I wanted to draw some attention to this George Scialabba essay, Progress and Prejudice.

It’s a discursive, elegiac (nostalgic, really, but ‘elegiac’ sounds better, and there is an unspoken mournfulness in his particular nostalgia, so we may call it a sort of elegy) and looks at what formed his own idea of progress and the writers of the past, mostly those who regretted it, but also some who… I don’t know? Accepted it without too many regrets.

He puts a significant portion of the words in talking about Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, which I read not so long ago. Scialabba put his finger on several things that passed me by until he brought them up, including the theological aspect of the novel.