Political philosophers have always understood that there was a close relationship between conceptions of time and politics. Modern, and now postmodern politics, are no different. Patrick Deneen has recently argued that modern ideologies are defined first and foremost by their relationship to time. Introduction “The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite, / That [...]
We have an obligation, it seems, not only to long for the recovery of the unspeakable loveliness that has come and gone when time will be no more, but to recognize it when it is passing and to speak of it to ourselves and others. In Alice Thomas Ellis’s “A Welsh Childhood,” we see nostalgia [...]
What makes time so wonderful is that it humbles us as well as inspires us. And if we simply recognized each person on social media as a complete human being born into a specific place and a specific time, we might be able to get past so much of what we erroneously label as discourse. [...]
The end of history concept—the belief that there will be an endpoint to social, intellectual, and political progress—is a powerful idea that pervades modern-day secular thought. The spread of gay rights, the rise of universal government-run health insurance, and environmental awareness has hubristically led “progressive” secularists to describe a coming “Age of Enlightenment” when Americans [...]
The imagination allows the human experience to be of both motion and stability, both becoming and being—but could it be that contained in our experience of time is an experience of divine nature? In his Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius writes that “the infinite motion of temporal things tries to imitate the ever present immobility of [...]
Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. […]
If it is the case that time never makes its appearance out in the world but only motion is in evidence, then either time is not or it is in the only other venue of which I can think, inside our soul. Let me first explain my odd-sounding title. It is a variation on the [...]
Time, it will turn out, is a kind of intuiting, indeed the matrix of all intuiting, but it is not therefore to be intuited, that is, looked at, rather than thought out. The moving pictures that Hegel himself suggests to illustrate the emerging determinations of thought are only concessions to our ordinarily representational minds. This [...]
Time is not a being, a thing, or a substance in the world, nor does it operate as a power, a force, or a destiny in our life. It has no external existence; the word “time” is used by a sort of obtuse poetry for processes that have better names of their own. Here is [...]
The past is, indeed, a place in which to take refuge when it is necessary to pull back, to contemplate life, and to mull things over. The present is the phase for brisk deliberation, decision, and action; for being in that sleepwalking state in which we do, more or less surefootedly, the one thing needful [...]
Christopher Dawson believed that history, far from being cyclical, was instead a particular manifestation of God’s will, and thus was “moving towards a great consummation, the revelation of the power and glory of Yahweh through his servant Israel”… As noted in previous essays in this series, Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), one of the greatest of the [...]
The future is nothing but the dreams and plans we currently have; nothing is coming but what we actively or passively agree to. When our dean asked me to lecture this September it was because I’ve just completed a book on time, and I’m happy to have the opportunity to talk about it. There seemed [...]
For all that we are often lost amid the loneliness, hostage to the gravity and grief that cause us to fall, there is always that sudden and unexpected upsurge of grace and glory to lift us high above the dark and sullen weight of so many dead and dying leaves... An old and valued friend, [...]
It could be that this earth is the staging ground for all that matters in the cosmos. It may well be that this planet is the battleground where the cosmic battle between good and evil reaches it’s climax. Crucial battles must take place somewhere. What if the war in heaven is completed here on this field of war? And what if [...]