Pathways

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking right now and how writers are trying to keep up. Here are some routes we found in June that opened up new vistas on what it means to be modern and how became we that way.

At GenMod, we kind of love Samuel Johnson, so we are excited about Yale’s publication of his complete works.

Augusto Del Noce’s genealogy of the stagnation of leftist politics in Europe.

Race and modernity may turn out to be inseparable constructs.

If we are all going to move back to the suburbs, we should know a little about the history of picket fences, driveways, and big yards.

Can we recover the sound of the original Bach? Do we even want to?

Can three moral thinkers—James Baldwin, Augustine, and Frederick Douglass—give us the wisdom we need in the face of racism’s persistence?

Maybe the Spanish empire wasn’t so bad?

Speaking of Empires, did a pandemic bring down the Roman Empire?

Reverse modernity a little bit and get religious art out of museums and back into churches.

Rather than relativism or persecutory certainty, maybe we need moral ambiguity?

Want to understand history? You probably should reread Beowulf.

We need to choose between different kinds of secularity if we are going to find a way forward for religion in the contemporary world.

We may be entering a new Axial Age and finding a new ground for the sacred.

Was Pius IX the last figure who could really say no to modernity and actually stop it?

If the world is falling apart, we might need to look to the philosophy of Bernard Lonergan, SJ to find a way to put it together in a more authentic way.

You know what is a scandal? Thinking that our obsession with scandal is all that new.