Because Japan had grafted what was available in Anglo-European modernity onto its socio-political and cultural milieu (i.e., fūdo 風土), Japan ended up with a strange mixture of ‘super-modernity’ and ‘pre-modernity’ as their peculiar form of ‘modernity.’

Takeshi Morisato on the thought of Maruyama Masao

If Christians would engage, penetrate, and Christianize a culture and society like ours, one with a robust and developed superstructure, we must develop a theology of comparable robustness in the face of contemporary questions.

Jonathan Heaps on the superstructures of modern culture

A new modernity will be marked by a different account of the good life with a different set of shared loves. Kate Soper shows that underneath our tawdry love of stuff there are deeper, more interesting loves.

Terence Sweeney reviews Post-Growth Living and finds in it a counter-modern modernity

Joseph Henrich’s account shows that much of what we take to be typically modern habits of mind—individualism, impersonal prosociality, an acute sense of guilt—were already deeply imbedded in the Western psyche by the High Middle Ages.

Brendan Case reviews The WEIRDest People in the World

We can tell stories other than slavery’s violence, but does that extend dignity to enslaved, brutalized humans? Does a story ‘against the grain’ face down the thing the archive does (preserving violence and creating race)? Or does a story about the violence memorialize violence?

Maria Cecilia Ulrichson asks what Christian genealogy can learn in the archives

Stephen Gaukroger exposes the insubstantial reasons for assuming that some meaningful theoretical construct or set of practices called "Science" underpins all the sciences..

Eileen Reeves reviews Civilization and the Culture of Science

Like 15th Century portrait painters, we find ourselves amid an experimental period. It is unclear what the future will hold, whether it is standardized virtual bookshelves or targeted ads that suggest lipstick shades based on wall color.

Chloé Pelletier on the background to our Zoom backgrounds

The body politic metaphor became proof that the immigrant and the dependent were biologically incompatible with the rest of society. The community that grew out of this interpretation shaped itself in strange, unsettling, and inhumane ways.

G. Marie Aquilina traces the history of eugenics as a distortion of the body politic

The turn toward the body had three important effects on modern political philosophy: it naturalized security, individualized liberty, and privatized property.

Emily Davis reviews Birth of the State by Charlotte Epstein

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

Fratelli Tutti offers an alternative to such modern forms of domination and points to fraternal service as a way of countering its love of money, the desire that so often presents itself as development.

Trevor Williams reviews Pope Francis’s latest encyclical

Montaigne was charting new, and uniquely modern, territory. We embrace ourselves, as ourselves, and try to learn to be ourselves, rather than striving to become something other.

Erik Dempsey reviews Pierre Manent’s Montaigne: Life Without Law

Given all the transformations wrought and about to be wrought by COVID-19, we will see much more attention paid to the role of plagues, pandemics, and pestilences in shaping human affairs.

Andrew Latham looks to microbes to explain macro-changes in history.

The politics of nostalgia looks to translates the past into a near-future that is utterly inhospitable to it. It is about using the past-that-never-was to build a future-that-never-could-be.

Andrew Latham reads Dante’s Monarchia and Xi Jinping’s China Dream together.

Using these recipes privileges cultural memory and tradition over efficiency and precision. Thus, we participate in the ritual of cooking not as a means of scientific inquiry or perfection, but to strengthen the community ties that bring us together at the table.

Alexandrea Pérez Allison on cookbooks and modernity.

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

Ideas have afterlives: they live on in subcultures that intentionally preserve them, in practices that have long lost their justification, and in our contradictions and nagging doubts.

John Buchmann offers a genealogy of balance and economics.

It is interesting to imagine an alternative history, one where Sanger had received the support she sought from eugenicists. What would our feminist genealogies look like then?

G. Marie Aquilina examines Margaret Sanger’s place in feminist genealogy

The roots of the present distemper go back to the turn of the twentieth century, when figures such as John Dewey sought to delete the Christian DNA from the genome of liberalism and insert Gnostic DNA in its place.

Andrew Latham does a genealogy of Gnostic Liberalism

The future of climbing is not modern. It is post-secular, mystical, communal, and intensely embodied, with technology merely incidental.

Ryan McDermott asks: When did climbing become modern?