The intended use of problematization is to recognize knots in order to be able to undo them. The undoing of the knots is beyond the scope of problematization, beyond the scope of scholarship.

Ryan McDermott considers theological genealogies of modernity

The arduous, the precarious measure of a tradition’s renewal is the measure of our own lives, in our own responses to the one thing necessary. It is we ourselves who look back, and it is we who look forward.

Anne Carpenter on living tradition in Charles Péguy and Maurice Blondel

Tradition can be renewed by being re-sourced. What a wonder, and what a wonderful idea. Isn’t it? But let me tell you my problem. As much as I like the idea of ressourcement, it is impossible.

Anne M. Carpenter on Maurice Blondel and Charles Peguy

Our “doing” seems to be free from the static social narrative of the grand “to be” of the past. Instead, it is entrapping us in the ever-smaller understandings of “to be,” as if each of them were the grand narrative.

Takeshi Morisato on being and doing within Japanese modernity

Clogged porosity may be more prevalent in modernity. But there are “passageways between the immanent and transcendent realms,” places where grandeur flames through the frame.

Steven Knepper reviews Ryan Duns’s Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age: Desmond and the Quest for God

What we see in Japanese modernity, according to Maruyama, is a national franchise of these “idols of the market place” through the continuous specialization and internal diversifications that multiply these groups.

Takeshi Morisato on how Japan became trapped in a hyper-specialized version of modernity

Problematization is just the beginning. Genealogy is what we do after we problematize. Genealogy can be more constructive than critical.

Ryan McDermott on Foucault and genealogy as comedy

Su Xuelin's novel Thorny Heart is a reminder of the freedom with which different Chinese communities decided what could be counted as “modern” or as “traditional.”

Gina Elia examines the relations of modernity, religion, and tradition in early 20th Century China

We are living in an era of crisis, which, if responded to correctly, can lead to a whole series of opportunities to change how we “do religion.”

Philip Jenkins on the decline and growth of religion in the 21st Century

To say, as Gabriel Marcel did, “thou, thou shall not die,” is not a desperate plea nor a psychological coping mechanism, but a way of remaining faithful to the implications of what one has experienced in the beloved.

Geoffrey Karabin on intersubjectivity and immortality

They assembled a view of history as a raft to navigate the challenges of their modern world. As the 20th century wore on… that raft looked less and less secure, not stable enough to keep them afloat.

Paul Kurtz on liberal Christianity and the philosophy of history

For these readers of the Bible, the prophets were no longer predicters of the future—messianic or otherwise—but interpreters of God in past and present.

Paul Michael Kurtz on the German theorist of Jewish history

Modern culture occasions a crisis of belief not just about this belief or that belief, or even the aggregate of beliefs and correlated values in Catholic life, but about believing itself.

Jonathan Heaps on Lonergan and the culture of modernity

Varnhagen’s letters are increasingly gaining recognition, not just as records of a brilliant mind and the struggles of a Jewish woman of the time, but as works of literature and philosophy.

Anna Ezekiel explores the possibility of an epistolary philosophy in Rahel Varnhagen

From the crusades to WWII, Catholic materiality in combat did not just serve the needs of the faithful but also anchored broader conceptualizations of what constituted “just warfare.”

Sarah Luginbill examines portable altars and the relation of war and religion

For them, science was without mysteries. Everything there is can be surveyed and explained in its totality and verified empirically. Everything that means anything can be expressed clearly.

Henriikka Hannula reviews Exact Thinking for Demented Times by Karl Sigmund

To adopt the transhumanist vision is to think of incarnate reality as something to be saved from. To adopt Gabriel Marcel’s vision is to recognize that our salvation, or at least hope for our salvation, is already present before us.

Geoffrey Karabin presents two visions for a post-modern heaven

If Luther’s celebrants insist on granting him the honors of modernity, they need to consider his implication in the full story of modernity, not a sanitized version of it.

Christine Helmer details Luther’s place in the stories we tell about modernity

Genealogy speaks of repetition—surprising repetitions—across historical periods and especially across the so-called hiatus between the modern and premodern world.

Cyril O’Regan looks to an old heresy to understand new problems

A covenantal genealogy is indexed toward a transcendent God, rather than to contingent historical objectives such as those integral to the immanent frame that Enlightenment rationality (mis)identifies as its exclusive and all-encompassing domain.

Thomas Pfau distinguishes different modes of genealogy