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

This back-and-forth will grow and stretch and change and, somehow, we will recognize that we have been caught up together in another, greater boundedness all along.

Lyle Enright reviews Lexi Eikelboom’s Rhythm: A Theological Category

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

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 January that opened up new vistas on what it means to be modern and how we became that way.

When modernity lost its modularity, it became an asset to be fought over, a territory to be controlled. Modernity became the cool neighborhood that scholars jockeyed to buy into.

Daniel Zimmerman critiques the excess of periodization

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

Toeing the line between sincere homage and raucous parody, The Rake’s Progress is a complex opera, one that evinces sincere ambivalence toward its source material, but above all, delight.

Jacob Martin reviews a transhistorical operatic masterpiece

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

The theological tradition requires self-critical appropriation, which must be capable of discerning what, having been passed down, is best forgotten and what is best remembered or re-presented for the Body of Christ today.

Antony Sciglitano looks for what truth can be found in genealogical methods

In light of Brentano-von Arnim’s recognition by the Young Hegelians and her association with the Silesian Weavers’ Uprising, it is remarkable that her political writing is so rarely considered in work on the development of Communism.

Anna Ezekiel examines the contributions of a neglected Left Hegelian

If Black Catholics—having lived through repeated disappointments and the demoralizing treatment of their ancestors—are exhausted in the fight, now is the perfect time to find new strength and take heed of history as the Church changes all around them.

Nate Tinner-Williams carves out a space for Black Catholicism

The most compelling alternative to the twin perils of genealogy and fideism, radical immanence and radical transcendence, involves a hermeneutics of tradition.

Thomas Pfau develops a Christian Hermeneutics of Tradition

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

The old ways have not died. Enchantment remains. The very soul of baseball seems up for grabs, with mystery, enchantment, and superstition on the one hand, and science, disenchantment, and statistics on the other.

Jeffrey Waldon on Christopher Beha’s The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

We have asked some of our writers from this past year to select some of their favorite books from 2020. Perhaps some of these books will end up source texts for future genealogists. So, if you are looking for a last-minute gift for your favorite genealogists, or making reading resolutions for 2021, we have you covered!

Contrary to Foucault’s account of genealogy, Nietzsche characterizes his enterprise as the discovery of the true (singular) origin of intellectual and cultural phenomena. Genealogy, in his disparaging account, gets it wrong.

Ryan McDermott develops an answer to the question: what is genealogy?

Karoline von Günderrode’s contributions to the history of ideas have been occluded and forgotten. When she wrote, women’s intellectual efforts went unacknowledged, meaning that we may never know the extent of her influence on the people around her.

Anna Ezekial recovers the philosophical insights of Günderrode

Fratelli Tutti offers an alternative to such modern forms of domination and points to fraternal service as a way of countering its love of money, the desire that so often presents itself as development.

Trevor Williams reviews Pope Francis’s latest encyclical

“To apprehend the point of intersection of the timeless with time is the occupation of the saint.” -T.S. Eliot

A video conversation between Thomas Pfau, Brenna Moore, Cyril O’Regan, and Maria Cecilia Ulrickson