Friday Links
Moon Over Ventnor City, NJ
May 29, 2026
Magnifica Humanitas
Idols of the Valley
Real and the Unreal
Cheap Tradsploitation of “Yesteryear”
How Occultists Remade the World
"The Novel: A Survival Skill"
Magnifica Humanitas
It now falls to us to face the challenges of our time with clarity of thought and responsibility. It is necessary to establish adequate regulatory tools capable of upholding justice and curbing the distorting effects of technological power. Nevertheless, the issue is not limited to regulation. As Pope Francis warned, we must realistically ask ourselves who holds this power today and how they use it: “It must also be recognized that nuclear energy, biotechnology, information technology, knowledge of our own DNA, and many other abilities which we have acquired… have given those with the knowledge, and especially the economic resources to use them, an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world.” [7] In the past, it was largely up to the State to guide and direct innovation. Today, however, the main drivers of development are private, often transnational, parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments. Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly “private” aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good.
Idols of the Valley
This is one unavoidable conclusion from reading Magnifica Humanitas. Leo XIII did not offer his guidance at the dawn of the industrial age. He thought and wrote near the end of the nineteenth century, when the character of industrial capitalism had become readily evident, and the nature of the benefits it offered and the challenges it posed could be articulated and classified. Leo XIV does not have that advantage. He is, like the rest of us, straining to grasp the contours of the still-emerging age of AI.
The principle of “The Three City Problem” is this: the relationship between faith, reason, and technology is both interdependent and complex, and those who attempt to evaluate any one dimension without reference to the others will be condemned to ignorance. They will have oversimplified and reduced the most fundamental metaphysical questions, much in the way that a chemist studying hydrogen alone, however rigorously, will never arrive at water — will never predict that bound to oxygen these two combustible gases yield the substance that puts out fires and sustains life. The bond is the thing. The atoms in isolation will tell you almost nothing about what they become together.
Cheap Tradsploitation of “Yesteryear”
The plot turns on a nifty conceit. Natalie Heller Mills is a tradwife influencer, a “good Christian woman” who runs a nostalgic hobby farm in Idaho with her husband, the scion of a political dynasty. The aesthetic is prairie dresses and sourdough starter. They have chickens and cows and scads of kids. A gigantic pantry hides the modern conveniences. Natalie’s whole life is a performance—for her TikTok, for herself. She despises her husband, resents her kids, and urges herself, “Don’t forget to smile!” One day she wakes up on the same farm but apparently in 1855, and the past she cosplayed gets real.
How Occultists Remade the World
The supernatural, it would appear, is on the move, and popes and priests aren’t the only ones who have noticed. By some estimates, practitioners of Wicca now outnumber mainline Presbyterians in America. In 2021, Pew reported that roughly 33 percent of American Christians believe in reincarnation. By 2025, it was estimated that 30 percent of all Americans, Christians or otherwise, were practicing astrology, tarot, or other forms of divination, and that 62 percent believed in one or more New Age ideas, be it psychics, crystals, spiritual energies, “positive thinking,” or the “law of attraction.” Popular religiosity appears to be shifting, and it’s not hard to see where it is headed.
"The Novel: A Survival Skill"
The thesis of The Novel: A Survival Skill flies squarely in the face of the so-called “biographical fallacy”—the idea, much beloved of professors in the 1970s, that an author’s life is irrelevant to our understanding of his works. When he was still a teenager, Parks wrote an essay arguing that T.S. Eliot’s “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” was intended to turn Eliot’s struggles with women into a “clever literary performance.” He received a bad grade on the essay: “biographical fallacy” was his teacher’s verdict.
