What earlier ages described as communion or participation reappears in a new vocabulary of entanglement and interdependence… The underlying insight is familiar: the world is not a collection of discrete objects but a web of relationships, a reality that becomes understandable only through forms of participation.

Brian M. Ross on the compatibility of religion and science

“We must recognize that the post-Cartesian reductive-materialist frameworks will never be sufficient to support a robust and expansive human flourishing.”
M. G. Scott on re-accessing metastructure

“The truly strange thing about quantum mechanics is not the content of the theory: it’s the way that quantum mechanics threatens to upend our fundamental relationship to reality itself.”

M. G. Scott on quantum mechanics and truth.

“The opposite of the self-defining subject of the postmodern era is one whose existence is conditioned entirely by realities outside the self. ”

M. G. Scott on the existential comforts of Greek tragedy.

Evidently, the language which would be assumed under the Eighth Amendment originates from the intent of delegates to secure proper respect for the unalienable rights of all people.

Jackson Jannell on liberty and death

The posters on my wall are meant to evoke a vintage style, but they are really artistic echoes of centuries of attempts to catalog the world, from book lists to agricultural pictures to Sears’s grandiosity.

Carl Friesenhahn on trade catalogs as maps of modernity

The convergence of liberalism and gnosticism has fundamentally reshaped our political landscape.

Andrew Latham glimpses a “Gnostic Leviathan”

[T]he particular form of liberalism we see today is influenced by what can be described as a contemporary form of gnosticism.

Andrew Latham on the myth of post-liberalism

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