The path toward greater intellectual, social, and spiritual wholeness cannot bypass the enactment of Black dignity but must run through it.

Andrew Prevot reviews Vincent Lloyd’s Black Dignity

Reading Smith’s “How to Inhabit Time” is itself a practice of spiritual timekeeping, granting the attentive reader a space and time in which to give herself over to reflection.

Caroline Arnold on living in hope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The happy skeletons smile, as if to say, “I am alive, I am well, and death is not the end.” For Jorge Portilla, like Socrates before him, a good and meaningful life requires the endorsement of life after death.

Brian Harding on philosophies of death from Greece to Mexico

Only a dialectical approach between the Enlightenment and Christianity is capable of grasping the historical dynamics of the emergence of human rights within the European context.

Sharon Kuruvilla reviews Hans Joas’s The Sacredness of the Person

They may yet “return to tradition,” as it were—even in a land so detraditionalizing and antithetical to objective truth as the marketplace or the digital borderlands.

Esmé Partridge on truth from Plato to al-Fārābī to Twitter

Dorothea Veit-Schlegel shared some commitments with male Romantics, but she critiqued many of their central ideas, especially in relation to gender, education, and personal development.

Anna Ezekiel recovers an essential Romantic thinker and writer