Modernity is an era of exposure. How so? In a context where the ancient paths must be chosen—where the world around us will not reinforce them—any relation to those paths will share in the pathologies that attend human willing. This is not to deny, of course, that civilization itself cannot mediate pathology. Indeed it has […]
Friday, 18 December, 2020 by Joseph Minich
“I am I and my circumstance,” Ortega was fond of saying. And resisting the cultural forces that threaten to drag our civilization to the death of a fixed tribalism – I previously claimed – requires some reading of our circumstance. This is true for all Christians. Minimally, Christians can be confident that our ultimate enemies […]
Friday, 20 November, 2020 by Joseph Minich
Almost 40% of young Millennials are religiously unaffiliated (2). But, argues Tara Isabella Burton, this does not mean that they are not religious. The latter is not a particularly remarkable claim, of course. Many books have been written about post-Christian Western spirituality, and even about the “religion” of the godless. It would be a shame […]
Thursday, 05 November, 2020 by Joseph Minich
Previously, I argued that American “woke” and “red-pill” tribes mirror one another’s motions. If the polls can be trusted, it would appear that an unusual percentage of our fellow countrymen are electing for one of the two main parties in November. And if the polls cannot be trusted, few would contest the myriad of subtle […]
Monday, 26 October, 2020 by Joseph Minich
Our country is tense as the 2020 election fast approaches. Donald Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016 was a political earthquake that manifested deep and stubborn fault-lines in American civilization. Those who weren’t paying attention when the cracks seemed smaller are most certainly paying attention now. And the last four years have seen little […]
Wednesday, 30 September, 2020 by Joseph Minich
“For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him; but the tax collectors and prostitutes did believe him; and you, seeing this, did not even feel remorse afterward so as to believe him.” Matthew 21:32 It is sometimes easy to miss the surgical precision in the words of […]
Wednesday, 16 September, 2020 by Joseph Minich
The Assault on American Excellence By Anthony Kronman Free Press, 2019 288 pages (hardcover), $27.00 Unceasingly inundated as our civilization is with transparently partisan moralizing, I’d wager that the average American intellectual has developed the unenviable habit of being reflexively cynical and numb in the face of any moral screed. We’re constantly on the lookout […]
Tuesday, 01 September, 2020 by Joseph Minich
Central in late modern society, I previously claimed, is bonding over ideology. Especially in an age of social media, we are habituated to code persons as totems of a friendly or opposing force – an accuser or an affirmer. The gradual evaporation of traditional embodied networks of trust renders the center of human identity virtual […]
Tuesday, 18 August, 2020 by Joseph Minich
Perhaps the birthpangs of our modern era of mobility began with the railroads. But the automobile (and later the airplane) made mobility go viral. The inevitable effect of this has been the increasing capacity of human beings to choose their neighbors. One might think that this simply means choosing one’s physical neighbors. But it has […]
Thursday, 16 July, 2020 by Joseph Minich