Genealogies are at their best when they both demonstrate complexity and simplify historical relations by applying principles of significant proximity for specific purposes.

Ryan McDermott maps out historical relationships over time

If we lose track of natality, newness, and birth, we will ourselves become gray-haired obstructers of the new. Genealogists do not just trace the past. We are students of birth.

Terence Sweeney on genealogy and old age with Arendt and Nietzsche

Glorifying the apparently obvious becomes a way of warding off the transcendent, since distraction—made easier by friction-free, disembodied typographic banality—becomes the primary mode of attention.

Duncan Reyburn on mimetically uniform fonts

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 June on our modern life.

It is this backward glance, careful and sustained, at who we used to be, that will give us back the image of who we are now and what possibilities the future might hold.

Kirsten Hall considers the appeal of the 18th century and “2001: A Space Odyssey”

The modern conception of how time unfolds leaves us trapped in a chronological sequence with no return to the past; but is it true that “you can’t go back”?

A podcast interview with Matthew Milliner

We often think of the time before the birth of Jesus Christ in terms of the Old Testament. But what about the humans in other parts of the world, long before the history of Israel begins?

A podcast interview with Matthew Milliner

Porter narrates how the things we choose to notice reflect the people we become… She encourages readers to pay attention to the warning signs that could lead to our own fates if we fail to keep watch.

Casie Dodd recovers Porter as a Catholic writer

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.