The Massachusetts Bay Colony Seal is in and of itself a rather compact genealogy of modernity. The image is a discursive moment that actively constructs a sense of what it means to be modern, and it neatly highlights several important phenomena that cohere to underpin Western colonial modernity: seals/logos, the Bible, and the construction of “the Indian.”

Julian Sieber on colonial modernity

Two films of the past fifteen years, The Book of Eli (2010) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), dramatize this confluence of grifter capitalism and religious demagoguery in the years immediately prior to Trump’s real-life rise to power. 

J. Laurence Cohen on the fusion of religion and politics in the US

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

“All the past incarnations of the katechon have resulted culturally in a progressive, step-by-step demystification of the nature of violence itself, bringing to the surface its mimetic and cyclic nature. Are we not at the point where the very discussion of the katechon involves an understanding of this nature and the actual unsustainability of violent solutions?”

Anthony Bartlett offers a genealogy of the katechon

“The most significant recent embrace of the katechon comes from tech-billionaire student of Girard and Trump/Vance backer, Peter Thiel. The connection with Girard makes this latest iteration doubly provocative and in need of serious examination.”

Anthony Bartlett offers a genealogy of the katechon

What earlier ages described as communion or participation reappears in a new vocabulary of entanglement and interdependence… The underlying insight is familiar: the world is not a collection of discrete objects but a web of relationships, a reality that becomes understandable only through forms of participation.

Brian M. Ross on the compatibility of religion and science

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.

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.

“Girardian revelation is a necessary addition to the genealogies of the modern, not in any sense of religion making a comeback to contest the secular, but in a sense internal to the secular itself. ”

Anthony Bartlett on René Girard

“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