Pathways

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 February on our modern life.

We need good history and good genealogical work if we are going to resist the threat of figures like Putin. The New Yorker

An anti-modern pro-medieval Dominican Friar helped form contemporary Catholicism. Church Life Journal 

Who knew that dixieland and German beer are essential to the genealogy of pizza?An Eccentric Culinary History

When a religion declines, it leaves a host of sacred objects—too many to be conserved as heritage: the rest become waste. What about recycling? Allegra Lab

Did modernity start with univocity? The Reformation? The scientific revolution? No. It was the tractor that dragged us into the modern world. The Washington Examiner 

Can we mourn or remember objects that have become useless? Yes, and we should. The Baffler

A high-resolution picture of kinship practices in an Early Neolithic tomb. Nature

When modern citizens try to honor the segregationist wishes of the dead in their cemeteries. The Order of the Good Death

And also from Newton, a short meditation and a list of books about ancestor-focused spiritual practices. Substack

Explorer Tara Roberts took up diving to learn about wrecks from the era of slave shipping. She wound up connecting with her family’s past. National Geographic. 

The doctrine evolving around AI is not, in fact, a holdover from the Dark Ages. Rather, it resembles the theology that emerged alongside the birth of modernity.The Believer