Tag Archives: Modernity

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Flannery O'Connor

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it.
—Flannery O’Connor
 
1. Introduction: Flannery O’Connor’s Open Soul
Flannery O’Connor belongs to a very particular age of the American fiction. She is inserted in a period marked by a strong kind of linguistic realism inspired by the kinds of James Joyce and William…

Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary. Arpad Szakolczai. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2016.
Arpad Szakolczai is Professor of Sociology at University College Cork, and the first book’s subtitle is The Sociology of the Contemporary (hereafter NS) while the second occurs within a Contemporary Liminality Series. Still, all of Szakolczai’s work seems to effortlessly go beyond what’s conventionally regarded as…
Trepanier McGuire Voegelin

Eric Voegelin (1901-85) is often portrayed as one of the severest critics of modernity–its belief in human reason’s ability to understand and convey the fundamental structures of reality and its dismissal of transcendent teleologies as private and suspect beliefs. For Voegelin, modernity was a “Gnostic revolt” against reality: the belief that human beings can transform the nature of reality through…
Religion Christianity God Divine

Michael Allen Gillespie’s The Theological Origins of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
 
Seeking to clarify what we mean by “modernity,” Michael Gillespie provides an intellectual history of the subject by reaching back to the late Middle Ages. Contrary to the accounts that present modernity as a radical break with the past based on reason, Gillespie provides a perspective that…

In view of an unfolding global modernity, Voegelin  proposed “the empirical thesis that the philosophical investigation of the realm of phenomena has always drawn  its dynamism  from contemporary conflict situations. If today's horizon of the phenomena in question is truly global, it is because the entire globe has become  a contemporary field of tensions.” As a result, philosophical investigation must…
Alt Right reactionary

Part 2: Rebooting the Leviathan.
In the first part of this essay we looked at the phenomenon of the “alt right”. In this second piece we turn to discussions of neo-reactionary philosophy. A common story goes that the intellectual flagship, the act of legitimation for reanimating reaction as a culture, began at the end of last decade with a rather peculiar…
Martin Heidegger 5

Unlike the word “modern,” which in common usage usually connotes progress and improvement over the past, “modernity” is a more abstract, less commonly used word that is often pejorative, suggesting the negative cultural underside of “progress.”  The  “culture war” in which the Western world is currently engaged is a contest between those who regard the modern age of secularism, scientism,…
Augusto del Noce 1

The Crisis of Modernity. Augusto Del Noce with Carlo Lancellotti, ed. and trans. Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2014.
 
An important book has been published. Let us use the occasion of this short review to justify this importance and to explain why the book deserves to be widely read by philosophers and political and social theorists – and by anyone trying to…
Augusto del Noce 2

In 1968, Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics was published in Italian by Borla, translated by Renato Pavetto, and with an introduction authored by Catholic philosopher Augusto Del Noce (1910-1989) titled ‘Eric Voegelin e la critica dell’idea di modernità’ [‘Eric Voegelin and the Critique of the Idea of Modernity’].[1] The aim of The New Science of Politics, Del Noce…
Leo Strauss 4

Modernity and What Has Been Lost. Considerations on the Legacy of Leo Strauss. Pawel Armada and Arkadiusz Górnisiewicz, eds. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press / Krakow, The Jagellonian University Press, 2012.
 
Modernity and What Has Been Lost is the title of a conference on Leo Strauss held at the Jagellonian University in Krakow in June 2009.
The eleven papers of this conference,…