We no longer connect with one another over information as often as we used to. Instead, we connect with a broker, a hub, a nexus.

Tom White and Wesley Brandon on substituting systems for people

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 time is only contingencies, then Christians will lose their way in time. But if time is a place in which the eternal emerges, then there is a path for Christian thinking within a liturgical life.

Terence Sweeney resists the modern flattening of time

Human history is human above all other things, and human beings are not merely predictable. And that is why we should be cautious in our trend-spotting and forecasting.

Duncan Reyburn on Chesterton and the wobbliness of time

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

It is the realized and the not yet, an eschatology understood as historiosophy. The condition of dying without the finality of death, bathed always in the light of resurrection hope.

Sarah Livick-Moses reviews Bulgakov 'Sophiology of Death”

After all, isn’t that really what Ressourcement is? A turn to the sources of the past to bring more vitality, and even spiritual vitality, into the present.

Brenna Moore considers a genealogical return to forgotten sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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