17. To claim that modernity entails the simultaneous global re-negotiation of all human custom does not, crucially, imply that modernity is the death of tradition. We can no more exit tradition than we can exit language. But as the parallel itself suggests, this does...

13. Taking the mid 19th century as our point of departure in understanding modernity, I have (so far) focused merely on the question of man’s relationship with his labor (and implicitly the swelling of the earth’s population after 1800). Another way of filling out...

9. If our point of departure in understanding modernity is “that moment in which some humans decided they were modern,” then the epochal fracture would have to be located in the 19th century. One could describe the transitions of that century along many vectors...

5. Before we seek to understand modernity, it is fitting to ask whether there is anything to be understood in the first place. Is “modernity” actually definable in any substantive way, or is it a phantom of the human imagination? As Bruno Latour argues in We Have...

The first in a series navigating the key features of modern life and the crises they provoke.

Could religion only have developed among a species that knew how to play?

For a significant portion of the human race, the sensation of self-confidence is but a mental construct. Its internal structure is imaginatively “guessed” and projected on those who evidence its external markers. But like any good alchemy, the recipe remains elusive and secret.

“Feelings are not facts,” we hear a lot these days. In a host of intellectual and even pastoral debates, this binary is popular. There are those who care about the real stubborn world of inflexible facts, and those who want to force the world to conform to the shape of their feelings. There are those, analogously, who stick to the plain teaching of the Bible, and those who try to retrofit the Bible into the shape of their sentiments.