Featured

The Joys of Tech Asceticism
Elon Musk, the man who started four billion-dollar tech companies, is worried that computers are on course to kill us.
Peter Mommsen
From the Editor
Anabaptist Technology
In 1998, Community Playthings, the church-run manufacturing business based in New York in which I work, tried abandoning email...
John Rhodes
Essay
The Immortality Machine
Is transhumanism, with its dreams of immortality, acceptable to Christians?
Essay
The Perfect Tool
“The axe is the perfect tool. It is the tool. It is tool. Every woodworking tool is resting there in the axe waiting to be born.”
Susannah Black Roberts
Doers
Simulating Religion
“Strange and surprising subcultures are thriving in Silicon Valley, among them a loose-knit community calling themselves rationalists.”
Alexi Sargeant
Essay
The Gods of Progress
We speak of progress, but where are we progressing to? In 1948, a British farmer-poet penned this prophetic essay.
Philip Britts
Essay
The Technology of Gender
What’s at stake when we artificially alter a human being in regard to something as fundamental as biological sex? An interview with Dr. Paul R. McHugh.
Interview

Insights

Your Neighbor Lives Next Door
When folks ask us what it’s like to live without the conveniences of modern technology, our best answer is that it has localized our lives.
Essay
Endangered Habitat
Just as we protect endangered natural habitats, so we must preserve silence, the space that allows both speech and the soul to flourish.
Essay
Meet a True Story
Technology fails to satisfy our need for real human connection. A boom in live storytelling could be changing that.
Essay
The Immortality Delusion
A prescient reading on technology from C. S. Lewis’s novel, That Hideous Strength.
CS Lewis
Reading
The Pencil Box
“God bless the craftsmen who give their fellow men such feelings even out of pieces of wood.”
Reading
Why Children Need White Space
Just as books require white space, so do children. They need room to grow, in a space shielded from the onslaught of the information age.
Johann Christoph Arnold
Reading
The Soul of Work
Love is work, work of muscle and mind, heart and soul. Therefore this kingdom of love – this kingdom of the church and of the coming rule of God – must be a kingdom of work.
Eberhard Arnold
Reading
Digging Deeper: Issue 15
Books that help us think well about technology: Shop Class as Soulcraft, The Abolition of Man, Brave New World, Technopoly, and Devices of the Soul.
Digging Deeper
Insight: Finding Someone to Worship
Have you ever looked at the world to see what is driving it, what it has dreamed up in the way of worshiping God in some way?
Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt
Inklings
Insight: Friedrich Froebel
“You, who roam through garden and field, through meadow and grove, why do you close your mind to the silent teaching of nature?”
Friedrich Froebel
Inklings
Insight: Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer
As a farmer, I do almost all of my work with horses. As a writer, I work with a pencil or a pen and a piece of paper.
Wendell Berry
Inklings

Arts & Letters

A poem for my son about grace
My son slouches when he walks,/ shoulders rounded, chin jutted/ forward, his self moving slow . . .
Jacob Stratman
Poetry
Go On, Inner Man
“I began this painting while living as a hermit in Kansas. By the time it was finished it had grown into a wedding gift to my wife.”
Another View
Readers Respond: Issue 15
Anabaptist triumphalism; Church, state, and monarchy; Iraq’s Christians; remembering the elderly; and Early Christian hope.
Forum
How to Homestead a Hermitage
“How far is it to Bethlehem?” Not very far indeed, say fifteen minutes’ walk. See, there it is through the olive trees.
Dispatch
The Pen and the Keyboard
A vintage pen signifies much more than just another tool, even to the tuned-in and logged-on Millennial.
Viewpoints