Two containers with a temple complex: a ship and a mailbox. Both drip with blood drawn in white heat of colonial suspicions of rebellion and rights to autonomy.

Maggie Slaughter exposes colonialism and orientalism in a mailbox and a passenger ship

While the ancients may have had the science wrong, the reality of the experience to which they referred by the “Gorgon effect” still rings true today.

J. Larae Cherukara revaluates forgotten theories of optics

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.

Franz kneels before the priest. It is nighttime and the cell is utterly dark save for one luminous candle. This is the light that shines in the darkness. And the darkness cannot overcome it.

Jeffrey Wald examines the power of cinema in the modern world.

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

Perhaps there’s another way of understanding what’s at issue in the western tradition—not a narrative but an ethos; not a straightforward story of development but an idea that resurges in the history of western art and reaches a kind of fever pitch in the modernist project.

Tom Break rethinks modern art’s relationship with the western art tradition

July

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking right now and how writers are trying to keep up. Here are some routes we found in July that opened up new vistas on what it means to be modern and how became we that way.

It is time to set aside the troubled histories of past confrontations and takeovers and strive for healing and reconciliation, by advocating to open the doors of these sites to all faiths who are invested in them.

Sahar Hosseini on the Hagia Sophia and spaces of encounter

Early modern communities faced an identity crisis in which their very beings seemed constantly at-risk and in-flux. Antitheatricalists believed theater made these problems worse by turning them into a spectacle.

Krystal Marsh compares 17th Century Theater to 21st Century Comedy Central.

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

As I stand in this virescent orchard of hope, looking at those who have lain their truths in its roots, it seems to matter little that boys urinated here, dogs died there, or garbage litters the organic horizon of peat.

Maggie Slaughter on sacred trees and wishing wells.

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?

The language all of these “pagans” use, and every other Western reaction against Christianity, remains Christian. Perhaps we don’t escape our history after all.

Micah Meadowcroft reviews Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites.

A central concern remains: the timing and nature of India’s encounter with modernity. Did modernity come with the East India Company or did modernity have more ‘native’ roots?

Devin Creed looks for a different modernity in the streets of New Delhi.

Chivalry is an attempt to internalize restraints so that powerful men police one another and themselves—masculinity taming the excesses of masculinity.

Kathryn Mogk reassesses chivalry amidst the Me-Too era and deepening concerns about police violence.

We may still take the best of what calling cards have to offer: a more robust etiquette for managing our digital, social lives on a more humane timescale.

Kirsten Hall loses her phone and looks to the 18th Century for guidance.

June

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking right now and how writers are trying to keep up. Here are some routes we found in June that opened up new vistas on what it means to be modern and how became we that way.

What O’Regan emphasizes for Christian genealogy is the work of memory. We all too easily forget; we are all tempted by misremembering. We must keep vigil for the return of our Master.

Terence Sweeney reviews Exorcising Philosophical Modernity.

Millions waited for a new, unknown magic to save the world from a final tragedy. The occultic had returned, but no one knew how to see it anymore.

Jason Blakely imagines the rise and fall of science and the occult.

Ultimately, nobody is interested in hermeneutics and intertextuality for their own sake … but everyone wants to know what is real and how we should live, and if books can help us there, interpretation becomes intensely interesting.

Kathryn Mogk rediscovers reading with Augustine.