Newman’s model of liberal arts study provides an ideal roadmap for how to create a program that would encourage focused, meaningful interdisciplinary learning.

Gina Elia on the application of Newman’s ideals

To showcase the ongoing relevance of a liberal arts education to students, programs should emphasize the roles of generalists, as opposed to specialists, in a society’s infrastructure.

Gina Elia on the ongoing urgency of John Henry Newman

The popularity of Hacks speaks to our moment, in which adult child estrangement is fairly common.

Elizabeth Stice on modern intergenerational humor

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we found in early 2025 on our modern life.

The posters on my wall are meant to evoke a vintage style, but they are really artistic echoes of centuries of attempts to catalog the world, from book lists to agricultural pictures to Sears’s grandiosity.

Carl Friesenhahn on trade catalogs as maps of modernity

Genealogies of Modernity’s Best of 2024

The convergence of liberalism and gnosticism has fundamentally reshaped our political landscape.

Andrew Latham glimpses a “Gnostic Leviathan”

[T]he particular form of liberalism we see today is influenced by what can be described as a contemporary form of gnosticism.

Andrew Latham on the myth of post-liberalism

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we found in November 2024 on our modern life.

[A]n enlarged sense of self in the universe is in demand.

Elizabeth Stice on eating habits in The Broom of the System

How do we stay human in the midst of digital upheaval?

An interview with Peco and Ruth Gaskovski

Announcing free teaching aids and resources for high school and college-level students!

Liberalism is often taken to be essentially about the promotion of radical individual autonomy, but might this understanding of liberalism be only one kind of liberalism?

Beatrice Institute interviews Fred Bauer

The Genealogies of Modernity Substack is now live!

[M]oments of beauty, however brief, impact our hearts, minds, and souls in a profound way. What exactly is occurring in these moments?

Beatrice Institute interviews John-Paul Heil

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we found in October 2024 on our modern life.

The genealogical description insists on erasing hundreds of years of Christian life. The writer awkwardly alludes to Christianity but cannot imagine that it has any real importance except as a machine for appropriating pagan practices.

Terence Sweeney critiques pop-genealogies of Halloween

[P]roponents of AI argue that as long as we are masters of ourselves, we needn’t worry that AI will master us. But as all the writers of the Romantic era knew, men are helpless when in the thrall of powers greater than themselves.

Elizabeth Stice offers a Romantic reading of AI

Lean more about the Genealogies of Modernity Project: our journal, our podcast, and our vision.

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we found in September 2024 on our modern life.