Whereas we denizens of late modernity are wandering in the fog of the simultaneous global renegotiation of all human custom, and consequently pining for nodal points of orientation, it seems fitting to remind ourselves that it is of the very essence of said “nodes”...

25. On a superficial reading, the trends and quandaries I have highlighted thus far permit two basic reactions. Republicans versus democrats, right versus left, conservative versus progressive, tradition versus change, power versus justice - perhaps men versus women....

I have always (in one way or another) battled with the assurance. From an extremely visceral fear of going to Hell in my early childhood, to which was added a struggle with the assurance of salvation in my youth and a more profound struggle with general religious...

21. Bringing my analysis all the way to the ground, it is one thing to see our quandary, and another to know what to do about it. One way through the morass, as Joshua Mitchell has recently argued (see American Awakening) is to remind ourselves what is a supplement...

Some say that Jesus always "responded" to people, but never "reacted" to them. For our purposes, I'll take "being triggered" as a reaction. On this reading, most of us are frequently triggered in (at least) small ways. It is ironic that the term came into usage as one...

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.