“All the past incarnations of the katechon have resulted culturally in a progressive, step-by-step demystification of the nature of violence itself, bringing to the surface its mimetic and cyclic nature. Are we not at the point where the very discussion of the katechon involves an understanding of this nature and the actual unsustainability of violent solutions?”

Anthony Bartlett offers a genealogy of the katechon

“The most significant recent embrace of the katechon comes from tech-billionaire student of Girard and Trump/Vance backer, Peter Thiel. The connection with Girard makes this latest iteration doubly provocative and in need of serious examination.”

Anthony Bartlett offers a genealogy of the katechon

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

Either the mysterious structures underpinning our rationality are arbitrary and misleading, or—somehow—they broadly work… We are forced to wager that there is something somehow connecting our thoughts with reality. 

Kit Wilson on science, skepticism, and subjective experience

“As the great phenomenologists and theoretical physicists of the mid-twentieth century saw it, then, science simply cannot deny ordinary human experience without ultimately undermining itself.”

Kit Wilson on science and reality

“Girardian revelation is a necessary addition to the genealogies of the modern, not in any sense of religion making a comeback to contest the secular, but in a sense internal to the secular itself. ”

Anthony Bartlett on René Girard

“Girard’s generative anthropology rises from a discovery of foundational violence, and constantly illustrates a desperate contemporary need to somehow free ourselves from this violence.”

Anthony Bartlett on René Girard

“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.

Does the agonistic ritual of the potlatch—identified as “primitive” by some—only belong to the past or does it appear in the so-called modern world?

Carl Friesenhahn looks at three ways of answering this question.

Genealogies of Modernity remembers Alasdair MacIntyre

Williams’ work is not just a historical treatise but a call to deep introspection about what it means to live out one’s faith amidst the pressures of any culture that has a different telos than one’s religion.

LuElla D'Amico reviews Nadya Williams’ latest work

Mateusz Stróżyński on Owen Barfield, whose philosophy and poetry are “indispensable… for those who want to go beyond the present spiritual and cultural crisis.”

Every spoken word was a pilgrim, in some sense, passing through the valley of the shadow of death.

Lauren Spohn ponders death from the dentist’s chair

Is it possible to critique secularism in a thoroughly secular age?

Ali Harfouch on alienation and the sublime

Lunn’s story illustrates the reality that one need not choose between being a “modern” and “classical” mountain enthusiast or between being an inventor or follower of tradition.

Margaret Sutton on the “something else“ we find in the mountains

Do bioethicists actually change minds?

An interview with Michael Deem

Guns, in these contexts divorced from a practical function, have come to bear a symbolic meaning.

Catherine Yanko responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast

The emphasis in Western Christianity has been placed upon individual fallenness and the need for a personal conversion, in contrast to the deeply collectivist culture in which Jesus originally spoke.

Jonathan Lyonhart responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast

Kierkegaard is the thinker that overcomes the systemic optimism of Hegel with meaning and morality actualized by personal commitment to truth, goodness, and beauty.

Chris L. Firestone responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast