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 on our modern life.

In telling a story that accounts for sovereignty, we can think through the possibility of a politics without sovereignty and the implications that such a politics would have on liberatory politics

Ali S. Harfouch on modernity, Islam, and second creators

Neither limited to nor ignorant of the important but circumscribed sphere of domestic life, the finest women’s writing highlight the ways in which private and public life intersect, overlap, and coinhere.

Katy Carl on Virginia Woolf and Sigrid Undset

Time collapses on itself as Romeo’s lingering warmth betrays the truth of his death. He lived only moments ago. And now, Juliet is only moments away from ending her own time in this world.

Krystal Marsh on the warmth of lips

What’s different about this idea, from either Claudel or Maritain, is that poetry does not call into being through naming: it finds.

Tom Break on Anna Key’s poetry and what art does

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

The possibility of an event, of perceiving a thing in the difficulty of what it is to be, of a momentary vision with an other-worldly value, is necessarily predicated on a certain degree of silence.

Tom Break on patience and contemplation

Something happened between Proust's early efforts and his mature masterpiece, a paradigm shift that made the author capable of transferring his legendary gifts as a comic dinner-table raconteur 'onto the page.'

Trevor Merrill on Proust’s conversion

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 February on our modern life.

Something, outside of human reason, outside of human meaning and of human feeling, has reached him. “The bird sings.” And the speaker hears it.

Tom Break on hearing goodness in being

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

Every aspect of our existence is shot through with value, and it is inconceivable to think outside of this value-replete framework. So, how do we fit in an unmade world, in a world devoid of value?

Tom Break on art, value, and a meaningless world

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

Anyone who has sought to make or comprehend art has probably come across at least a few lessons on beauty—insights that, it seems, can never be exhausted.

Trevor Merrill on lodestars of aesthetic judgement

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 January on our modern life.

Her conviction to “give a helping hand” wherever it will be received was a moving incarnation of her ethical bent—one that remains as relevant today as it was in the wake of modernity’s worst set of horrors to date.

Casie Dodd on soup kitchens and the Great War

By demolishing the conflict thesis, the authors have reminded us that if we hope to make true progress, it will require disabusing ourselves of convenient narratives and embracing collaboration between faith and reason.

Zachary Stoltzfus reviews Of Popes and Unicorns

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

If the loss of value is the affliction of our time, and if the recovery of value is going to be this serious and this painful, we will need to dig deep into the heart of the artistic enterprise to find the thing that has gone missing.

Tom Break on Simone Weil and the loss of value