The Genealogies of Modernity Journal
Spare Time with Prince Harry
The conversations we have about Spare reveal the social mores that have solidified into shared beliefs about what we believe and have passed down as the proper modes of behaving and thinking.
Luella D’Amico reviews a fallen prince's memoir
Modernizing the Monarchy
Past writers have updated Arthur for new audiences without sacrificing his essential kingship. If that's possible for Arthur, it should be possible for Charles and the British monarchy.
—Gabriel Schenk on what King Charles can learn from King Arthur.
A Poet of Philosophy and Prayer
Reading her poetry, one follows Pinkerton’s journey away from Eros and the self through prayer and philosophy and the contemplation of existence, time, the physical world, and faith.
Mary Grace Mangano’s review of Helen Pinkerton’s poems
The New (Biomedical) Normal
We are witnessing a dehumanization of society driven by a covert, reductionist ideology. We need a return to a non-reductionist anthropology, rooted in classical conceptions of the human good.
Xavier Symons on public health, COVID, and Kheriaty’s ‘The New Abnormal’
The Peasant of the Garonne and the Pharaoh Within
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
The (Newest) Population Problem: Part II
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
The (Newest) Population Problem
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
Malforming the Law of Nature
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
A Black Philosophy of Liberation
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
Universal Mother
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
The Rise of the Information Nexus
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
The Problem of the Spiritual in Contemporary Art
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
Forgotten Histories of the Christian Middle East
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
Willa Cather’s Romanesque Modernism
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
Best of 2022
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!
Orphans of the Storm
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
Getting the Timing Right
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
The Great Sphinx: Pontoppidan’s "Lucky Per"
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