Pathways, July 2026
Each month, we keep track of the different paths that modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we recently found in our modern life.
Welcome back to Pathways!
This month our friends from Loyola Chicago’s Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage published a new issue of their journal Nexus on “Catholic Media Ecology: Realists, Influencers, Neighbors.” The issue features work by Sr. Theresa Aletheia Noble of the Sisters of the Little Way and Brett Robinson on the Church’s relation to transformative media through the ages, and the Catholic convert and new media theorist Marshall McLuhan (best known for his core insight, “the medium is the message”). It also explores Aaron Lewis and Josh Morin’s production of an LLM called “StatueGPT” that
can play the role of any statue that the learner stands in front of, bringing the stone’s story to life. A simple trigger — “Hello [Name]” — cues the bot to pull all the publicly available information it can find about that figure. It then carries on a first-person conversation with the learner based on their questions, curiosities, and close observations of the artwork (the sculpture’s pose, gesture, and habit).
This LLM was first piloted at the November 2024 Catholic Media Influencer Summit at the University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, IL, where it allowed attendees to “talk” to statuary on campus, including St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Therese, and St. Pope Pius X. The effort to bring into being an "incarnational digitality” is admirable, but it sounds a bit too much like a first step toward uploading our minds to the cloud. Isn’t “incarnational digitality” a contradiction in terms?
July also saw symposia by Commonweal and America Magazine on the reception of Magnifica humanitas and the crisis of male loneliness respectively. See especially Kevin Gallagher on the “radical implications” of Magnifica humanitas and Patrick Gilger on the scripts of the bro-sphere.
One of my favorite reads was this tremendous essay in The Lamp by Merlin Holland, the only grandchild of Oscar Wilde. In this excerpt from his new book, After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal, Holland explores the upbringing of Wilde’s two sons (Holland’s father, Vyvyan, and his uncle, Cyril) in the shadow of Wilde’s trial, imprisonment, and death. It is a deeply moving portrait of two boys’ relationship to their father and his legacy. Holland’s book speaks directly to this journal’s animating questions about genealogy and our relation to the past.
Other things we’re reading:
Plough asked Christian Wiman, Emily Wilson, Dana Gioia, and many others—” “Who is America’s Homer?” Their answers may surprise!
Check out some wonderful thinking about Marian genealogies in “The Madonna and Child who captured the world’s attention on Pope Leo’s Africa trip” by Marie Glancy O’Shea
An insightful essay that historicizes “Skill Nostalgia” by Joshua Habgoode-Coote and includes figures like John Ruskin and William Morris of the Arts and Crafts Movement
Carlos Noreña speculates on an “interconnected global antiquity” that precedes the “global Middle Ages”
In an excellent appraisal of Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear (2026) in the LA Review of Books, Anna Ballan wonders whether Burke’s critique of the “tradwife” is a little thin, a kind of strawman (strawwoman?) whose takedown falls along predictable, partisan lines:
Burke, alas, tends to fall back on a familiar binary: the empowered career woman whose life is secretly empty (Reena) contra the submissive homemaker whose life is secretly a prison (Natalie). The possibility that most women live somewhere in between—negotiating trade-offs and imperfect arrangements—barely registers in the novelistic frame, perhaps deliberately so. We deal instead in the realm of caricature: Angry Women, tradwives, and a kind of frantic oscillation between the two. It is a polarization the novel cannot quite think beyond, and one that finally recruits the reader into sharing its terms.
And finally, a somewhat consoling essay by Benjamin S. Bernard on the university’s historical entanglements with crisis. As it turns out, crisis in the university—due to plague, ideological conflict, or technological revolution—is the rule rather than the exception. Find whatever solace you can in that!
Commissioning Editor Lucas Carroll will be putting the next Pathways digest together. You won’t want to miss it—it promises to be an epic voyage!
See you back here in August.
