Entering the Pickle was also an unusual experience… a fact that the inscription “Step high, speak low, and leave your dignity behind” emblazoned on its front door… cheekily acknowledged.

Elysia Balavage on a bohemian pillar of the Chicago Renaissance

McLuhan sees our modern, technologically induced condition as a product of tensions between individualism and tribalism.

Éamon Brennan contests a standard reading of Marshall McLuhan

Scruton, looking at our days “sub specie aeternitatis,” even thinks that this time of decay gives us an opportunity to work on the behalf of religion, morality, and culture that “no previous generation has been granted, and which no future generation may desire.”

Julian Kwasniewski reviews Against the Tide

For more seasoned readers, these chapters also uncover the feline motifs that, like medieval marginalia, are everywhere on the edges of this history but have mostly escaped notice until now.

Caroline Hovanec reviews Marx for Cats

War, revenge, and obsession are driven by the perception of control and hopes for victory and utopia, but ultimately result in being drawn into one’s own destruction.

Sarah MacMillen delves into applications of the Golem myth

[T]o trace a genealogy of American gun violence would seem to require tracing the genealogy of a double-helix: the genealogy of guns and the genealogy of Americans-with-guns.

James DeMasi responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast

Winthrop’s remarkable sermon outside the distorting lens of contemporary American exceptionalism might just help us see that a new way forward—a way of love—is perhaps just a really old way forward.

Douglas Sikkema responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast

Those in the past are not only metaphors for how we view the family as a structure today: they were people whose lives can provide some vision for our own.

LuElla D’Amico responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast

This inability to stop engaging in unhealthy, excessive behavior is not unique to the current age.

Helena Vaughan on smartphones as a marker of modernity

Disenchantment talk… has the benefit of raising an alternative way of viewing reality to what has become deeply ingrained and habitual in us all.

Travis DeCook responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast

Humility is key to understanding modernity.

Rokhaya Dieng responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast

The best way to show students how the term “modernity” is wielded in this way is to highlight the variety of lifestyles that exist parallel to each other in the same era…

Gina Elia responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast

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

His experience was that poetry—Romantic poetry in particular—had the potential to expand perception by rousing the imagination in a way that forged a new unity of self and world.

Ashton Arnoldy on modernity as real stage in human history

[T]the distinction we make today between inner realities (consciousness) and outer realities (the physical universe) is not final, nor is it an accurate basis for reconstructing… the pre-human past.

Ashton Arnoldy on modernity as real stage in human history

[T]he decline of sickness funds and early community-rated plans transformed a system rooted in voluntarism and mutual aid…

Grant Martsolf on the transition from industrial sickness funds to insurance plans in the United States

How does the past bear on the present? Has “modernity” always been around?

Ryan McDermott’s interview with the Spiritually Incorrect Podcast

If we read Virgil’s works closely, we can see how he anticipates a Christian view of creation in his approach to the pastoral…. His vision of pastoral poetry is more Christian than classical.

Mary Grace Mangano on Virgil’s Christian approach to creation

Early modern science emphasized an optical connection to the universe,' making its brilliance appear close enough to touch. Tragically, this optical achievement consigned the individual to reflect on an unbridgeable distance.

Michael Golec on the confluence of civilization and barbarism

Today, the very nature and purpose of the family snapshot has changed. What does it mean that the majority of our pictures of family have become dematerialized?

Arthur Aghajanian on family photographs and the transcendent