Urban Hannon

David Fincher has a new film that once again updates Fight Club’s existential crisis for our time. In The Killer, we see a nameless main character high on pseudo-profundities and therapeutic life-hacks, all to cope with the anxiety of existence in a decadent age. He is a control freak with main-character syndrome, who keeps himself sane by the illusions of detachment and self-determination. Fate is a placebo, but so is nihilism.

Thomas Griffin

President Trump is against a national ban on abortion. President Biden champions abortion as a matter of healthcare and wants more access for women, not less. In order for someone to vote for a candidate who is not strictly pro-life, one must do so in order to promote the other policies of a candidate that outweigh the harm that would occur if a different candidate were to take office. We are speaking about material cooperation versus formal cooperation.

Maggie Phillips

When the pro-Palestinian campus left chant support for terrorists and voice antisemitic threats, they are latching onto the narratives they have been offered. In too many cases, those narratives are nihilistic lies introduced by bad faith actors, easily grasped for their simplicity, but which usually lead to collectively blaming Jews. As Catholics, we have a special responsibility to recognize and to speak out against antisemitism.

Caroline Foreman

As AIs get increasingly powerful, autonomous, and intelligent, they are dangerous and conceivably might destroy us. There’s an interesting—and distressing—connection between apologetics and the slippery slope of AI for humanity. The more you know, the more you can see that human cognition and consciousness are superior to the AI brand of “thinking.” Read more from Dr. Selmer Bringsjord, and hear him in-person this August at the Wonder Conference.

Michael Adams

JJ Reddick and LeBron James host Mind the Game, a new podcast offering viewers insight into how the two basketball legends think. In one discussion, they unintentionally reveal the disordered undertones that our desire for greatness can come to embody. However, individuals embracing this mindset are tragically mistaken. We were not made for earthly greatness but for the source of greatness itself.

Fr. Damian Ference

I can’t stop thinking about it, and I can’t stop talking about it. Underneath my profound experience of the great solar eclipse is a natural and rare lesson in kenosis, a Greek word meaning “self-emptying” or “complete or total gift of self.” What is our proper response to God’s great and total gift of self? It is the total receiving of God’s gift and then offering the total gift of ourselves back in return.

Nell O’Leary

Mothering has been reduced to a transactional performance in our digital villages, and it’s time to shift that perspective. What role does our Heavenly Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, have to play in all this brunching and card signing and hashtagging #happymothersday? She teaches us how to mother in one simple way: receptivity. If the metric is shifted from transactional perfection to radical receptivity, we only need one voice: that of our Beloved.

Alejandro Terán-Somohano

If Sauron’s ring is a mythical treatment of the placing of one’s power in some external object, we can now see how it is an apt image of our relationship with machines and devices. With modern technology, we become passive. Our machines become capable of more, while we become capable of less. And because we can do less, we rely more and more on our devices, becoming increasingly dependent on them, bound to them, restless without them—like Bilbo, or worse yet, Gollum.

Colin Smith 

To protect the environment, we don’t need to buy into an ideology of environmentalism. And if we value economic wellbeing and human ingenuity, we needn’t defend a proud and careless utilitarianism. Sifting the elements of truth in each in the light of reason and revelation, the Church offers an alternative that is not a mere compromise but a substantive, balanced, and integral vision.

Word on Fire

“The greatest thinkers of history tended to be theists, and there are good philosophical reasons why that was the case.” In his new Institute course, Dr. Feser demonstrates how “the thesis that God exists does indeed have a rational basis, and that there are no good grounds for the cliché that belief in God is essentially nothing more than a matter of blind faith, emotion, cultural prejudice, or the like.”

Dr. Christopher Kaczor

The view that all reality is one, that the distinctions between things are mere illusions, is sometimes called “monism.” Should we accept this idea that all reality is really just one? Advocates for monism hold that it is true that “all things are one” and that it is false that there are in fact many different things. But this assertion presupposes a difference between truth and falsity. So, the claim that “all things are one” is a self-defeating statement.

Vanessa Lopez

Grace is the name we give to God’s life in our souls. Grace is like the flow of electrons passing to us in the Person of God the Holy Spirit. When we receive God’s grace and pass it on freely to our neighbors, we help to unite all of creation in the beautiful flow of going out from God and returning to Him—exitus and reditus—the divine electrical circuit of love.