Dear friends:

Here are a few items of news that I'll loosely class among "blasts of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of chatbots"—or at the very least, noises sounded for human goods, whether those of writing, embodiment, localism, or creative joy.

Here follows five things I've participated in lately that have brought me joy and contributed, I hope, to my project to preserve and celebrate the human in a machine age.

A movement against AI

To absolutely nobody's surprise, I have enthusiastically signed onto the Paul Kingsnorth-led Writers Against AI project. It's the best coordinated effort I know of to create a community dedicated to preserving human words. I echo Kingsnorth here:

Once I wanted to be a writer, and now I am. And as a writer, I want to take a stand, however small, against the Ignorance Machine of Artificial Intelligence. Despite the rush and the pull of this insane age, we are not powerless. We remain human, and we have choices. The deskilling and the dehumanising impacts of AI can be both resisted and refused, at least in our own lives. Nobody can make us use these things - not yet, at least. Nobody can stop us reading or writing real stories. We can decide, as much as it is within our power, what to engage with - and what not to.

I'm not generally much of a manifesto guy or one for signing onto movements, but I'm happy to put my name to this project and to appear in the site's list of anti-AI voices. If you're a writer or reader, please consider signing on.

A quixotic publishing project

I appeared for the second time on the Color of Dust podcast in my capacity as Director of the Center for Needless Splendor. I'm please to announce that the Center is co-sponsoring an eccentric little new publishing project with the Color of Dust guys, and the podcast was a chance to kick that idea around a little and talk about what it represents. The project is called the Rolling Rood Screen and it will be a print publication (words that fill me with delight) in which "our goal is to bring together as many artists (poets, farmers, musicians, etc.) as possible in order to reach just one person." It's going to be a lot of fun.

You can learn more and hear our conversation here.

A review of Leaves of Healing

I'm grateful to my friend Gracy Olmstead for reviewing Leaves of Healing for the print edition of Mere Orthodoxy. I had no idea that a review was coming, so I only found out when I pulled my copy of the print journal out of the mailbox. Gracy's review is quite perceptive, not totally positive, but very fair. One of the risks of being an essayist is finding that readers understand you better than you understand yourself, an experience that leaves a person feeling rather exposed but which is probably spiritually beneficial. These paragraphs probably reveal more about me than I was prepared for:

In the movements Miller takes from Lent toward Advent, from the brokenness of Covid toward the hope of a new year, one senses acedia rear its head occasionally. This, more than anything, seems to feed his sense of disappointment as the year draws to its close. It is a disappointment, the reader senses, not just in the trials of the garden—but in the bleak injustice and brokenness of the world itself, as it beats along in its metronomic rhythms. How to find contentment in the garden when the larger world proceeds apace in its chaos and cruelty?

These are hard questions to answer. “Gardening and liturgy are the answer” seems trite in response to the chaos, uncertainty, and evil of our world. Yet in Leaves of Healing—its vision of a humble garden well-loved, and its attendant determination to attend to the eternal and the quotidian—we also see those glimpses of hope and thanksgiving that promise health in both this life and the next.

My thanks to Gracy for reading and writing about my book.

A small piece on a local poet

My friend Elizabeth Stice runs a review, Orange Blossom Ordinary, that features a regular column on out-of-print books. What a great idea. I was pleased to contribute a small piece on the Nebraskan poet Don Welch's chapbook The Platte River:

The poems in The Platte River bloom and sing with authentically local Nebraska, features one would only recognize from years spent observing the place. Welch writes about blue herons and sandhill cranes, the wandering nature of the Platte, rip-rap on the side of the river, water snails. He draws a particularizing rather than universalizing picture of a place, offering the reader an invitation: come and see Nebraska with him.

If the piece piques your interest, you can find a lot of Welch's work online at the Don Welch digital archive.

An analog Holy Week

Finally: I am going to take a luxury afforded to me by my sabbatical and log off entirely for Holy Week. I aim to switch over to a flip phone and shut down my computer over the weekend, returning probably only when my children are back in school on the Tuesday after Easter. Andy Crouch advises everyone to take a week fully offline once a year, and it is time for me to begin to take that advice. I don't imagine that I am enough of a contemplative to find the experience entirely peaceful—I'm sure the dopamine itch will rear its head regularly—but I am excited to spend the week as much as possible in gardening, reading, housework, and worship. Maybe I'll have a blast of the trumpet or two more to sound after I return to the digital world in April.

The peace of the Lord be with you,

Matt