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

Presentism is an obsession with the present that forgets its relationship with the past, that covers history and humanity with a blanket of generic sameness that muffles difference and dulls memory.

Donato Loia reviews Charles Saumarez Smith’s The Art Museum in Modern Times

All of these restorations in “Richard III” are contingent upon the reinstatement of sincere eucharistic participation—Holy Communion . . . where rituals are revivified, and where communion—real Communion—can materialize.

Daniel Zimmerman finds a counter-modern theology in William Shakespeare

From the vantage point of Pierre d’Ailly’s introduction to the Consolation of Philosophy, history looks like a tower of hand-wringing moderns all the way down.

Matthew Vanderpoel looks to the medievals and finds that we are not the first moderns

When we are doing genealogies of modernity, we may find that what we are doing is arguing for which epoch we think is best for the future. Thee real question for the present may be this: which past will be our future?

Terence Sweeney on living within different eras

When modernity lost its modularity, it became an asset to be fought over, a territory to be controlled. Modernity became the cool neighborhood that scholars jockeyed to buy into.

Daniel Zimmerman critiques the excess of periodization

Modernity is more akin to an epistemological front, waxing and waning here and there in history, whose distribution might be unevenly spread across different human societies at any given moment.

Tim Howles expands on Bruno Latour's genealogies

A central concern remains: the timing and nature of India’s encounter with modernity. Did modernity come with the East India Company or did modernity have more ‘native’ roots?

Devin Creed looks for a different modernity in the streets of New Delhi.

The windows at Conques, seen from the outside, seem to be walled with a metal sheet.

Donato Loia examines the old and the new with Pierre Soulages’s modernist windows in a Romanesque church.