The Genealogies of Modernity Journal
Typographical Banality and the Univocal Mind
Glorifying the apparently obvious becomes a way of warding off the transcendent, since distraction—made easier by friction-free, disembodied typographic banality—becomes the primary mode of attention.
Duncan Reyburn on mimetically uniform fonts
Oswald Spengler and the Singularity
This unifying symbol of a culture-to-be is the Singularity in which being is essentially coterminous with consciousness with a way of life mediated almost purely through screens and through the internet.
John Ehrett on the singularity to come
Nutritional Colonization in British India
Nutrition becomes a realm subject to technocratic achievement and colonial control. In this way, the British state enters the domestic realm of colonized peoples.
Devin Creed on Britian’s development of nutritional colonization
All Present in the Nowhere Place
Virtue is a matter of acting correctly according to whatever circumstances arise. The state which legislates the need to choose out of existence legislates virtue out of existence.
Daniel Fitzpatrick on Brave New World and the 80 Years’ War for Virtue
Barbarism and Social Media
We are not built to live in the way barbarism trains us to live, whence the widespread unhappiness and dissatisfaction of technologically advanced nations.
Brian Harding on Michel Henry, social media, and the loss of interiority
Medieval Ecocriticisms
To my surprise, I found Pope Francis a medievalist, St. Francis an eco-theologian, and a papal encyclical a work of literary ecocriticism.
Kathryn Mogk Wagner on medieval studies and ecocriticism
Inventing the Sovereign State
In telling a story that accounts for sovereignty, we can think through the possibility of a politics without sovereignty and the implications that such a politics would have on liberatory politics
Ali S. Harfouch on modernity, Islam, and second creators
Demystifying Soup Kitchen Relief during WWI
Her conviction to “give a helping hand” wherever it will be received was a moving incarnation of her ethical bent—one that remains as relevant today as it was in the wake of modernity’s worst set of horrors to date.
Casie Dodd on soup kitchens and the Great War
Popes, Unicorns, and Other Convenient Narratives
By demolishing the conflict thesis, the authors have reminded us that if we hope to make true progress, it will require disabusing ourselves of convenient narratives and embracing collaboration between faith and reason.
Zachary Stoltzfus reviews Of Popes and Unicorns
Art and the Restoration of the Value
If the loss of value is the affliction of our time, and if the recovery of value is going to be this serious and this painful, we will need to dig deep into the heart of the artistic enterprise to find the thing that has gone missing.
Tom Break on Simone Weil and the loss of value
Setting Sail for Truth
What ‘The Steerage’ pictures are the complexities that the myth of American immigration ignores. The truth is, it has never been a one-way trip to the promised land.
Arthur Aghajanian reflects on an Alfred Stieglitz photograph
Detraditionalization and the Internet
They may yet “return to tradition,” as it were—even in a land so detraditionalizing and antithetical to objective truth as the marketplace or the digital borderlands.
Esmé Partridge on truth from Plato to al-Fārābī to Twitter
Humanities beyond the Crisis
This sense of repetition—of just how persistent the titular state of “crisis” in the humanities has been—gives one pause. It is in the space of this pause that their criticisms may land with force.
Jonathan Heaps reviews Permanent Crisis
Nuclear Counterfactuals: Part II
Truman’s decision was an inevitably flawed human attempt to come to grips with a wicked problem, in the absence of perfect knowledge and in the full knowledge that the stakes were world-historical in significance.
Andrew Latham on counterfactuals and the atom bomb
Hiroshima and Nuclear Counterfactuals
Counterfactual history allows us to sharpen our judgment by juxtaposing what did happen with what could have happened.
Andrew Latham on thinking through counterfactuals and the bombing of Hiroshima
The Diverse Roots and Routes of Liberty
There are many roads to modern liberty, but some focus not on the triumphant will but on the richness of the person and our commitments to one another.
Fred Bauer on an off-liberalism marked by care, duty, and solidarity rather than autonomy
The Social Question of Artificial Intelligence
The word “artifice” means handiwork, work of skill. Artificial intelligence is a wondrous work. And yet, if we allow that artifice to define our reality… we may become artifices ourselves, handiwork of our handiworks.
John Dolan and Jordan Wales on AI and us
Developing an Off-Liberalism
Rather than being merely anti-liberal or anti-postliberal, the off-liberal reveals (and perhaps revels in) the heterogeneity of sources for the so-called “liberal” order.
Fred Bauer on developing an off-liberal approach to modern political predicaments
How AI Will Change Us
The meaning of our personhood becomes a necessary object of examination wherever some technology is deeply entwined with our lives, particularly when that technology purports to replicate what we are.
Jordan Wales and John Dolan on AI and us
Retelling the Human Story
The crisis of deep history is a crisis for our modern self-understanding, and a short chronology of human civilization is no longer adequate for explaining our place in the world.
Evan Kuehn on the need for a longer view of history