Despite claims of working for this moral good or that concept of order, the Personalists observed that political inscriptions of sovereignty often end up as examples of absolute power exercised without accountability. As such, there is no room for singular sovereignty within a philosophy centered on the well-being of persons. 

Marty Tomszak on Maritain and sovereignty for our forum on Personalism and the Catholic Worker

Genealogies of Modernity hosts a reading group on Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm’s The Genealogy of Genealogy

Maurin called socialism the offspring of capitalism. In his eyes, both capitalism and socialism regard money as the basis of reality. But to Peter Maurin, the person was the basis of reality. The development and cultivation of the human spirit—rather than economic development—would create a new society.

James Murphy and Renée Roden on Peter Maurin’s life and philosophy for our forum on Personalism and the Catholic Worker

Heidegger moved on from “facticity”… to the themes of “homecoming” (Heimkunft) in relation to Being, our gentle “releasement” (Galassenheit) and “openness” to all that is, our grateful reception of the “gift” of Being.

Richard Capobianco on the later Heidegger

An ethic that is averse to instrumentality animates the thought of contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and can be seen in Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, released in 2025.

Kyle Sossamon on an ethics of gesture

In most areas, Machiavelli and Erasmus disagree, but both adamantly warn princes against flatterers. Though medieval princes are rare in the present, warnings against flatterers may be more widely applicable than ever before because of AI.

Elizabeth Stice on genealogies of flattery

There is no fate a human being can face that will render bringing them into the world immoral…. But it can be a moral failure to knowingly bring a child into the world and not be ready to address, in whatever way you can, the challenges they will face.

Anthony Shoplik interviews Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman

For most of human history, people understood themselves intergenerationally, as having a past and having a future that extended beyond their lives and that they would be directly contributing to bringing about.

Anthony Shoplik interviews Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman

The chain of being began in ancient philosophy, but it reached its fullest and most systematic expression in medieval Christendom. In the hands of medieval scholastics, the chain of being was personified.

Julia Powell’s genealogy of the Great Chain of Being

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

“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.

Here in the middle of these muted colors and fantastical plot is an observation straight out of Hannah Arendt.

Elizabeth Stice on philosophy in Wes Anderson

Genealogies of Modernity remembers Alasdair MacIntyre

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 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

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