There is a genealogical case to be made that the solidity of the modern scientific world picture may have been unwittingly grounded upon a theistic metaphysic.

JD Lyonhart on Henry More and the origins of modern space

Petrarch was a founder of an alternative modernity, which emphasizes the compatibility between the ancients and medievals by adhering to the traditional prioritizing of the contemplative over the active.

Michael Krom on spiritual ascents

For us—every human who has been born and who is yet to be born—birth is one of the known unknowns in one’s life.

Donato Loia on the mystery of having been born at all

If we lose track of natality, newness, and birth, we will ourselves become gray-haired obstructers of the new. Genealogists do not just trace the past. We are students of birth.

Terence Sweeney on genealogy and old age with Arendt and Nietzsche

The unity and coherence of Christian tradition is derived from the antecedent finality of its futural fulfilment and can’t be secured by appeal to a procrustean deposit of faith perduring through history.

Jack Pappas reviews David Bentley Harts’s Tradition & Apocalypse

The patriotism and religious piety felt by U.S. Catholics during WWI through efforts to supply devotional objects paved the way for the solidification of American Catholic identity.

Sarah Luginbill on portable altars and Catholics becoming American

This case illustrates the complex entanglement of enchantment and disenchantment in the 19th century, a dynamic participated in by Church and State, physicians and spiritualists—and angels in top-hats, too.

Richard Yoder on an angelic apparition

While Benjamin Lipscomb cannot be criticized for failing to say everything relevant on this history, it is worth noting that there may be a richer and longer history to be told here.

Nicholas Sparks reviews The Women Are Up to Something

Jansenist Orientalism, a sub-species of ‘Catholic Orientalism,’ matters as a French tributary to religious modernity as such—the overlooked contribution of a prominent if persecuted minority.

Richard Yoder on Orientalism in early modernity

Machiavelli follows Augustine by demythologizing violence, stripping it of the gloss of legend and heroism. He departs from him by adding that it is necessary, excusable, and worthy of imitation.

Brian Harding on violence and political reality

Perhaps the task of history, so like that of the Gospel, is to disquiet the living with a persistent presence that rises from the dead.

Richard Yoder reflects on Jansenism and the Refusal of Sacraments controversy

Religion, and the apocalyptic motifs of the Christian Gospels, is that which alone can send us back into the world with a renewed strength for political engagement and activism.

Tim Howles on the eschatological roots of political renewal

When the concept of the katechon is handled by contemporary theorists, it takes on a disappointingly conservative hue. . . . There seems to be little room for political activisms that might challenge the status quo.

Tim Howles on the eschaton and political theology

The happy skeletons smile, as if to say, “I am alive, I am well, and death is not the end.” For Jorge Portilla, like Socrates before him, a good and meaningful life requires the endorsement of life after death.

Brian Harding on philosophies of death from Greece to Mexico

Only a dialectical approach between the Enlightenment and Christianity is capable of grasping the historical dynamics of the emergence of human rights within the European context.

Sharon Kuruvilla reviews Hans Joas’s The Sacredness of the Person

Dorothea Veit-Schlegel shared some commitments with male Romantics, but she critiqued many of their central ideas, especially in relation to gender, education, and personal development.

Anna Ezekiel recovers an essential Romantic thinker and writer

Despite their imperfections, mystical texts are worth keeping alive in modernity—particularly in periods of authoritarianisms and violence—because they offer glimpses of other possibilities.

Brenna Moore on the life and work of a great figure of the Ressourcement

That Sertillanges finds these practical matters necessary for someone to live a properly intellectual life reveals a key insight: the intellectual is a human being, and a human being is more than just a spiritual soul.

Brs. Christopher Daniel and John Henry Peters on the intellectual vocation in the modern world

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