Every spoken word was a pilgrim, in some sense, passing through the valley of the shadow of death.

Lauren Spohn ponders death from the dentist’s chair

Do bioethicists actually change minds?

An interview with Michael Deem

Kierkegaard is the thinker that overcomes the systemic optimism of Hegel with meaning and morality actualized by personal commitment to truth, goodness, and beauty.

Chris L. Firestone responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast

His experience was that poetry—Romantic poetry in particular—had the potential to expand perception by rousing the imagination in a way that forged a new unity of self and world.

Ashton Arnoldy on modernity as real stage in human history

[T]the distinction we make today between inner realities (consciousness) and outer realities (the physical universe) is not final, nor is it an accurate basis for reconstructing… the pre-human past.

Ashton Arnoldy on modernity as real stage in human history

Contentment requires that one appreciate the good things in life.... We should view reality with a loving, contemplative gaze, as if we were looking at the Rowan Tree.

Xavier Symons reviews the film Living as an antidote to modern malaise

Philosophy does not point toward an abstract transhistorical truth for humanity, but rather to a murky, historically contingent truth… the truth of historical and material conditions.

Joseph Natali on Horkheimer’s Discontinuity with the Ancients

It is only through the practice of an explicitly critical philosophy that a wholly stagnant self-affirming social order can be avoided.

Joseph Natali on Horkheimer critical theory and the meaning of philosophy

For Horkheimer, his method of critical theory, are the truest continuation of the initial philosophic project of the Western tradition.

Joseph Natali on Max Horkheimer and the critical role of Socrates

It is fitting that Arendt, a thinker who celebrates the possibilities of natality—the joy of new beginnings and of unpredictable ripple effects—made such a long-distance friendship possible.

Sanjana Rajagopal on intellectual debts and friendships

Reading her poetry, one follows Pinkerton’s journey away from Eros and the self through prayer and philosophy and the contemplation of existence, time, the physical world, and faith.

Mary Grace Mangano’s review of Helen Pinkerton’s poems

If all contemplative elements are driven out of life, it ends in a deadly hyperactivity. The human being suffocates among its own doings.

James Lawson on Jacques Maritain and Byung-Chul Han

The most pernicious problem is his political Nestorianism: he thinks that if politics is conventional or humanly constructed, it cannot be sacral or divine.

Matt Boulter reviews Simon Kennedy’s Reforming the Law of Nature

The path toward greater intellectual, social, and spiritual wholeness cannot bypass the enactment of Black dignity but must run through it.

Andrew Prevot reviews Vincent Lloyd’s Black Dignity

Reading Smith’s “How to Inhabit Time” is itself a practice of spiritual timekeeping, granting the attentive reader a space and time in which to give herself over to reflection.

Caroline Arnold on living in hope

Is life a gift? Or a calamity? Is existence to be affirmed, or avoided? The answer to those questions may very well depend on what you think about the possibility of forgiveness.

Jeffrey Wald reviews Johua Hren’s novel Infinite Regress

For us—every human who has been born and who is yet to be born—birth is one of the known unknowns in one’s life.

Donato Loia on the mystery of having been born at all

If you give your soul to the enterprise, for the sake of your desire to live a meaningful life beyond its reach, you might be rewarded with the blessing of forgetting that such a life was ever possible.

Daniel Cunningham on the neoliberal wager

If we lose track of natality, newness, and birth, we will ourselves become gray-haired obstructers of the new. Genealogists do not just trace the past. We are students of birth.

Terence Sweeney on genealogy and old age with Arendt and Nietzsche

Glorifying the apparently obvious becomes a way of warding off the transcendent, since distraction—made easier by friction-free, disembodied typographic banality—becomes the primary mode of attention.

Duncan Reyburn on mimetically uniform fonts