Greetings from the Porch,

We've had a cold wet May, but I hope that, as of this week, the last freeze of the spring is behind us. All my tomatoes and peppers are in the garden, and they want some sun.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about chatbots, agency, and water.

• Garth Brown reviews Bruce Friedrich's Meat and wrestles with the intractable challenges of eating well: "There are problems that we do not have the luxury of waiting for lab-grown burgers to solve."

• Art Kusserow recounts what he learned in a recent encounter: "A mixture of shock and anger gripped me when it appeared that the driver, by now four cars ahead, was seemingly making no attempt to pull over and meet us to assess potential damage."

• Robert Ordway responds to Wendell Berry's Marce Catlett: "Hardship fades from memory with each generation. Those who lived it remember the weight of it. Those who didn’t often forget."

• Jacob Riyeff wonders if hardcore AI users might, in some ways at least, be like hardcore drug users: "The mounting evidence that (who would have thought?) automating portions of thinking degrades cognition, memory, attention, retention, learning, and ethical decision making suggests that the mentality of the very ai may well be substantially affected."

• Teddy Macker turns to Thomas Merton for wisdom in imagining how we might love one another well in the moment we find ourselves: "Are our first principles as Americans, as humans, as creatures, sifted and rightly laid down?"

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about constancy this week.

I’ve enjoyed reading the fascinating narrative that Darren Dochuk relates in his magisterial Anointed With Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America. The book is exhaustive in scope, and sometimes that level of detail gets a bit exhausting; there are a lot of characters and threads to keep straight. But for the most part Dochuk’s history is easy to follow. His portrayal of Francis Schaeffer’s Pollution and the Death of Man as “unabashedly anthropocentric” isn’t accurate; Schaeffer aims to counter both the pantheistic biocentrism he identifies in the rising environmentalist movement and the exploitative anthropocentric default in American Christianity with a biblical theocentrism. But I was fascinated to learn more about Ignatius O’Shaughnessy’s vision for liberal arts education that led him to donate generously to Notre Dame and the educational convictions that led oil money to be invested in institutions from the University of Chicago to Biola to Fuller to Grove City College to LeTourneau. Dochuk’s narrative hinges on a contrast between the more liberal, corporate oil producers like the Rockefeller's and the “wildcat” independents like the Pews. At one point, he describes the latter in this way:

Melding eschatological expectation with wonder for technology, corporate know-how with dirt-under-the-fingernails resolve, they sold themselves and their Christian Americanism to the US citizenry as the way forward. At the end of their surge in the 1950s they would still speak in dour terms about a nation that was lost, but theirs would be a jeremiad delivered from a position of authority, not—as it had long been—one of desperation.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro