Born of antimodern sentiment, the summer camp was ultimately a modern phenomenon, a “therapeutic space” as much dependent on the city, the factory, and “progress” to define its parameters as on that intangible but much...

Advances in communication technology foster a false fantasy of togetherness by transmitting the impression of contact- phone calls, faxes, e-mail- without its substance. And when a relationship is ailing from frank time deprivation, both parties...

In a feast of fame and talks,Scandal flashing, raising tongue and brows.In a blast of bombing and power play,Fear and death dig more revenge.In a forgotten continent,Famine and drought devour lives.In an unfortunate eye of...

The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns...

Women’s liberation is one thing, but the permeation of anti-male sentiment in post-modern popular culture – from our mocking sitcom plots to degrading commercial story lines – stands testament to the ignorance of society. Fair...

We’ve inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development part of what distinguishes the “modern”...

Walter Mignolo terms and articulates _critical cosmopolitanism, juxtaposing it with globalization, which is a process of “the homogeneity of the planet from above––economically, politically and culturally.” Although _globalization from below_ is to counter _globalization from...

For better of for worse the church in the West bought modernity’s claims. We were baptized in its story (even though it said it did not have one) and accepted its categories and definitions. But...

Nothing is born of nothing, least of all knowledge, modernity, or enlightened thought; progress is made in tiny surges, in successive laps, like an endless relay race. But there are links without which nothing would...

When we pick up the newspaper at breakfast, we expect – we even demand – that it brings us momentous events since the night before…We expect our two-week vacations to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and...

A paradox: the same century invented History and PHotography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive...

In the world of The Age of Innocence, a financial disaster or moral scandal would permanently exile a guest from the finest dinner tables. In contemporary New York, a mere change of fashion can eliminate...

Multitasking is a highly overrated thing if you ask me. Today, we do everything in twos and threes. There is no longer time to stand and gaze, to look and ponder and to let your...

Modern anxiety is expressed in the longing for what most people fear, even as modern grief is expressed in the unconsummated mourning for what they never really had.

To be “modern” means refusing to worry about where the benefits of progress actually come from.

It seems the more we know, the less we believe.

In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.

Protestant Christianity, whether in its liberal or conservative garb, finds itself waking up each morning in bed with a deteriorating modern culture, between sheets with a raunchy sexual reductionism, despairing scientism, morally normless cultural relativism,...

Before this generation lose the wisdom, one advice – read books.

I believe that the idea of the totality, the finality of the master-plan, is misguided. One should advocate a gradual transformation of public space, a metamorphic process, without relying on a hypothetical time in the...

Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. … At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex...

How could a large land empire thrive and dominate in the modern world without reliable access to world markets and without much recourse to naval power?Stalin and Hitler had arrived at the same basic answer...

Modernity kills ghostly romance(“The Undying Thing”)

Modern politics is like watching a film with only bad guys. It soon starts to get really boring, because one of the points of stories is that they should have some sort of redeeming character,...

better” synonymous. From my family I became aware of the importance of passing along wisdom from one generation to the next. Yet despite the increasing proliferation of digital recording and other communication technologies, we’re passing...

I was thinking about honour. It’s a thing that changes doesn’t it? I mean, a hundred and fifty years ago we would have had to fight if challenged. Now we’d laugh. There must have been...

In India there’s no modernism without barbarism. Strip away the young man’s face and you’ll find an old man’s mind.

There is a quality of lightness, easiness, and in some sense blatant unseriousness that pervades Classical Christianity’s dialogue with modernity. The Christian intellect has no reason to be intimidated in the presence of later-stage modernity....

To live in modernity–an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news–is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason...

The death of God left the angels in a strange position.

Apollinaire said a poet should be ‘of his time.’ I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in...

The whole tendency of modern life is towards scientific planning and organisation, central control, standardisation, and specialisation. If this tendency was left to work itself out to its extreme conclusion, one might expect to see...

In February 1912, ancient China came to an end when the last of three millennia of Chinese emperors abdicated.Imagine twentieth-century Italy coming to terms with the fall of the Roman empire or Egypt with the...

Right now I’m thinking a good deal about emancipation. One of our sins was slavery, another was emancipation. It’s a paradox. In theory, emancipation was one of the glories of our democracy – and it...

You know,” he added reflectively, “we’ve got a much easier job now than we should have had fifty years ago. If we’d had to modernise a country then it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bicameral...

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

The church that weds itself to modernity is already a widow within postmodernity.

This is what made the difference, they used social networking for entertainment and I used it for business.

Modern art has to be what is called ‘intense.’ it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.

One would love nonetheless to know how to be a man, how to be a woman before God, in the mirror of one’s own conscience, in the looks of those who surround us. One would...

Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib...

The only way to gain power in a world that is moving too fast is to learn to slow down. And the only way to spread one’s influence wide to learn how to go deep....

If God meant for people to fly, He would have given them brains.

The modern world has forgotten the necessity of encouraging men to be better. They speak of sick men or healthy men, of interesting people or uninteresting people; they never, or seldom, indicate that there is...

What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don’t say about themselves.

A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

Keep in mind, we are past the age of enlightenment. This is past reason. We are pretty deep into modern history and the decline of religion. This is when nature itself has been stripped bare...

The peculiar predicament of the present-day self surely came to pass as a consequence of the disappointment of the high expectations of the self as it entered the age of science and technology. Dazzled by...