Tag: modernity

But I wonder: as it strains to get over Christ, will the West survive without noticing all the other beaten horses of the world? Or will it one day break its supposed sanity and collapse back into a foregone pity?

Witnessing the ascendancy of the Machine, Lewis understood what was at stake. He watched this ideology sweep across his society and take hold in its schools, and he keenly felt the loss of what was so hastily displaced and soon forgotten. The medieval worldview that Lewis cherished was replaced by an ideology that breeds nihilism and despair.

Modernity has become permanently liquid; it no longer seeks solid replacements to the pre-modern world but finds greater value in transience, not just of institutions and things, but of human relationships too.

Are dreams only dreams? Or are they God’s gifts of the unconscious which we still fail to know? McCarthy lets these questions remain, and no argument or worldview can answer them. So, we are left waiting for God to say something, anything, as His answer.

There is something new in Doestoevsky's insights into the psychology of “the Human Being,” beyond the Church Fathers, or at least that's the case made. If this is true, especially in the light of the complete mental breakdown happening all around us, shouldn't we be redirecting our time and energy toward incorporating this and making it central to our thought and lives?

To the tomb, all life hastens. But while death is ineluctable, the growing good of the world is not. There is an intrinsic vulnerability to civilization (and parenthood), in large part because the beings who comprise it have the capacity both to sustain and destroy it; to be “the best of the animals when completed” and “the most unholy and … savage” when divorced from virtue.

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self draws on a deep reservoir of erudition rather than the shallow puddle of populism.

The lens through which Eric O. Jacobsen views the three pieces of glass that serve as the basis of his book—the windshield, TVs, and phones—is in need of a good polishing.

The modern age, in almost every detail, began with the flat rejection of joy.  And the modern condition consists in alternately lamenting that there...