arts and culture on Modern Life

Last year I joined the growing ranks of people who have made the return to music on vinyl. There is much debate in my family as to whether I’m a hipster or will soon be eating dinner at 4 p.m. and wea...

Cultural commentator Richard Sennett has claimed that the primary architectural emblem of contemporary life is the airport departure lounge.

In his book  Flesh: Bringing the Incarnation Down to Earth , Hugh Halter opens with an unlikely scenario: taking his teenage daughter to get her first tattoo. While watching his daughter get “inked...

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

In a knowledge-based economy, the way we make ourselves seen and even validated is through more work. Busyness shows us that we’re valuable, contributing members to society. So whether we can’t stop c...

The big issue . . . is not whether one applauds or disapproves of the growth of consumerism. The central issue is that consumerism is now a fact of life.”11

In his excellent little book, A Testament of Devotion , written almost a hundred years ago, Thomas Kelly describes the true heart of the problem related to the complexity of our lives: Let me fir...

Looking into his life and out to the wider world, Kenneth Gergen writes about The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life, arguing that “social saturation brings with it a general lo...

Up until the twentieth century, traditional cultures (and this is still true of most cultures in the world) always believed that too high a view of yourself was the root cause of all the evil in the w...

Modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increa...