Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we recently found on our modern life.

An ethic that is averse to instrumentality animates the thought of contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and can be seen in Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, released in 2025.

Kyle Sossamon on an ethics of gesture

In most areas, Machiavelli and Erasmus disagree, but both adamantly warn princes against flatterers. Though medieval princes are rare in the present, warnings against flatterers may be more widely applicable than ever before because of AI.

Elizabeth Stice on genealogies of flattery

Monsters show that our critiques should target not only the process that turned nature into a mute object at the disposal of the human, but also the correlative process that reduced divine and supernatural forces to superstitions of the past.

Emre Keser on monsters and history

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we recently found on our modern life.

The seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony is filled with the paradoxes and tensions that are required to define and depict modernity: Latin encircling King James English, the indigenous name Massachusetts subsumed by Nova Anglia, and the Native man always simultaneously noble and savage, inviting and threatening.

Julian Sieber on colonial modernity

The Massachusetts Bay Colony Seal is in and of itself a rather compact genealogy of modernity. The image is a discursive moment that actively constructs a sense of what it means to be modern, and it neatly highlights several important phenomena that cohere to underpin Western colonial modernity: seals/logos, the Bible, and the construction of “the Indian.”

Julian Sieber on colonial modernity

Two films of the past fifteen years, The Book of Eli (2010) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), dramatize this confluence of grifter capitalism and religious demagoguery in the years immediately prior to Trump’s real-life rise to power. 

J. Laurence Cohen on the fusion of religion and politics in the US

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we recently found on our modern life.

There is no fate a human being can face that will render bringing them into the world immoral…. But it can be a moral failure to knowingly bring a child into the world and not be ready to address, in whatever way you can, the challenges they will face.

Anthony Shoplik interviews Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman

For most of human history, people understood themselves intergenerationally, as having a past and having a future that extended beyond their lives and that they would be directly contributing to bringing about.

Anthony Shoplik interviews Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman

The past cannot confirm what we say of it; there are always details left in silence, despite our best efforts; whispers that are barely legible; haunting echoes that quietly ripple through time.

Zaccary A. Haney on identity and history

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we recently found on our modern life.

Schmitt’s interpretation of politics as fundamentally being a fight between friends and enemies may well, at its core, be correct. Yet, Schmitt’s trying to tie this claim to space is a failure which cannot be ignored.

Sam Mace on Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy dichotomy

One path by which we might regain our sense of place in the universe lies in the way of modern evolutionary theory. The theory of evolution not only explains phenomena that the great chain of being couldn’t account for, but also has provided us with a new model by which we might orient ourselves in the world.

Julia Powell’s genealogy of the Great Chain of Being

The chain of being began in ancient philosophy, but it reached its fullest and most systematic expression in medieval Christendom. In the hands of medieval scholastics, the chain of being was personified.

Julia Powell’s genealogy of the Great Chain of Being

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we recently found on our modern life.

What would it mean for the Church to redeem, rather than merely adopt, digital media?

Arthur Aghajanian on Christian visual culture

Where in the past, challenges for both artists and churches included scarcity, durability, and doctrinal clarity, today’s churches are challenged by excess, novelty, distraction, and the difficulty of sustaining contemplation. How does a sacred image rise above the noise? How can it function as an enduring, spiritually formative encounter as opposed to fleeting visual content?

Arthur Aghajanian on Christian visual culture

Genealogy of Modernity’s Best of 2025—And More to Come!