Genealogies of Modernity hosts a reading group on Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm’s The Genealogy of Genealogy

Maurin called socialism the offspring of capitalism. In his eyes, both capitalism and socialism regard money as the basis of reality. But to Peter Maurin, the person was the basis of reality. The development and cultivation of the human spirit—rather than economic development—would create a new society.

James Murphy and Renée Roden on Peter Maurin’s life and philosophy for our forum on Personalism and the Catholic Worker

Anthony Shoplik introduces our first forum

The U.P. possesses some quality that, in a particular and privileged way among America’s territories, points on a natural level to the supernatural. So, this is your invitation: book a trip to Marquette or Escanaba or Sault Ste Marie, rent a car, and drive – into the wilderness, into town, whatever – until inspiration strikes.

John-Paul Heil on the literature of the Upper Peninsula

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.

Exploring gender and sexuality in the Nigerian context allows us to consider how traditional cultures reflect an openness and flexibility that enables individuals who are often marginalized in modern societies to belong.

Obinna Tony-Francis Ochem on orality and modernity

Heidegger moved on from “facticity”… to the themes of “homecoming” (Heimkunft) in relation to Being, our gentle “releasement” (Galassenheit) and “openness” to all that is, our grateful reception of the “gift” of Being.

Richard Capobianco on the later Heidegger

Literary modernism is, in its way, a step towards the emergence of the fantasy genre, even as the modernist literary elite are the sort of readers prone to dismiss fantasy.

Sarah Coogan on the emergence of fantasy as a genre

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