Two Lewises and the Megamachine
Two new pieces: one on C.S. Lewis and one that tackles Lewis Mumford. The former focuses on Paradise Lost, and the latter on the good of machines and technology.
I’ve been a bit slower on the posting uptake lately—largely due to the fact that I was in the homestretch of my book on intelligent design (which I’m happy to report that I have finished and submitted).
The book will be published by NYU Press, hopefully sometime early next year. I’ll certainly relate more information about it as more becomes available.
In the meantime, I have two more pieces I’ve written, both touching the two Lewises (C.S. and Mumford), figures who’ve had an inordinate impact on my thinking.
The first is a summary review of C.S. Lewis’s A Preface to Paradise Lost, which is probably his most lasting and influential piece of academic writing. This is the third in my series on his academic books, and the Preface is especially interesting in that it had a long-term effect on readings of Paradise Lost (mostly in Lewis’s argument that, no, Satan is not the hero of the story (sorry, William Blake)).
Following up on this, I drew a lot on the thought of Lewis Mumford, whose thinking on technology and machinery is critically important today.
The occasion for this article was my sense that those of us who are “critics” of technology need to also take more stock of all the benefits of machinery and technology (beyond just medicine), and think in a more nuanced way about how technologies can be good and bad, and in what ways they might be. Furthermore, might machines possibly be our allies in the fight against Mumford’s main villain: the Megamachine?
Moving forward, I’m planning to write another piece on The Book of the New Sun, with a focus on its theology, as well as a number of other tech-focused articles.
Many thanks again for reading.