Our life is fuller and lovelier for variety. At one moment we might need Lizzo, at another Liszt, but ultimately both, or their like, should find their ways into our lives and into our playlists.

Jacob Martin on Richard Straus’s opera and diverse cultural experiences

This unifying symbol of a culture-to-be is the Singularity in which being is essentially coterminous with consciousness with a way of life mediated almost purely through screens and through the internet.

John Ehrett on the singularity to come

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

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 May on our modern life.

Nutrition becomes a realm subject to technocratic achievement and colonial control. In this way, the British state enters the domestic realm of colonized peoples.

Devin Creed on Britian’s development of nutritional colonization

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

We inheritors of the Cartesian dream believe that if we had enough knowledge, we could know the past and the future and could banish the fictions which for a hundred millennia have spelled our ruin.

Daniel Fitzpatrick on James Joyce and Thornton Wilder

How does digital media emulate sacred imagery? How can the doctrine of Incarnation break the spell of hyperreality?

Arthur Aghajanian in conversation with Matthew Tan on a love that is also made manifest materially

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

Virtue is a matter of acting correctly according to whatever circumstances arise. The state which legislates the need to choose out of existence legislates virtue out of existence.

Daniel Fitzpatrick on Brave New World and the 80 Years’ War for Virtue

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 on our modern life.

If the fiction writer accepts the imitative laws of human interaction, then Rene Girard’s mimetic theory puts him in a tricky spot.

Trevor Merrill on writers and the problem of mimetic desire

We are not built to live in the way barbarism trains us to live, whence the widespread unhappiness and dissatisfaction of technologically advanced nations.

Brian Harding on Michel Henry, social media, and the loss of interiority

A Podcast interview with Brad Gregory on the sciences, Christianity, and way history shapes us.

Girard is not only an academic theorist but a veritable agent of culture who has shaped the thinking of writers around the world…. But where there is influence, there is also the potential for anxiety.

Trevor Merrill on novel writing after Girard

To my surprise, I found Pope Francis a medievalist, St. Francis an eco-theologian, and a papal encyclical a work of literary ecocriticism.

Kathryn Mogk Wagner on medieval studies and ecocriticism

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