Mystery and the Manners of the Modern Student

The modern world view, marked by a suspicion of anything not empirical, skeptical to the possibility of transcendence or mystery, is our age’s default perspective. What exists beyond the data points of observable human emotion and action? Our society has no answer. Modernity is the air we breathe, the language we use, the habits we form.

Walker Percy and Writing this Blog

Over the summer I got together with some teacher friends to read and discuss Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins, his wildly funny dystopian satire written in the early 1970s. It’s a grab-bag of a book (“everything in it but the kitchen sink,” Percy once told the Paris Review) and I couldn’t get enough of its odd mix of science-fiction, philosophy, ribald humor, and eerily prophetic descriptions of American life in the 1990s, as he imagined it.