The Humanitas Forum

If you don’t carry a smartphone you’re old, odd, or eccentric.  You are hopelessly out of step with the times, according to conventional wisdom.  But is this wisdom?  Or, more precisely, convention without wisdom? 

Technology …

It may be the techies themselves who give us some of our better advice in the debate about the use of communications technology.  Kevin Kelly, senior maverick for Wired magazine, has written that smartphones are the new “sugar and …

Attention is a finite resource—a fact rarely acknowledged in our culture of busyness and 24/7 connectivity.  But we need to attend to attention because it is “the faculty by which [we] encounter the world.”

This is the case …

Friendship, like family and community, has fallen on hard times in our modern world.  Mobility, busyness, digital technology and numerous other factors have contributed to the thinning—if not the disappearance—of “true friendship.”  Friendship has become “the characteristically modern …

Few books reward close reading—and rereading and reading yet again—as richly as does C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves.  Each of the “four loves”—affection, friendship, Eros, and charity—has fallen on hard times in our modern world, something Lewis …

Traffic jams and overloaded brains are the products of modern life.  And they are similar in significant ways.  Traffic slows when there are too many automobiles on a roadway, producing irritated drivers and causing accidents. Brain overload also …

Boredom is the all-encompassing name we give our discontent in this late modern age.  Boredom gained prominence as a social condition in the 18^th century when the word was invented, according to Patricia Meyer Spacks, author of Boredom: …

“We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us” wrote communications expert Marshall McLuhan in the early 1960s.  His assessment of the various communications media (radio, television, movies, telephones, and computers) was simply, “We become what we behold.”…

Two revolutions have radically altered the way families think about the meaning of the “home.”  The technological revolution currently extends and broadens the impact of the industrial revolution.  As a result, prevailing family practices create tension with a …

“‘They grow up so fast’ used to be a wistful sigh; now it’s a panicked cry for help from parents watching their 10-year-old daughters critique Miley Cyrus’s twerking and discuss oral sex with their friends.”

Thus runs the caption …