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

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 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

The donation of portable Mass kits was a way for non-combatants to participate in the war effort in a way that is uniquely tied to religious material culture.

Sarah Luginbill on medieval and modern liturgical inscriptions

At the heart of the modernist controversies was the question of how human subjects are able to experience the transcendent God.

Elizabeth Huddleston on the perplexity of modernism

‘Tongue-in-cheek’ as it may be, but it conveys a Christian soteriology: through Christ’s sacrifice, death does not have the last word; and that mercy and love should extend to all.

Victoria Costa on Sir James MacMillan’s ‘St John Passion’

Through Peter’s silence hope is granted access to his despairing heart. Through silence ‘La Pasión’ is granted access to the audience, transforming the hearts that listen.

Victoria Costa on Golijov’s musical presentation of Peter’s betrayal.

Informed by Pärt’s own spirituality, ‘Passio’ participates in a wider musical exploration of Peter as emblematic of a fallenness redeemed and restored in relationship with God.

Victoria Costa on Arvo Pärt and Peter’s denial of Christ

How it is that the Christian past can be present here and now when it travels to us in the medium of a historical process not only fraught and irregular, but so often saturated with evil and sin?

Jonathan Heaps reviews Nothing Gained is Eternal

Reading her poetry, one follows Pinkerton’s journey away from Eros and the self through prayer and philosophy and the contemplation of existence, time, the physical world, and faith.

Mary Grace Mangano’s review of Helen Pinkerton’s poems

If tradition is a socially embodied argument extended through time, then Willa Cather and Simone Weil’s quarrel with the boosters of the Gothic exemplifies faithfulness to the traditions of Christian sacred architecture.

Jonathan McGregor on tradition versus traditionalism

The death, decay, and melancholy found in the ruins of our fallen world wither against the evergreen flower of our suffering God.

Michael McCarthy on the deepening relevance of Brideshead Revisited

If time is only contingencies, then Christians will lose their way in time. But if time is a place in which the eternal emerges, then there is a path for Christian thinking within a liturgical life.

Terence Sweeney resists the modern flattening of time

Ultimately, the council majority was victorious: anti-Modernist doctrinal documents failed to achieve a ‘controlling function’ at the Council.

Shaun Blanchard on leaving anti-modernism behind

Understanding how anti-Modernism was evoked and how anti-Modernist critiques were rebutted sheds light on Vatican II as a fundamental shift in the relationship between Catholicism and modernity.

Shaun Blanchard on Modernism and Vatican II

She found herself alone with God, in her garden, religiously unaffiliated and sacrificially loved... She likely never partook in the Eucharist that she wrote about so lovingly.

Luella D’Amico on Emily Dickinson as precursor to the ‘nones’

The unity and coherence of Christian tradition is derived from the antecedent finality of its futural fulfilment and can’t be secured by appeal to a procrustean deposit of faith perduring through history.

Jack Pappas reviews David Bentley Harts’s Tradition & Apocalypse

The patriotism and religious piety felt by U.S. Catholics during WWI through efforts to supply devotional objects paved the way for the solidification of American Catholic identity.

Sarah Luginbill on portable altars and Catholics becoming American

This case illustrates the complex entanglement of enchantment and disenchantment in the 19th century, a dynamic participated in by Church and State, physicians and spiritualists—and angels in top-hats, too.

Richard Yoder on an angelic apparition

Jansenist Orientalism, a sub-species of ‘Catholic Orientalism,’ matters as a French tributary to religious modernity as such—the overlooked contribution of a prominent if persecuted minority.

Richard Yoder on Orientalism in early modernity