Petrarch was a founder of an alternative modernity, which emphasizes the compatibility between the ancients and medievals by adhering to the traditional prioritizing of the contemplative over the active.

Michael Krom on spiritual ascents

Modern American viewers seem to suffer from the same bias as The Gilded Age characters themselves: if it isn’t the English way, it isn’t anything at all.

Jacob Martin on Julian Fellows’s newest television series

If we are serious about critiquing colonial modernity, we must reclaim notions of the divine and transcendent.

Ali Harfouch on the Limits of Postcolonial and Decolonial Paradigms

Is life a gift? Or a calamity? Is existence to be affirmed, or avoided? The answer to those questions may very well depend on what you think about the possibility of forgiveness.

Jeffrey Wald reviews Johua Hren’s novel Infinite Regress

It is the realized and the not yet, an eschatology understood as historiosophy. The condition of dying without the finality of death, bathed always in the light of resurrection hope.

Sarah Livick-Moses reviews Bulgakov 'Sophiology of Death”

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 August on our modern life.

For us—every human who has been born and who is yet to be born—birth is one of the known unknowns in one’s life.

Donato Loia on the mystery of having been born at all

She found herself alone with God, in her garden, religiously unaffiliated and sacrificially loved... She likely never partook in the Eucharist that she wrote about so lovingly.

Luella D’Amico on Emily Dickinson as precursor to the ‘nones’

If you give your soul to the enterprise, for the sake of your desire to live a meaningful life beyond its reach, you might be rewarded with the blessing of forgetting that such a life was ever possible.

Daniel Cunningham on the neoliberal wager

A cultural product of its time, its value is more anthropological than literary. In an ideological age, what do secular, educated parents most want to believe about their kids?

Maya Sinha on parenting and literature in Powers and O’Connor

Hai Zi was a poet dedicated to an attempt to create a mythology of modernity; a poet as obsessed with the origins of modernity as he was with the challenge of reforging it.

Jake Grefenstette and poetic genealogies of Chinese modernity

Both films concede that technology shapes the future, but the determining factor in the life of heroes and of nations still seems to be not the gun or the plane, but the person behind the trigger.

Lauren Spohn on heroes and technological determinism

Both Maverick and Skyfall encourage us to read the life of the nation in the life of the hero... When we talk about the course of the hero’s life, we’re also talking about history.

Lauren Spohn reflects on similarities between James Bond and Maverick

After all, isn’t that really what Ressourcement is? A turn to the sources of the past to bring more vitality, and even spiritual vitality, into the present.

Brenna Moore considers a genealogical return to forgotten sources

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