“What makes the sketch’s autonomy fantastical is the reciprocal sense in which formalizing and circulating itself as the process of its production reconstitutes its process as a commodity—indeed, as the commodification of the resistance to the commodity’s reification.”

Daniel Fulton Cheung on the “autonomy imperative”

What earlier ages described as communion or participation reappears in a new vocabulary of entanglement and interdependence… The underlying insight is familiar: the world is not a collection of discrete objects but a web of relationships, a reality that becomes understandable only through forms of participation.

Brian M. Ross on the compatibility of religion and science

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.

Either the mysterious structures underpinning our rationality are arbitrary and misleading, or—somehow—they broadly work… We are forced to wager that there is something somehow connecting our thoughts with reality. 

Kit Wilson on science, skepticism, and subjective experience

“As the great phenomenologists and theoretical physicists of the mid-twentieth century saw it, then, science simply cannot deny ordinary human experience without ultimately undermining itself.”

Kit Wilson on science and reality

“HBO’s Watchmen ruthlessly unmasks the fantasy that whistleblowers alone will end police corruption.”

J. Laurence Cohen explores genealogies of vigilante justice, from American history to HBO’s Watchmen

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’s the difference between a masked cop and a vigilante?”

J. Laurence Cohen explores genealogies of vigilante justice, from American history to HBO’s Watchmen

“Girardian revelation is a necessary addition to the genealogies of the modern, not in any sense of religion making a comeback to contest the secular, but in a sense internal to the secular itself. ”

Anthony Bartlett on René Girard

“Girard’s generative anthropology rises from a discovery of foundational violence, and constantly illustrates a desperate contemporary need to somehow free ourselves from this violence.”

Anthony Bartlett on René Girard

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.

“We must recognize that the post-Cartesian reductive-materialist frameworks will never be sufficient to support a robust and expansive human flourishing.”
M. G. Scott on re-accessing metastructure

“The truly strange thing about quantum mechanics is not the content of the theory: it’s the way that quantum mechanics threatens to upend our fundamental relationship to reality itself.”

M. G. Scott on quantum mechanics and truth.

“The opposite of the self-defining subject of the postmodern era is one whose existence is conditioned entirely by realities outside the self. ”

M. G. Scott on the existential comforts of Greek tragedy.

Elie pushes us to reconsider and expand our idea of what counts as religious and/or sacred art, but we should be careful not to collapse the transcendent sphere into the natural world.

Aaron James Weisel reviews Paul Elie’s latest book.

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.

Does the agonistic ritual of the potlatch—identified as “primitive” by some—only belong to the past or does it appear in the so-called modern world?

Carl Friesenhahn looks at three ways of answering this question.

Here in the middle of these muted colors and fantastical plot is an observation straight out of Hannah Arendt.

Elizabeth Stice on philosophy in Wes Anderson

Genealogies of Modernity remembers Alasdair MacIntyre

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.