News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Last week I had the chance to help a colleague process the meat from a cow he'd raised. The craft of butchering is a high and worthy craft, and at this point, I remain a very unskilled amateur.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about flourishing, paper, and fake meat.
- Benjamin Glaser considers how the pleasures of local food might depend, in part, on the accessibility of cheap industrial food. Where does that leave us? "If we imagine that the fate of our times hangs upon our efforts, we’ll deceive ourselves and miss out on the goods and pleasures that are at hand waiting to be enjoyed, even now."
- Elliott Drago points to Philadelphia as a place where arguments central to American principles have been hashed out over the decades: "As Americans, we must remember that place matters, and our founding principles are best understood when we look at how they were made real in the city of brotherly love."
- David Bannon celebrates Valentine's Day even as he mourns the loss it reminds him of: "My daughter Jess and I always observed Valentimes, as she called it. Through the years we shared many joy-filled moments on the holiday. When she was ten, I settled on a gift card from one of her favorite shops—a tradition that lasted each year until she died in January, 2015."
- Matt Stewart talks with Trevor Latimer about his new book and the dangers of localism: "My real concern is when the ideas of bumper sticker localism or principled localism seep into the culture and influence people in positions of power."
I've enjoyed reading through Meghan O'Gieblyn's God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning. O'Gieblyn is a careful and perceptive thinker, and she writes beautifully. She grew up in an evangelical home and attended college at Moody Bible Institute before doubts eventually shredded her Christian faith. She's not particularly bitter about her upbringing, though, and she has a knack for spotting religious patterns of thought in unlikely places--such as among technologists and AI boosters. Here, for example, is her description of Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines:
I read the book over the course of a couple days. I did not at the time have the technical knowledge to know whether these predictions were feasible or far-fetched, but it hardly mattered. Like all classic works of revelation, Kurzweil’s narrative unfolded with the kind of elegant simplicity that is easily taken for truth. The book contained dozens of charts and graphs and timelines that stretched back to the earliest eons of our planet. Just as my theology professors had divided all of history into discrete "dispensations" by which God revealed his truth—the dispensation of innocents, the dispensation of law, the dispensation of grace—so Kurzweil conceived of history as a cumulative process of revelation: the epoch of physics and chemistry, the epoch of biology, the epoch of brains. With each era we were moving closer and closer to this point of culmination, when intelligence would merge with the universe and we would become divine. Evolution for Kurzweil is not merely a blind mechanism of accident and trial and error; it is a “spiritual process that makes us more godlike.”
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro