A type of secular self-enclosure partaking in characteristics both pagan and Christian, trollish and monkish, stoic and saintly: a synthesis that registers as curiously incomplete.

Katy Carl on genealogies of selfhood

If time is only contingencies, then Christians will lose their way in time. But if time is a place in which the eternal emerges, then there is a path for Christian thinking within a liturgical life.

Terence Sweeney resists the modern flattening of time

Ultimately, the council majority was victorious: anti-Modernist doctrinal documents failed to achieve a ‘controlling function’ at the Council.

Shaun Blanchard on leaving anti-modernism behind

Understanding how anti-Modernism was evoked and how anti-Modernist critiques were rebutted sheds light on Vatican II as a fundamental shift in the relationship between Catholicism and modernity.

Shaun Blanchard on Modernism and Vatican II

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 November on our modern life.

While the ancients understood justice as one virtue among many, we often view justice as the sole, super-virtue… thereby distorting justice itself and re-ordering it into something very different.

Br. Nicodemus Thomas on reuniting the cardinal virtues

Human history is human above all other things, and human beings are not merely predictable. And that is why we should be cautious in our trend-spotting and forecasting.

Duncan Reyburn on Chesterton and the wobbliness of time

There is a genealogical case to be made that the solidity of the modern scientific world picture may have been unwittingly grounded upon a theistic metaphysic.

JD Lyonhart on Henry More and the origins of modern space

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 October on our modern life.

Muffled beneath the sounds of contemporary American life, the discerning reader will hear the reverberations of a question posed to Jesus: ‘And who is my neighbor?’

Charles Ducey on Tess Gunty's The Rabbit Hutch

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