's approach to historical knowledge: "For the task of understanding the past demands honesty, humility, and respect for all aspects of human nature, from the material to the intellectual and volitional and—above all—the spiritual."
- I share a set of theses from my new book on the effects that different textual technologies have on us: "The highest use of language is to serve friendship, and the kinds of conversations our textual technologies encourage will shape the kinds of friendship that are imaginable."
- John Murdock talks with Yuval Levin on the Brass Spittoon podcast about his new book, American Covenant and the Constitution.
I’ve been reading a lot of books about AI, and one of the better ones I’ve come across so far is The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking by Shannon Vallor. It has some flaws, and I’m working on a review essay of the book that tries to articulate both what Vallor does well and where her analysis falls short. But it’s a provocative, virtue-ethics approach to the questions around how relying on AI might shape our character and society:
Technology began in the cave, the field, in the home. It was the art of making and keeping a home for others, before it was the art of anything else. It was the art of healing, of warming, of feeding and defending and sustaining a world, even when the limits of a person's world might not have stretched beyond one's sight from a high perch. . . .
Technology begins in a world where the future of one's home and family is never a given, never promised, but built and carefully kept through the skillful use of tools to collectively provide the "necessary services" that life requires to endure. For the vast majority of the world, that has remained the vital program of technology. It is only the activities of modoern industrial nations that led the dominant pattern of technological innovation to be severed from that vital program, and soon become inimical to it.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro