Sublime

Stoicism, an ancient philosophy that was once one of the most popular civic disciplines in the West, practiced by the rich and the impoverished, the powerful and the struggling alike in the pursuit of the Good Life.

So, too, were the ancient Greeks and Romans. They were nomadic, eating one meal a day—mostly seasonal fresh food, meats, fish, legumes and whole grains, olive oil, and wine. However, if you look a little farther south to Egypt, long-revered for their magnificent civilization, you see something altogether different. Much of their art depicts a

In Paul’s day, “religion” consisted of God-related activities that, along with politics and community life, held a culture together and bound the members of that culture to its divinities and to one another. In the modern Western world, “religion” tends to mean God-related individual beliefs and practices that are supposedly separable from culture,

We can take Pinker as our quintessential modern Hobbesian. In his magnum opus, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2012), and subsequent books like Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018) he argues that today we live in a world which is, overall, far less violent and cruel than anything

Don’t you ever stop to question why things are the way they are now? Pick a random time or place on this Earth and plop yourself down into any of its cities as just a normal citizen. Ancient Egypt. Modern Egypt. The Roman Empire. Sparta. Istanbul. Congo, now or then. St. Petersburg. Ancient Beijing. Feudal Japan. Māori New Zealand. There isn’t just

“Foundations of law like the ones you prize; who are they laid by? Men who aren’t afraid to bloody their knuckles or hurl tea in harbors. Now, this nation of ours decided to lay aside a violent beginning—in some ways, at least—and try to ground our future in something more rational . . . But that doesn’t mean violent men didn’t kick off the

Principled struggle is a Marxist conflict framework brought into Black movement spaces most recently by N’Tanya Lee.