“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

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we recently found on our modern life.

“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

Elie pushes us to reconsider and expand our idea of what counts as religious and/or sacred art, but we should be careful not to collapse the transcendent sphere into the natural world.

Aaron James Weisel reviews Paul Elie’s latest book.

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

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

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

‘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’

If all contemplative elements are driven out of life, it ends in a deadly hyperactivity. The human being suffocates among its own doings.

James Lawson on Jacques Maritain and Byung-Chul Han

The complexities of premodern interfaith relations are explored in all their surprisingly human dimensions, avoiding the tragic obscuring of this history that has occurred as the result of modern traumas.

Philip Dorroll reviews Orthodoxy and Islam in the Middle East

If we are serious about critiquing colonial modernity, we must reclaim notions of the divine and transcendent.

Ali Harfouch on the Limits of Postcolonial and Decolonial Paradigms

Genealogies are at their best when they both demonstrate complexity and simplify historical relations by applying principles of significant proximity for specific purposes.

Ryan McDermott maps out historical relationships over time

The modern conception of how time unfolds leaves us trapped in a chronological sequence with no return to the past; but is it true that “you can’t go back”?

A podcast interview with Matthew Milliner

We often think of the time before the birth of Jesus Christ in terms of the Old Testament. But what about the humans in other parts of the world, long before the history of Israel begins?

A podcast interview with Matthew Milliner

Porter narrates how the things we choose to notice reflect the people we become… She encourages readers to pay attention to the warning signs that could lead to our own fates if we fail to keep watch.

Casie Dodd recovers Porter as a Catholic writer

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

How does digital media emulate sacred imagery? How can the doctrine of Incarnation break the spell of hyperreality?

Arthur Aghajanian in conversation with Matthew Tan on a love that is also made manifest materially

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

A Podcast interview with Brad Gregory on the sciences, Christianity, and way history shapes us.