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 February on our modern life.

If all contemplative elements are driven out of life, it ends in a deadly hyperactivity. The human being suffocates among its own doings.

James Lawson on Jacques Maritain and Byung-Chul Han

Implicit in this wisdom saying is a sense of the incalculable—that one person is the whole world. This incalculable value transcends the rationalist’s quality of life calculations.

Anthony Shoplik on suffering and meaning in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men

There are two questions: ‘Should I have kids, knowing they will contribute to the climate crisis?’ and ‘Should I have kids, given the climate crisis they will face?’

Anthony Shoplik on having kids in the age of climate change

The most pernicious problem is his political Nestorianism: he thinks that if politics is conventional or humanly constructed, it cannot be sacral or divine.

Matt Boulter reviews Simon Kennedy’s Reforming the Law of Nature

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

Kher promotes more fluid conceptions of genealogy, encouraging viewers to consider that ancestry goes beyond the markers of culture, race, and ethnicity.

Vaishnavi Patil on Bharti Kher’s Ancestor and imaging motherhood

We no longer connect with one another over information as often as we used to. Instead, we connect with a broker, a hub, a nexus.

Tom White and Wesley Brandon on substituting systems for people

You're not taken to some other realm. You're firmly on the ground trying to perceive the eternal and transcendent in the immanent and present. That for me is an authentic kind of presence.

Arthur Aghajanian and Taylor Worley in conversation

The complexities of premodern interfaith relations are explored in all their surprisingly human dimensions, avoiding the tragic obscuring of this history that has occurred as the result of modern traumas.

Philip Dorroll reviews Orthodoxy and Islam in the Middle East

If tradition is a socially embodied argument extended through time, then Willa Cather and Simone Weil’s quarrel with the boosters of the Gothic exemplifies faithfulness to the traditions of Christian sacred architecture.

Jonathan McGregor on tradition versus traditionalism

Here are some of our favorite books from 2022. Perhaps some of these books will end up source texts for future genealogists. So, if you are making reading resolutions for 2023, we have you covered!

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 December on our modern life.

The death, decay, and melancholy found in the ruins of our fallen world wither against the evergreen flower of our suffering God.

Michael McCarthy on the deepening relevance of Brideshead Revisited

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

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.