Romano Guardini’s Diagnosis of the Modern World

By |2024-02-23T20:52:07-06:00February 20th, 2024|Categories: Christianity, Civil Society, Culture, Featured, Modernity, Romano Guardini|

“To speak precisely, God lost His dwelling place; thereby man lost his proper place in existence.” Man believed he had dominion over nature, and so proceeded to act as a ruler thereof, but it is a poor ruler indeed who destroys that over which he is supposed to govern. “Where is the place of man? [...]

Charles Peguy on the Hubris of Modernism

By |2023-11-29T18:11:41-06:00November 29th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Culture, Modernity, Philosophy, Timeless Essays|

In Western society we are so immersed in and surrounded by the philosophy of modernism, that many are hardly aware of it. Modernism may present itself in various forms. Most recently, some aspects of it seem to have appeared among clergy in the Vatican. It is, therefore, relevant to revisit Charles Peguy’s hard-hitting critique of [...]

James Joyce, John Senior, & the Illumination of the Modern World

By |2023-11-18T08:06:23-06:00November 17th, 2023|Categories: Books, Christianity, Culture, John Senior, Modernity|

Reading James Joyce and John Senior together will illuminate the modern world and point toward a path of how to thrive within it. Both represent a quest for the real: one through the symbolic mediation of literature and the other through its poetic embodiment in our daily lives. John Senior is known as a cultural [...]

The Soundminded Schizophrenic: Living in the Just-Nowness

By |2023-11-15T17:50:53-06:00November 15th, 2023|Categories: E.B., Eva Brann, In Honor of Eva Brann at 90 Series, Liberal Learning, Modernity, Senior Contributors, St. John's College, Time, Timeless Essays|

“Modernity” comes from Latin "modo," meaning “just-now.” Thus modernity is any generation’s own time; it is the mode of the recent, the contemporary—with a hint of time-pride: the latest is the newest, and the newest is the best. Mr. Ropoulos and I were talking in the St. John’s College Coffee Shop, and the subject of [...]

Capitalism and the Gospel of Love

By |2023-09-06T19:06:29-05:00September 6th, 2023|Categories: Adam Smith, American Republic, Capitalism, Economics, Free Markets, George Stanciu, Love, Modernity, Timeless Essays|

In “The Wealth of Nations,” Adam Smith was absolutely right: The widespread division of labor would cause the interior life to die; an unsurprising result, for under capitalism, the human person became a commodity, a resource, a thing used to further profits. My parents, Romanian gypsies, born in a Transylvanian village and raised in thatched-roofed [...]

Are We Becoming a Nation of Gollums?

By |2023-09-02T10:36:44-05:00September 2nd, 2023|Categories: Christian Humanism, Christianity, Evil, J.R.R. Tolkien, Joseph Pearce, Modernity, Senior Contributors|

Although we are halflings, we cannot remain halflings. We must either grow towards the wholeness of holiness or we must shrivel into the wreckage that Pride will make of our lives. Doing nothing is the sin of omission which leads to decay. We can either be Ring-bearers or Ring-wearers. We can either take up our [...]

St. Augustine, Modernity, & the Recovery of True Education

By |2023-08-27T13:11:19-05:00August 27th, 2023|Categories: Bradley G. Green, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Featured, Liberal Learning, Modernity, Senior Contributors, St. Augustine, Timeless Essays|

One of the most pressing tasks for contemporary Christians is the recovery and cultivation of the inextricable link between the Christian faith and the intellectual life. In order to engage in such reflection, we should explore the relationship of Christianity and the liberal arts, and in particular seek to draw from Augustine as we reflect [...]

Romano Guardini & “The End of the Modern World”

By |2023-08-25T20:55:06-05:00August 25th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Mark Malvasi, Modernity, Romano Guardini, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Nearly seventy years after the publication of Romano Guardini's "The End of the Modern World," the rot has advanced too far to entertain any serious prospect of restoring a Christian social order in which, as Guardini insisted, “faith will maintain itself against animosity and danger” and “man’s obedience to God will assert itself with a [...]

The Speechless Image

By |2023-08-14T14:39:03-05:00August 14th, 2023|Categories: Art, Culture, Modernity, Philosophy, Timeless Essays, Worldview|

What can be said of the way that the abstract work speaks to us—despite the fact that its “content” is untranslatable into words and concepts—is that in its very inability to speak, the work expresses the sense of alienation from a once-familiar and shared artistic life-world. Is the avant-garde then a tragedy or a happy [...]

Modernity: A Rebellion Against God

By |2023-07-31T19:51:59-05:00July 31st, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Existence of God, Francis Bacon, George Stanciu, Modernity, Science|

Francis Bacon imagined a glorious future for us once our ancestors made themselves the masters and possessors of Nature; however, the ever-ascending arc of science and technology turned out to be not under human control. Physicists, neuroscientists, and computer and genetic engineers are the new sorcerer’s apprentices, having summoned great forces they can now not [...]

The Year They Tore Salem Depot Down

By |2023-06-29T16:56:22-05:00June 29th, 2023|Categories: Architecture, Culture, History, Modernity, Timeless Essays|

We are lesser people for the disappearance of our architectural heritage. If Edmund Burke was correct that “to make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely,” then historical preservation takes on the same importance as land conservation. Both are inheritances to be held against the bulldozers of economic development. Salem Depot [...]

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