When Austin acquired a Major League Soccer team in 2020, the name, colors, and logo of the new club communicated to the world exactly how we view our city. The simple team name, “Austin FC,” for instance, showed the pride residents place in Austin as its own brand. After all, it is a global destination … Continue reading Ice Ice Baby.
Quiet Time
Is it Time to Quit 'Quiet Time'? Maybe we should follow the example set by the early church that Justin Martyr described, reading the Bible at length together and discussing the difficult questions it raises, rather than passively listening or uncritically relying on theological commentary. We can welcome loving, humble disagreement for the sake of … Continue reading Quiet Time
Coming Apart
From Chapter 3: A New Kind of Segregation: "[In 1960] Austin's wealthiest citizens lived to the west of downtown and north of the Colorado River in four census tracts that comprised 16 percent of Austin's adult population. The median family income in those affluent census tracts was $60,700 (in 2010 USD) - roughly the income … Continue reading Coming Apart
Limits of AI
Noam Chomsky: The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system … Continue reading Limits of AI
The Postmodern Predicament
I am making my way through Love and the Postmodern Predicament: Rediscovering the Real in Beauty, Goodness and Truth by D.C. Schindler. Schindler prefaces the argument of his book with the following claim: "Modern culture is largely a conspiracy to protect us from the real. Though it has opened up horizons in all sorts of … Continue reading The Postmodern Predicament
Father Love
My brother likes to send me articles that hit me right in the heart. Like this piece by Francis X. Maier, on how Father Love is a Hard Love: We too often take for granted the love between our parents, and so we never fully appreciate it. In my father’s tears were forty-two years of love, … Continue reading Father Love
backwards with time 