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 August that opened up new vistas on what it means to be modern and how we became that way.

Be very suspicious of simple, one-purpose answers; one trait they all share is that they’re wrong.

It's a rare moment indeed when the movie is better than the book.

Charles Taylor, Christian genealogist, talks about the great theologian and theorist of tradition, Yves Congar, OP.

What does the sunnah—exemplary practice of Muhammed—of honoring women mean today? A homiletic meditation.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr: Modernism Itself Is Extremism.

Let’s go back to St. Thomas Becket and wonder if we might rehabilitate him as a very modern saint. 

Herodotus, the original genealogist?

Acedia: the lost name for the emotion we’re all feeling right now.

How did we forget the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century?

Genealogy and the Politics of Representation in the High and Late Middle Ages.

Was the transformation of Dark Age Britain to early medieval England due to genes or memes? 

Painter Fan Kuan "was known as generous and easygoing, a lover of mountains, wine, and, above all, the Way—the path in life and harmony with nature known as the Tao."

Confucian values are being used to construct a national identity to replace what is now seen as the ineffective “foreign” ideologies of Marxism–Leninism in an attempt to secure the party-state’s leadership.