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

[The 1990s] can demonstrate the existence and possibility of the very kind of “miracles” that Arendt encourages us to expect and initiate.

Elizabeth Stice explores glimmers of historical hope

If we want memories of miracles to draw on, we can do worse than to remember the 1990s.

Elizabeth Stice on the human role in history's miracles

The story of modernity is not so much that we have expelled the gods and that their throne sits empty but rather that it has been filled with a new god.

Grant Martsolf and Brandon Daily conclude their series from The Savage Collective

Flourishing consists of the realization of basic, natural goods constitutive of human personhood emerging from our nature as fully embodied souls.

Grant Martsolf sets the scope of The Savage Collective

What is Flourishing? What is good work?

Grant Martsolf and Brandon Daily introduce The Savage Collective

Despite the arrogance of modern thinkers and the mountains of data tech companies collect about us, they still fail to know us deeply.

Charles R. Martelle offer a principal’s view on a modern crisis of attention

Either humanity, and thus each and every human, has dignity in its current state, or it, and by extension we, can never claim to have, or give, dignity.

John P. Slattery offers a genealogy of eugenics

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