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From Chicken-Stuffing to Immortality Machines: The Faustian Bargain of Modernity

The scene feels like a grim parody of scientific progress: London, late March 1626. An aging Sir Francis Bacon, once Lord Chancellor of England, now fallen from grace but still crackling with intellectual ambition, jostles in a carriage through the snow near Highgate. Spying a chicken pecking scraps in a cottage yard, a sudden inspiration […]

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An Elegy for the Sacramental Imagination

Karen Armstrong (b. 1944)—British author, scholar, and former Roman Catholic nun—has spent a lifetime interrogating the modern world’s estrangement from the sacred. Since leaving her religious order in 1969, she has emerged as one of the most accessible and thoughtful voices in comparative religion, blending scholarly range with spiritual urgency. Her wide-ranging works—A History of […]

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The Failure of the Modern Project: Part 1 of 4

O what a world of profit and delight,Of power, of honour, of omnipotence,Is promis’d to the studious artizan!All things that move between the quiet polesShall be at my command: Emperors and KingsAre but obey’d i’ their sev’ral provinces,Nor can they raise the wind or rend the clouds;But his dominion that exceeds in this, Stretcheth as […]

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