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

From the vantage point of Pierre d’Ailly’s introduction to the Consolation of Philosophy, history looks like a tower of hand-wringing moderns all the way down.

Matthew Vanderpoel looks to the medievals and finds that we are not the first moderns

The self exists to be true to itself, and it can only be so insofar as it sloughs off the heteronomous influences of society. The unhappy result is that “we are all expressive individuals now.”

James Matthew Wilson reviews Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

When we are doing genealogies of modernity, we may find that what we are doing is arguing for which epoch we think is best for the future. Thee real question for the present may be this: which past will be our future?

Terence Sweeney on living within different eras

Marked by the Spirit with that indelible birthmark, as the Priest wanders, he wanders towards God instead of away. Perhaps Graham Graham too felt this relentless pursuit as an agnostic Catholic, felt the pull of a God who will not let you go.

Shemaiah Gonzalez on a literary saint for modern times

Because Japan had grafted what was available in Anglo-European modernity onto its socio-political and cultural milieu (i.e., fūdo 風土), Japan ended up with a strange mixture of ‘super-modernity’ and ‘pre-modernity’ as their peculiar form of ‘modernity.’

Takeshi Morisato on the thought of Maruyama Masao

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

Physicians must acknowledge that our wellness comes from embracing our authentic identity, not from a pursuit of individual happiness. The great challenge that lies before us is not so much to heal humanity or to heal ourselves, but rather a renewal of the search for our lost communion.

Michael McCarthy on Walker Percy, medicine, and service of others

If Christians would engage, penetrate, and Christianize a culture and society like ours, one with a robust and developed superstructure, we must develop a theology of comparable robustness in the face of contemporary questions.

Jonathan Heaps on the superstructures of modern culture

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

These Shakespeareans wish to see the playwright as a progenitor of their own project of exposure, disenchantment, and social critique. Their readings contort the histories to make them accord with modern sensibilities.

Daniel Zimmerman on making a modern out of Shakespeare

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

A new modernity will be marked by a different account of the good life with a different set of shared loves. Kate Soper shows that underneath our tawdry love of stuff there are deeper, more interesting loves.

Terence Sweeney reviews Post-Growth Living and finds in it a counter-modern modernity

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

Joseph Henrich’s account shows that much of what we take to be typically modern habits of mind—individualism, impersonal prosociality, an acute sense of guilt—were already deeply imbedded in the Western psyche by the High Middle Ages.

Brendan Case reviews The WEIRDest People in the World

Friendship with God—it is a laughable postmodern literary idea. But for post-postmodernity, is there anything worth pursuing more?

Jeffrey Wald reviews books by Catholic writers Joshua Wren and Trevor Merrill

We can tell stories other than slavery’s violence, but does that extend dignity to enslaved, brutalized humans? Does a story ‘against the grain’ face down the thing the archive does (preserving violence and creating race)? Or does a story about the violence memorialize violence?

Maria Cecilia Ulrichson asks what Christian genealogy can learn in the archives