modernity 27

The stuff of ordinary creation can shine and shimmer with a supernatural radiance

The world of books is tacitly conceived of as a homey yet elevated sphere analogous perhaps to Tolkien’s Shire. How did books become what Joel Miller calls “the forgotten technology”?

The right kind of literature has the power to make the immediate visible to us once again.

Insofar as "The Bee" now occupies something near the center of American Christian discourse, what’s crowded out, I think, is an articulated (not just implied-by-negation) path toward holiness . .…

It turns out that while you can take the man out of the Xaverians, it is more difficult to take the Xaverian out of the man.

Churches aren’t offering peace. They’re optimizing for engagement. And what gets built in the end is impressive. But like all “Babels,” it can’t bear the weight of the human soul.

Science can only provide partial truths because it does not consider form or end.

We live under the impression that we can do for the human community and the individual human soul what physicists have done with the atom.

Over the decades, I suppose I learned a lot from podcasts; plenty of facts and all the “sides” to stories. Very little of those things seem to matter to me…

But I wonder: as it strains to get over Christ, will the West survive without noticing all the other beaten horses of the world? Or will it one day break…

Witnessing the ascendancy of the Machine, Lewis understood what was at stake. He watched this ideology sweep across his society and take hold in its schools, and he keenly felt…

Modernity has become permanently liquid; it no longer seeks solid replacements to the pre-modern world but finds greater value in transience, not just of institutions and things, but of human…

Are dreams only dreams? Or are they God’s gifts of the unconscious which we still fail to know? McCarthy lets these questions remain, and no argument or worldview can answer…

There is something new in Doestoevsky's insights into the psychology of “the Human Being,” beyond the Church Fathers, or at least that's the case made. If this is true, especially…

To the tomb, all life hastens. But while death is ineluctable, the growing good of the world is not. There is an intrinsic vulnerability to civilization (and parenthood), in large…

Ed Hagenstein reflects on Makoto Fujimura's metaphor for cultural engagement and suggests that cultural renewal starts with the essential resources all around us.

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self draws on a deep reservoir of erudition rather than the shallow puddle of populism.

The lens through which Eric O. Jacobsen views the three pieces of glass that serve as the basis of his book—the windshield, TVs, and phones—is in need of a good…

The modern age, in almost every detail, began with the flat rejection of joy.  And the modern condition consists in alternately lamenting that there is nothing in which to take…

What if the nation-state was not the cure but the cause of the wars that we term “religious”?

Teaching Wendell Berry to students today isn't a thankless task, but the victories are small and far between (which, one might say, is all the best victories always are).

Holland, MI. I confess: I hate farms. I hate everything about them. I hate the malodorous smells that take days to wash off. I hate the all-pervasive dirt which invades…

Washington, Connecticut. The urge, some might say mania with which our species has attempted to distance itself from Nature is a defining occupation and it appears to be quickening in…

Readers of FPR will be readily forgiven if they have yet to reserve any time this year to celebrate the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth. (If you are tempted,…