The Given World
These posts are part of an ongoing project committed to resisting what G.K. Chesterton called “a small and cramped eternity” — that profane vision of Christianity as somehow limited to what happens on a Sunday morning, rather than a vision-shattering insight into reality itself.
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Leaving Facebook
Finally, after actually months of planning to do it, I deleted my Facebook account. For whatever reason, I was dragging my feet. I didn’t want to figure out the process for downloading photos and videos. I felt wistful about the interactions I’d had with old classmates. I wondered how I would be able to promote…
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Is Not This Thing in My Right Hand a Lie?
I made a video last year in 2023 after reading something in the book of Isaiah that felt weirdly prescient. After all, this was a book written anywhere between six and eight centuries before Christ (depending on who you ask), yet it had passages like this one…
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A Longing for the World
I work in a city. Every day, I travel along asphalt roads, past soaring, steel skyscrapers. Life under these peculiarly modern conditions often leaves me longing for more – longing for the world, even, as if the day-to-day world I find myself in is concealing something deeper that’s become hidden from view. At times, I…
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The One Devices
When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007, he made a point of emphasizing that he was not presenting a phone or an iPod or an internet communication device: “These are not three separate devices. This is one device.”
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The Physical Internet
The question, “What is the Internet?”, has meaning because, despite our daily engagement with it, we often have no idea just what constitutes it. We are aware that its superficial reality — what we actually engage with via sophisticated UX/UI — is radically not the same as its physical reality. I have often wondered whether…
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Towards a Handmade Digital Artifact
How artists and designers are applying real world constraints to the digital in order to make something new Bradley Hart creates art with bubblewrap, paint, and syringes. He starts by using a computer to transform an image — the Mona Lisa or a Van Gogh self-portrait — into a series of coloured dots. Once these dots and…
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The Men Who Helped the Inklings
Reflections on two lives lived in humble service It’s been nearly four years since the passing of Walter Hooper, the longtime literary executor of the C.S. Lewis Estate. I wrote a short reflection on Hooper back in 2020 when he passed and then posted it to a random blog I was trying to make happen at the time.…
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Little We See in Nature
On the built environment as sleep paralysis In René Descartes’s Third Meditation on the existence of God, he writes: I will now shut my eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all my senses. I will eliminate from my thoughts all images of bodily things, or rather, since this is hardly possible, I will regard all such images…
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On Plankton
Trying to Find the Edges of the Built World The thought that has occupied me on my commute lately is about the worlds that we occupy. Mostly, we (or at least those of us who live in North America) live in a built world. It’s a world almost 100% permeated by human and technological influence. It seems…
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Old-School Movie Magic
Fetish or Sacrament? My kids and I have been watching Light and Magic, a docuseries on Disney+ all about the history of the special effects house, Industrial Light & Magic. The series begins by outlining George Lucas’s rationale for establishing the company. His vision of a space opera that would merge the visuals of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001:…
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