benfridge's bookshelf

benfridge

Joined 2026-04-25

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benfridge.com Technology, Philosophy, and the Creative Life

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goodreads export to bookshelf import possible? goodreads drops a CSV file that could be culled to just title/author for ease of import... might be against ethos/philosophy of this platform- if so, total respect.

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Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

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Joining Creation's Praise: A Theological Ethic of Creatureliness

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The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

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Read 🪴

Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do

The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

An Essay on Typography

On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

A Creative Minority: Influencing Culture Through Redemptive Participation

Living into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Remembrance of Earth’s Past Trilogy

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control

Fox & I

Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

The Ministry for the Future

The Life We're Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning

The New Yorker Book of Technology Cartoons (with CD-Rom)

Domestic Monastery: Creating Spiritual Life at Home

The Carbon Almanac: It's Not Too Late

Mother Night

The First Law Triology

Hyperion

Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

Never Let Me Go

The Didache

The Monkhood of All Believers: The Monastic Foundation of Christian Spirituality

The Phantom Tollbooth

The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man

Practicing the Way

The Creative Act

Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

Abraham's Silence The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God

Women and the Gender of God

On the Incarnation

The Rule of Taize

The Medium is the Massage

The Way of the Ascetics: The Ancient Tradition of Discipline and Inner Growth

Julian of Norwich: The Showings: Uncovering the Face of the Feminine in Revelations of Divine Love

The Orthodox Way - Classics Series Vol. 2

Seeds of Contemplation

dune messiah

Dune

The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament

Interior Castle (The Essential Wisdom Library)

The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

Paul: A Biography

The Murderbot Diaries

Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier

Dark Night of the Soul (Tan Classics)

A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

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How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

Things in Nature Merely Grow

Searching for and Maintaining Peace: A Small Treatise on Peace of Heart

Gentleman Bastard Sequence

The Nurture Revolution: Grow Your Baby’s Brain and Transform Their Mental Health through the Art of Nurtured Parenting

Guards! Guards! (Discworld, #8; City Watch, #1)

Becoming the Pastor's Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman's Path to Ministry

Mistborn Era's #1-2

Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age

Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics

James

Bartleby the Scrivener

The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations

Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation

The Will of the Many

Reading for the Love of God

Prayer Vol. 01

The Overstory

Project Hail Mary

Dungeon Crawler Carl

The Sun Eater Cycle

Meister Eckhart's Book of Secrets: Meditations on Letting Go and Finding True Freedom (Wisdom of Meister Eckhart)

The Book of Longings

The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion

Flannery O'Connor and the Scandal of Faith

St. Francis of Assisi: His Life, Teachings, and Practice (The Essential Wisdom Library)

klara and the sun

How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South

Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad

Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

Steal Like An Artist

Playground

Piranesi

The Graveyard Book

The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

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The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

Antonin Sertillanges

finished: 2026-07-06 05:00:00

“Details are nothing: facts are nothing: the important things are the dependences, the transmissions of influence, the connecting links, the exchanges, which constitute the life of nature. Now, behind all these dependences, is the primal dependence; at the spot to which all connections converge is the supreme Bond; at the highest point of all transmissions, the Spring; beneath the exchanges the Gift; beneath the systole and diastole of the world, the Heart, the boundless Heart of Being. Must not the mind refer back to it unceasingly, and never for a minute lose touch with what is thus the All of all things, and consequently of all knowledge?” “When silence takes possession of you; when far from the racket of the human highway the sacred fire flames up in the stillness; when peace, which is the tranquillity of order, puts order in your thoughts, feelings, and investigations, you are in the supreme disposition for learning; you can bring your materials together; you can create; you are definitely at your working point; it is not the moment to dwell on wretched trifles, to half live while time runs by, and to sell heaven for nothings.” “The reward of a work is to have produced it; the reward of effort is to have grown by it.” "You want to produce an intellectual work? Start by creating within yourself a zone of silence, a habit of withdrawal, a will of dispossession, of detachment, that makes you entirely available for this work; acquire this state of soul, free from the weight of desire and one’s own will, which is the state of grace of the intellectual. Without this, you will not do anything; in any case, you will not do anything of value." "A chain compressed by narrow margins will go further. The discipline of a craft is a great school: it teaches the man of studies to expand his possibilities. Coerced, he concentrates more, learns the value of time, enthusiastically takes refuge in those rare hours when, duty fulfilled, he embraces his ideal, hours when he enjoys the chosen action, after the action imposed by harsh existence."

Hello Beautiful

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Babel

Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth

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Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth

Jennifer Banks

finished: 2026-07-06 05:00:00

"The Holocaust was a consequence of a death drive that ran deep through Western societies, one that had propelled humanity into a fruitless, barren place… Locked in their own privacy, flying into their inner selves, they had lost faith in their ability to transform their worlds and to create new, plural realities through their actions and their speech…" "From the time we are born, we are being shaped by birth… Study birth always; it takes an entire lifetime to learn how to give birth or to come to terms with our having been born… The great philosophers are those who practice being born and birthing… Keep birth daily before your eyes… Birth is evidence of our freedom... The fundamental purpose of art is to process the strange, painful, and miraculous experience of childbirth…" "Although humans may have been created out of nothingness, the fact that they were made at all paradoxically negates all forms of nothingness. “Once called into existence,” Arendt writes, summarizing Augustine, “human life cannot turn into nothingness.”" "Birth and the miracle of our creative beginnings are what indelibly shape us and prove our capacity to creatively act in the world." "Birth confounds the binary. It is an experience of neither mastery nor powerlessness; it confronts us with our embodied, earthly creativity, with what we can control and with what we simply cannot control…" "Birth breaks down most of the dualisms humans use to structure reality: man/woman, mind/body, thought/experience, destruction/creation, self/other, creator/created, birth/death. In challenging those binaries, birth can be an act of nonconforming, and motherhood an expression of alterity. Therein lies the difficulty of talking about birth today: birth is both the norm and its transgression."

With All Its Teeth: Sex, Violence, Profanity, and the Death of Christian Art

An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation

A Little Life

Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Suicide and the Communion of Saints

The Writing Life: The Classic Essay Collection on the Creative Process

Spirituality of the Psalms (Facets)

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

Collected Poems, 1909-1962

the burnout society

The Year of Magical Thinking

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

Open

The Imitation of Christ

There Is No Antimemetics Division

The Crisis of Narration

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A Larger Reality

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A Larger Reality

Ursula K. Le Guin

finished: 2026-07-06 05:00:00

"Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We'll need writers who can remember freedom-poets, visionaries- realists of a larger reality." "I create alternatives. I show that alternatives exist. Probably the sum total of my message to the world is that you do not have to do it one way." "I think art remains centrally important in any age, the best or the worst, because it doesn't lie. The hope it offers is not a false hope. And I think the novel is an important art because it talks about what we live by, other than bread. And I think science fiction is- well, no, not important, yet still worth talking about, because it is a promise of continued life of the imagination..." “I am not proposing a return to the Stone Age. My intent is not reactionary, nor even conservative, but simply subversive. It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth. All I’m trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks.” "Nature is humanity's "Other." As an Other, nature is demonized, idealized, extolicized, subordinated, objectified, and distance is lessened in a hundred thousand ways. To the extent any of us participate in this Othering, we lock ourselves out of community with the species with whom we share this world. We lock ourselves into a tiny, tiny cell that defines what we mean by "us." Solitary."

Don't Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again

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After Amen: 50 Days of Poetry and Prayer

A Wizard of Earthsea (The Earthsea Cycle, #1-3)

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