We don’t often stop and consider the elements, material and otherwise, that makeup architecture and urban spaces. Often, we think of them as simply the background against which we live, the setting for the drama of our human existence... “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” —Winston Churchill People love good streets. Americans who [...]
A straightforward reading of Michel Houellebecq’s book shows that the author wants to consider the possibility that religion—not spiritualism, not some kind of therapeutic deism, but true, practiced, day-to-day religion—soothes our longings and grants us some measure of peace and satisfaction, a measure withheld by secular liberalism… Submission: A Novel by Michel Houellebecq (Groupe Flammarion, 2015) [...]
As the rift in Western culture between secular traditions and sacred traditions grows wider, the scramble to explain ourselves, to sublimate our experiences and give them meaning, becomes increasingly frantic... My husband and I couldn’t do family Christmas gifts this year, so instead we decided to write thoughtful notes to each family member reflecting on [...]
In the 1950s, Robert Nisbet summarized the effects of nineteenth-century individualism on modern humans in the book The Quest for Community: “[Nineteenth-century] individualism has resulted in masses of normless, unattached, insecure individuals who lose even the capacity for independent, creative living.” His brutally honest assessment is only more true today; our public universities are busy [...]
It’s called FOMO: that sneaking Fear Of Missing Out on the experience that will make us feel happy and fulfilled—what Aristotle calls “human flourishing.” It comes from a belief that happiness comes from something we do, and social media exacerbate our fears, because when we see other people accomplish, experience, or achieve something we haven’t, [...]
On December 31, 2015, a mob of young Arab and North African men, perhaps as many as 1,000, assaulted, groped, harassed, and in some cases even raped European women in Cologne, Germany. It took almost a week for police to corroborate social media reports of the crime wave, and even longer for authorities to take [...]
Ridley Scott’s TV adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle came to Amazon in November, and bluntly put, it’s a horrifying ten hours. The premise says it all: What if the Allies had lost World War II? We see America divided between a Nazi regime in the east and a Japanese empire [...]