In yesterday’s post, “Consumerism and the Wow Factor,” I ended by hinting that if our subjective reaction is artworks is all that matters—as indeed must be the case when the consumerist imperative…
In 2013, Jeff Koons’ sculpture, “Balloon Dog (Orange),” sold at auction for $58.4 million, the most ever paid for a sculpture by a living artist. Made from mirror-polished stainless steel with transparent…
Readers of this blog will know that I write quite a bit about art. One of the rewarding aspects of my latest project with Ancient Faith has been the opportunity to tie…
Zena Hitz published Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life to draw our attention back to the permanent things—to human activities that have intrinsic value for what they are, in…
In Chapter 2 of my book Gratitude in Life’s Trenches, I discuss how spiritually unfruitful it is to beat ourselves up over our sin, or to engage in excessive grief and turmoil…
From my article, “The Power of Complaining,” The notion that people need to vent in order to feel better was influenced by the age of steam power in the 19th and early…
Last week our disclosure culture reached a new level of intensity. Shakira broke YouTube records with a Spanish-language song about how Gerard Piqué cheated on her. In just 24 hours, 63 million…
My forthcoming book, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation: A Manual for Recovering Gnostics, continues to receive endorsements from scholars who have been shown advanced copies of the manuscript. Below are some of…
From The Mystical Marriage: Spiritual Life According to St. Maximos the Confessor, pp. 89-90 “We should be careful not to disturb or upset our relations with others, even a little. We should not…
This evening I went onto OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3 – the new public AI that is taking the world by storm because of its ability to imitate human thought, language, and creativity. I had…
Scott Aaronson, an engineer at OpenAI, reported that Ilya Sutskever, Chief Scientist of OpenAI, would like to reduce ethics, and even the definition of goodness, to an algorithm. I have these weekly calls with Ilya Sutskever,…
I’m sorry to keep posting about politics, but things are becoming so interesting. There is no question that we are living in a transitional period politically, without a clear sense of how things…
