Walking the Camino Portugues to Santiago: On Development and Developers
As we are running out of time for many things, we chanced this April to walk the Camino Portugues with Agnes. We had limited success, for various…
Chekhov and the Literature of Possibility
Jacques Rancière needs little introduction to those in the world of philosophy, art, and aesthetics. Neither does Anton Chekhov, the great Russian writer famous for his short…
Heir to the Throne: Posthumanism and the Specter of the Totalitarian Titan
We find ourselves in a moment of time that is as much a mirror of a prior time as its extension, this prior time being the immediate…
What Is A “Social Creature”? Reflections on Education and Order
The question of social cohesion or cooperation has been a recurring one for me. It inevitably involves questions about human nature, since what it reveals is that…
Decoration Day
Mockingbirds sing in this rural Southern graveyard where you now lie amidst engraved stones, some broken, some legible though weathered cryptic by rain, drought, cold, spring and…
The Cartesian Universe and the End of Common Sense
“I realized that it was necessary … to demolish everything completely,” Rene Descartes asserts in his 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy “… and start again right from…
From Sin to Capitalism: Jacques Le Goff on Usury in the Middle Ages
The Middle Ages remain one of the most fascinating, yet simultaneously one of the most debated and misunderstood periods in history. To the modern, especially uninformed, observer,…
The New Right’s Hollow Gospel: Rediscovering the Common Good
Neoliberalism is visibly decaying. The promise of effortless prosperity that once sustained a belief in the mythos of the American Dream now feels like a cruel joke…
Post Cards from the Edge: Liberalism Before the Fall
A survey of the current ideological landscape is a bleak and dismal undertaking. Not a glimmer of hope is visible because optimism itself appears to have been…
Pentecost in Dust
The Galilean Druid knelt And stuck his fingers in the dust. The crowd that clamored all around Had no effect at all on him. Though every eye…
The University Before the University
Some years ago, while I was working on my own doctoral dissertation, my chair gave me a short list of professors linking our program to the founder…
A Tale of Two Buildings and Two Types of ‘Intelligence’ – Reflecting on Magnifica Humanitas
Long before the publication of Magnifica Humanitas, many believed Pope Leo XIV's inaugural encyclical document would address artificial intelligence; those hopes were not in vain. Long before…
Encountering and Creating the Beautiful
In our day and age, the rush and fury of digital distractions and slick advertising campaigns threaten to leave us in suspended animation, with eyes glued to…
No Progress in Philosophy: Plato vs Positivism
Given the paucity of knowledge we have about the Pre-Socratics, Western philosophy as we know it reached its pinnacle with Plato and has since largely been engaged…
Orienting One’s Zetema
“The world is experiencing a serious crisis, is undergoing a process of withering, which has its origins in the secularization of the soul and in the ensuing…