The dystopian horror of a future where “defective” embryos are targeted for destruction should be obvious, though to many it is evidently not. Siddiqui retweeted someone saying he can’t understand the outrage over intentional embryo sorting, when the very process of IVF (as most commonly practiced) guarantees not all embryos once created can be implanted. If people are unbothered by the fact that embryos in general are discarded all the time, whence the squeamishness at the proposal to ...| sarahendren.com
I’ve been living with Alasdair MacIntyre frequently in my head for the last couple of years. This recent lecture explores some of what’s been on my mind. I’m still making sense of the way my mind changed in mid-life, and I find it reassuring that MacIntyre also had several big intellectual and religious conversions (and, also like me, no PhD!). I’ll be trying to write more about him in coming months and years. This remembrance is lovely:| sarahendren.com
I am thoroughly enjoying Birnam Wood:| sara hendren
When we gathered as a class in the wake of the A.I. assignment, hands flew up. One of the first came from Diego, a tall, curly-haired student — and, from what I’d made out in the course of the semester, socially lively on campus. “I guess I just felt more and more hopeless,” he said. “I cannot figure out what I am supposed to do with my life if these things can do anything I can do faster and with way more detail and knowledge.” He said he felt crushed.| sarahendren.com
This week I had architecture students reading about rural and remote spaces. Among other things, they looked at the terrific work of Rural Studio, Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and essays by Wendell Berry. I also included this interview with Berry, which cites an abbreviated version of his “agrarian values.” I asked students to identify the ideas that are not explicitly environmental, in the familiar green-rhetoric sense, and to speculate about why they might be part o...| sara hendren
Joseph Davis:| sarahendren.com
Brady Smith, on tagging along with his father to the meetings of his parish’s men’s group in the 90s:| sara hendren
What I said in the comments section of Freddie’s new post:| sara hendren
Alan Jacobs:| sara hendren
One through-line that unites [the] tics and splits [of the progressive left] is the enthusiasm for the medical-industrial complex and biotechnological intervention, which is why Illichian critics of the pharmaceutical industry, a long-standing faction on the post-Sixties left, are either politically homeless or now on the right. Think biotechnological Prometheanism. This tendency often takes bizarre and politically suicidal forms: instead of advocating for the expansion of the family model to...| sarahendren.com
We’ve talked about formation, readiness, and prescriptive disciplines. Today I want to talk about spaces for learning.| sarahendren.com
Part 1 and Part 2 in this series.| sarahendren.com
So we’ve looked at formation and freedom in the college decision process. I want to examine next the framework of readiness in higher education to get at formation in another way — what should four years make a student ready for? I’ve written about this subject before, but today I want to restate the strengths and add some of the weaknesses of this frame.| sarahendren.com
This is likely to be the first in a series of meditations on the college decision-making process. My two younger kids are embarking on the process now, so I’m thinking about the subject personally; my job as a professor means I’m thinking about it in my workplace, too. And I hardly need to say that the big questions are in the zeitgeist after this academic year: What kinds of four-year experiences are worth paying for? What’s available in that developmental window that can be nurtured a...| sarahendren.com