Early modern science emphasized an optical connection to the universe,' making its brilliance appear close enough to touch. Tragically, this optical achievement consigned the individual to reflect on an unbridgeable distance.

Michael Golec on the confluence of civilization and barbarism

Today, the very nature and purpose of the family snapshot has changed. What does it mean that the majority of our pictures of family have become dematerialized?

Arthur Aghajanian on family photographs and the transcendent

What the interiority of reflection reveals is that which is interior to everything that exists: their reality as God’s creation.

Ali Harfouch on Islamic theology and reflection in the modern age

The donation of portable Mass kits was a way for non-combatants to participate in the war effort in a way that is uniquely tied to religious material culture.

Sarah Luginbill on medieval and modern liturgical inscriptions

At the heart of the modernist controversies was the question of how human subjects are able to experience the transcendent God.

Elizabeth Huddleston on the perplexity of modernism

The way to break the vicious cycle of Fascism and Anti-Fascism… is to embrace a more personalistic conception of the state which sees in the individual a meeting place of relationships of every kind.

Matthew Scarince on Christ Stopped at Eboli

Rosenberg reminds us that we can't assume modernity means a sundered sacrality. Rather, our discovery that we can produce the sacred means there is potentially more of it than ever before.

Lyle Enright reviews The Rise of Mass Advertising

This interplay of death and eros produces a flight of words in Ulysses which signals our fundamental need to give birth to beauty—not simply in the body of another, but in eternity.

Daniel Fitzpatrick on love and death in Joyce’s writing

Philosophy does not point toward an abstract transhistorical truth for humanity, but rather to a murky, historically contingent truth… the truth of historical and material conditions.

Joseph Natali on Horkheimer’s Discontinuity with the Ancients

It is only through the practice of an explicitly critical philosophy that a wholly stagnant self-affirming social order can be avoided.

Joseph Natali on Horkheimer critical theory and the meaning of philosophy

For Horkheimer, his method of critical theory, are the truest continuation of the initial philosophic project of the Western tradition.

Joseph Natali on Max Horkheimer and the critical role of Socrates

Del Noce supplies a crucial element lacking in the filmmaker: a transcendental perspective from which to begin the work of restoring life to society and the political community.

Matthew Scarince on The Crisis of Modernity and Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano

It is fitting that Arendt, a thinker who celebrates the possibilities of natality—the joy of new beginnings and of unpredictable ripple effects—made such a long-distance friendship possible.

Sanjana Rajagopal on intellectual debts and friendships

The political is a lived medium through which we gain insight into the theological concepts that inform the political as one human hierarchy amongst others (economic, social, and so on).

Ali Harfouch on recovering the political through political theology.

Manjot Kaur’s work creates new stories for a new world and to animate humans to interact with non-humans in ways we have never imagined.

Vaishnavi Patil on artistic genealogies of mythology in South Asia and new tales for the modern world

To feel the expression of ‘Mache dich’ is to be compelled to reflect—to think in time, and to listen in time. Bach creates patterns of expectation, weaving them together, and generating further shapes.

Stephane Crayton on "St Matthew’s Passion"

‘Tongue-in-cheek’ as it may be, but it conveys a Christian soteriology: through Christ’s sacrifice, death does not have the last word; and that mercy and love should extend to all.

Victoria Costa on Sir James MacMillan’s ‘St John Passion’

Through Peter’s silence hope is granted access to his despairing heart. Through silence ‘La Pasión’ is granted access to the audience, transforming the hearts that listen.

Victoria Costa on Golijov’s musical presentation of Peter’s betrayal.

Informed by Pärt’s own spirituality, ‘Passio’ participates in a wider musical exploration of Peter as emblematic of a fallenness redeemed and restored in relationship with God.

Victoria Costa on Arvo Pärt and Peter’s denial of Christ

How it is that the Christian past can be present here and now when it travels to us in the medium of a historical process not only fraught and irregular, but so often saturated with evil and sin?

Jonathan Heaps reviews Nothing Gained is Eternal