I believe that many who find that "nothing happens" when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.
— C. S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books”
The myth of technological and political and social inevitability is a powerful tranquilizer of the conscience. Its service is to remove responsibility from the shoulders of everyone who truly believes in it. But in fact there are actors.
— Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (Quoted by L. M. Sacasas)
When businesses start to realize that they’re paying vast amounts to get LLMs to do tasks that could be accomplished by a old-school coder writing a regex script … “I do think we’re about to see a lot of companies realize that a thinking model connected to an MCP server is way more expensive than just paying someone to write a bash script. Starting now, you’ll be able to make a career out of un-LLM-ifying applications.”
— Alan Jacobs
Our bodies are shot with mortality. Our legs are fear and our arms are time.
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
It is clear that the further technological liberation from the duress of daily life is only leading to more disengagement from skilled and bodily commerce with reality. Perhaps the account above fails to do justice to the riches of information, entertainment, and games that the new electronics will present us with. But these too will be consumed, i.e., they will not make demands of commitment, discipline, or skill. They will be more diverting due to greater variety and closer fit with our individual tastes. Since they will fail to center and illuminate our lives, however, their diversion will more and more lead to distraction, the scattering of attention and the atrophy of our capacities.
— Abert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, p. 151
Conservatives are correct, I believe, in their attempt to draw matters of ultimate concern into the universe of political concern. But, as suggested, they tend to short-circuit the discursive transaction of such problems. What is worse, as a rule they are inconsistent in their policies. The traditional good they seek to secure through civil and criminal legislation they undermine through economic legislation. Is is through the latter that democracies are given substance, and in this regard conservatives and liberals alike have fallen prey to the irony of technology.
Both are committed to a policy of economic growth in excess of the increase in population. Though they differ in the ways in which they want to distribute the fruits of economic growth, both factions understand such growth as an increase in productivity, which yields more consumer goods. Improved productivity, as we shall see, entails the degradation of work, and greater consumption leads to more distraction. Thus in an advanced industrial economy,* a policy of economic growth promotes mindless labor and mindless leisure*.
The resulting climate is not hospitable to the traditional values of the conservatives. This is the predicament of the conservatives. Nor is such a climate favorable to "human development in its richest diversity." It produces a wealth of different commodities. But underneath this superficial variety, there is a rigid and narrow pattern in which people take up with the world. This is the liberal predicament.
— Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, p. 93-94
... I was reminded of something - an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 118
The engineer reduces a problem to its essential functions and realizes the latter in the most efficient way possible. Such isolating of functions seems to be a purifying, liberating, and rational affair. It eliminaties the ballast of tradition, site, commitment, and fixity. But ends cannot be kept firm when means are relativized, nor can problems remain articulate when their context is erased. Ends and problems so treated are attenuated to commodities until they almost disappear there is nearly nothing,.
— Technology and the Character of Comtemporary Life, Albert Borgmain, p. 66
Attention is a resource. Don’t sell it cheaply in this economy of disreality.
— Jared Stacy
If we take the love of God for granted we shall not appreciate the
sequence of the apostles thought. But when we assess our weakness and particularly our ungodliness, then we discover both the need and the marvel of the proof God has given. What looms up in our conviction when our ungodliness is properly weighed is our detestability and the wrath of God, and it is impossible to take God's love for granted. That God could love the ungodly, far less that he did love them, would never have entered into the heart of man (cf. I Cor. 2:9, 10). On that background the text must be understood. The marvel of God's love is that it was love to the ungodly. And here is the proof-"Christ died for the ungodly". And not only so. When Christ died for them they were still weak, that is to say, they were still ungodly and contemplated as ungodly. Hence the love of which the death of Christ is the expression and provision is a love exercised to them as ungodly. It is not a love constrained by commendable qualities in them, not even by the qualities which they would one day exhibit by the power of God's grace. It is an antecedent love because it is the love presupposed in the death of Christ for them while they were still in misery and sin. It is not the love of complacency but love that finds its whole urge and incentive in the goodness of God. That is the kind of love the death of Christ demonstrates and it is a love efficient to a saving purpose because the death of Christ is on behalf of the ungodly and therefore to the end of securing the high destiny which the context has in view.
— John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
— James Joyce, The Dead
Wrath is the holy revulsion of God's being against that which is the contradiction of his holiness.
— John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, p. 51
Dear reader, whenever you are certain about something as I am go forward with me; whenever you hesitate, seek with me; whenever you discover that you have gone wrong come back to me; or if I have gone wrong, call me back to you. In this way we will travel along the street of love together as we make our way toward Him of whom it is said, ‘Seek His face always.’
— Augustine, De Trinitate I.iii.5
The only way I know how to make something good is to ship and iterate. Get something usable, use it, get feedback, revise. The early versions will not be as good as later versions. That’s ok! MVPs are imperfect and incomplete. Iteration is what counts, not the guess at a v1.
— Ryan Barrett
I have discussed the text and written down as best I could in eleven books what seemed certain to me, and have affirmed and defended it; and about its many uncertainties I have inquired, hesitated, balanced different opinions, not to prescribe anyone what they should think about obscure points, but rather to show how we have been willing to be instructed whenever we have been in doubt as to the meaning, and to discourage the reader from the making of rash assertions where we have been unable to establish solid grounds for a definite decision.
— Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, 12.1.1
For a time there
I turned away from the words I knew, and was lost.
For a time I was lost and free, speechless
in the multitudinous assembling of his Word.
— Wendell Berry, Meditation in the Spring Rain
We don’t need the next big thing. We need countless next little things.
— Paul Ford
The art of transposing truths is one of the most essential and the least known. What makes it most difficult is that, in order to practice it, one has to have placed oneself at the center of a truth and possessed it in all its nakedness, behind the particular form in which it happens to have found expression. Furthermore, transposition is a criterion of truth. A truth which cannot be transposed isn't a truth; in the same way that what doesn't change in appearance according to the point of view isn't a real object, but a deceptive representation of such.
— Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 65
Divine simplicity is a difficult doctrine, to be sure. But then would we not expect at the outset difficulties of its kind? Why should God not be different than we expect and other than we can fathom? It would strange indeed if God were not strange.
— Gavin Ortlund, Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals, p. 139
The burdens I have in view, of course, are those we now routinely associate with filtering and managing flows of information—a task which invites the constant deployment of new tools and techniques, which, in turn, often have counter-productive effects. Clearly, these are not altogether novel burdens, we may find complaints about the sort of thing we think of as “information overload” in connection with printing, but they are hardly getting easier to bear. And these burdens are not merely cognitive. They are affective as well. Tending to our information ecosystem, if we attempt it at all, requires a striking degree of vigilance and discipline. And as we noted at the outset, there is no given balance between place and speed, no natural context of relative meaningfulness to regulate the pace and quality of information for us. It’s on us to do so, daily, often minute by minute. We exist in a state of continuous and conscious attention triage, which can be exhausting, disorienting, and demoralizing.
— L. M. Sacasas