Greetings from the Porch,

Next week I'll be logging off the internet for a few weeks per my normal yearly rhythm. FPR will continue publishing new essays in my absence thanks to the hard work of several folks, notably Adam Smith and Omar Drissi, so do keep tabs on the website. This email should resume July 18th, if all goes well. And as you start making fall plans, do sign up to join us for FPR's October conference in Indy--and tell your friends to come along, too! It's shaping up to be a great weekend.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about NIMBYs, ghosts, and beauty.

• Nathan Beacom articulates the paradoxical need for both the global and the particular in responding to AI: "Both global solidarity and local subsidiarity are needed if we are to address the emerging technology of so-called AI in sane and humane ways."

• José Marichal frames Magnifica Humanitas as a needed response to the "dark enlightenment," a "flattering-to-tech-oligarchs gambit to restore a 'master morality' on a world perceived to have been captured by a 'slave morality.'"

• Andrew Mercer considers subsidiarity as an intellectual virtue: "individuals, groups, and local authorities violate the principle when they willingly unload what should be their own intellectual burdens onto AI systems. By identifying where the threat of the concentration of power lies and linking this to concerns with intellectual formation, Pope Leo has thus shaped subsidiarity to be not only a principle of Catholic social doctrine but an intellectual virtue."

• Dixie Dillon Lane reads the encyclical through the eyes of a distinctive American community: "What, the encyclical asked, should Christians and other people of goodwill do in response to the promise and challenges of this rapidly changing world and its astonishing technologies, especially AI? Well, what would the Amish do, I wondered?"

• Elizabeth Stice sits with the pope's call to an "authentic realism [that] does not give up on changing the world": "Many people are simply fatalists about many things. And with regard to AI, especially, many of us have already surrendered."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about obsession this week.

Next year, The Unsettling of America turns fifty. This August, a new edition is coming out to mark the occasion, and it includes a new foreword by Berry. I teach it often, including this spring, and it still holds up well, provoking needed pondering and conversation among students. Berry’s insistence on understanding agricultural problems as part of cultural and economic and religions and educational problems models a mode of thought that we desperately need to practice:

It must be asked if we can remove cultural value from one part of our lives without destroying it also in the other parts. Can we justify secrecy, lying, and burglary in our so-called intelligence organizations and yet preserve openness, honesty, and devotion to principle in the rest of our government? Can we subsidize mayhem in the military establishment and yet have peace, order, and respect for human life in the city streets? Can we degrade all forms of essential work and yet expect arts and graces to flourish on weekends? And can we ignore all questions of value on the farm and yet have them answered affirmatively in the grocery store and the household?

The answer is that, though such distinctions can be made theoretically, they cannot be preserved in practice.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro