My sabbatical is drawing to a close and something these months have provided is a bit of personal affirmation about this newsletter. My writing here has been predictably inconsistent this summer; it’s been good to be mostly offline. But I’ve missed having the newsletter tab opened in my browser throughout the week, a reminder to jot down a quick sentence or paragraph as time allows. Not to mention the ways this online medium has led to some real-life connections; I spent a recent very restful week in northern Michigan thanks to the hospitality of some generous readers. Thanks Louise and Greg!

I want to try something today that I hope to include occasionally in these intermittent missives. Instead of one relatively coherent reflection, I’m going to share a handful of things that have recently caught my attention. I’ve been thinking a lot about attention and about how much of contemporary life seems to work against sustained, purposeful, enjoyable attention. So, consider the following ephemera my own small attempt to pay attention and your invitation to the same.

Has anything arrested your attention these days?

{1}

I drove through Grand Rapids last week and stopped by the Baker Book store. For years I’d heard about their used books section and it didn’t dissapoint. I left with quite the stack and began with Jacques Ellul’s book about prayer and modernity. I finished his The Technological Society earlier this year, a book which has shaped a lot about how I’m thinking about AI, and its been good to have his contrarian voice back in my head.

For example, about the perfunctory prayers we Christians often offer before a meeting or church event, Ellul asks,

“At a time when we are so manifestly deprived of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, what meaning do those prayers of petition have? We know in advance that if ever they were answered, if ever the Holy Spirit were given, it would overturn all the financial plans, all the projections for the future, all the wise administrations.”

Ouch!

{2}

My questions about artificial intelligence continue and I confess to eavesdropping on a few conversations this summer when I realized people were discussing something related to AI. During my recent trip to Michigan, while reading on the patio of a restaurant in Traverse City, I slowly realized the people nearest to me were having a friendly debate about whether AI is generally good or bad. The young woman was pessimistic while the middle-age man bordered on utopian.

At some point, in what I think was an attempt to argue his glass-half-full perspective, the man talked about his aging father. He told the woman that his dad is ornery, drinks too much, and has only gotten more difficult with age. Wouldn’t it be great, he asked sincerely, if rather than sending my dad to a senior living community where he’d be a burden to others, there was an AI robot that could take care of him?

Early this summer I had a long layover in the Miami airport where I had the disheartening experience of watching robotic wheelchair-like devices slowly maneuver elderly passengers to their gates. Viewed from that concourse, Michigan man’s desired non-human future didn’t seem too far away.

{3}

Maggie made this delicious basil tofu recipe earlier this week. My small contribution was to spend about 5 minutes in the garden picking basil leaves from the few plants she planted this spring. The wonderful lingering smell of fresh basil on my hands is a top-three summer scent, right up there with peach cobbler coming out of the oven and a steamy street following a thunderstorm.

{4}

On Monday evening, after scanning the headlines on my laptop, I walked into the living room and told Maggie, “Wendell Berry died.” Berry has meant a lot to me over the years; his influence runs through both of my books and has significantly shaped how I think about pastoral ministry. I’ll write more about the agrarian author at some point but, for now, here are a few lines from one of my favorite of his Sabbath poems, this one from 1979.

Your Sabbath, Lord, thus keeps us by

Your will, not ours. And it is fit

Our only choice should be to die

Into that rest, or out of it.

{5}

I’m about halfway through Kim Phillips-Fein’s new book, Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America. The theme she pursues across U.S. history, from its very beginning, is the persistent anti-democratic impulse held by an influential minority of Americans. Take, for instance, Henry Ford who, in his book My Life and Work, wrote, “There can be no greater absurdity and no greater disservice to humanity in general than to insist that all men are equal.”

I think many of us tend to assume that the self-evidence of human equality, regardless of our historical failure to secure it for everyone, is fundamental to how most Americans conceive of our nation. But Pillips-Fein is persuasive as she documents the desire for hierarchy that made people like Ford deeply skeptical of egalitarian democracy.

Weirdly, reading Country of Lords has helped me feel a bit less distressed about the anti-democratic visions promoted by people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. It’s not that their authoritarian ideas are benign; marginalized communities are always slandered and scapegoated in service of sophisticated-sounding exploitation. But however intriguing and novel programs for domination are made to sound in the moment, the vantage point of history reveals how utterly empty and self-serving their proponents actually are. In other words, inevitability isn’t inevitable.

The View From Here

It was hot in Chicago this week! On Wednesday evening I talked our family into riding over to the lake to cool off and Maggie captured this shot of our oldest jumping in.