The donation of portable Mass kits was a way for non-combatants to participate in the war effort in a way that is uniquely tied to religious material culture.

Sarah Luginbill on medieval and modern liturgical inscriptions

At the heart of the modernist controversies was the question of how human subjects are able to experience the transcendent God.

Elizabeth Huddleston on the perplexity of modernism

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

The political is a lived medium through which we gain insight into the theological concepts that inform the political as one human hierarchy amongst others (economic, social, and so on).

Ali Harfouch on recovering the political through political theology.

How it is that the Christian past can be present here and now when it travels to us in the medium of a historical process not only fraught and irregular, but so often saturated with evil and sin?

Jonathan Heaps reviews Nothing Gained is Eternal

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

Ultimately, the council majority was victorious: anti-Modernist doctrinal documents failed to achieve a ‘controlling function’ at the Council.

Shaun Blanchard on leaving anti-modernism behind

Understanding how anti-Modernism was evoked and how anti-Modernist critiques were rebutted sheds light on Vatican II as a fundamental shift in the relationship between Catholicism and modernity.

Shaun Blanchard on Modernism and Vatican II

While the ancients understood justice as one virtue among many, we often view justice as the sole, super-virtue… thereby distorting justice itself and re-ordering it into something very different.

Br. Nicodemus Thomas on reuniting the cardinal virtues

There is a genealogical case to be made that the solidity of the modern scientific world picture may have been unwittingly grounded upon a theistic metaphysic.

JD Lyonhart on Henry More and the origins of modern space

Petrarch was a founder of an alternative modernity, which emphasizes the compatibility between the ancients and medievals by adhering to the traditional prioritizing of the contemplative over the active.

Michael Krom on spiritual ascents

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 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

The unity and coherence of Christian tradition is derived from the antecedent finality of its futural fulfilment and can’t be secured by appeal to a procrustean deposit of faith perduring through history.

Jack Pappas reviews David Bentley Harts’s Tradition & Apocalypse

The patriotism and religious piety felt by U.S. Catholics during WWI through efforts to supply devotional objects paved the way for the solidification of American Catholic identity.

Sarah Luginbill on portable altars and Catholics becoming American

This case illustrates the complex entanglement of enchantment and disenchantment in the 19th century, a dynamic participated in by Church and State, physicians and spiritualists—and angels in top-hats, too.

Richard Yoder on an angelic apparition

While Benjamin Lipscomb cannot be criticized for failing to say everything relevant on this history, it is worth noting that there may be a richer and longer history to be told here.

Nicholas Sparks reviews The Women Are Up to Something