Tag Archives: Culture

Culture, Essays, History, Philosophy, Politics

THE REPUBLIC OF VOICES

At the height of its power in 1364, Venice was a republic where eloquence was currency and every piazza a stage.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, August 24, 2025

The bells began before sunrise. Their iron tongues tolled across the lagoon, vibrating against the damp November air, carrying from the Campanile of San Marco to the Arsenal’s yards and into the canals of Cannaregio. This was Venice in 1364—at the height of its power, its fleets unrivaled in the Mediterranean, its markets setting the prices of silk and spice across Europe. The city sat at the hinge of East and West, commanding trade routes between Byzantium, the Mamluk Sultanate, and Western Christendom. Venetian galleys, sleek and maneuverable, patrolled waters thick with pirates, their timbers assembled in the Arsenale di Venezia, a proto-industrial marvel capable of producing a galley in a single day. Venice was wood, stone, and gold, but above all, it was sound. “The city is never silent,” one German pilgrim marveled, “every tongue of Christendom and beyond seems to shout at once.”

Venice’s supremacy was not abstract. Its colonies in Crete and Cyprus served as staging posts; its consulates dotted the Dalmatian coast. In Constantinople and Alexandria, Venetians lived in fortified fondaci—walled compounds where merchants traded under their own laws. The wealth of Murano’s glassmakers, Rialto’s bankers, and San Polo’s textile dyers depended on this vast maritime lattice. Even the Doge—Venice’s elected head of state, chosen for life from among the patrician class, part monarch, part magistrate but hemmed in by councils—was more merchant than monarch. Venetian nobility was not feudal but commercial: a patrician might chair the Senate one year and finance a convoy to the Levant the next. Bills of exchange, maritime insurance, joint-stock ventures—all pioneered here—reduced risk and turned uncertainty into empire.

Yet the republic was also built on voices. Speech was its second currency, flowing through churches, palaces, markets, and courts. Treaties were sealed with words before they were inked; rumors shifted markets as much as cargoes; sermons inflamed consciences long before decrees reached the streets.

In San Marco, the Basilica of mosaics and incense, the preacher’s voice dominated. On feast days friars addressed audiences that blurred patrician and plebeian, women and sailors, artisans and merchants. A Franciscan, recalling the Black Death, likened Venetian greed to “a contagion that spreads from house to house.” Andrea Dandolo, the Doge who also wrote a chronicle of his age, noted the murmurs of unease that followed. A parable about false shepherds might by nightfall become tavern gossip, retooled as an attack on patrician governors.

In 1364, Venice granted Petrarch a palazzo on the Riva degli Schiavoni in exchange for his library, a collection that would become the foundation of the Biblioteca Marciana. Known as the father of Humanism and now often called the father of the Italian Renaissance, he was among Europe’s most influential figures—poet of the Canzoniere, rediscoverer of Cicero’s letters, and advocate for the revival of classical eloquence. From his Venetian residence, he praised the city as “a republic not only of ships and laws, but of eloquence itself, where voices, raised in harmony or dissent, bind the state together.” For him, Venice was not only a naval empire but also a theater of speech.

Across the piazza in the Doge’s Palace, words carried a different weight. The cavernous Sala del Maggior Consiglio could hold a thousand patricians, their decisions shaping treaties and wars. The Doge spoke little, his ritual response to petitions—“Si vedrà”, “It will be seen”—an eloquence of restraint. More dramatic were the relazioni, oral reports of ambassadors returning from Constantinople or Cairo. Though later transcribed, in the fourteenth century they were performances. An envoy describing the Byzantine emperor’s throne gestured so vividly that senators felt transported to the imperial court.

Yet it was in the Rialto that Venice’s speech was most raw, where chatter became commerce and gossip became power. By day, the wooden bridge creaked under merchants and beggars, its planks worn smooth by boots from every corner of Europe. Below, spices from Alexandria, silk from Cathay, and pepper from India changed hands, but so too did stories. “The Rialto is a world itself,” wrote the chronicler Marino Sanudo, “where the news of all Christendom and beyond is traded swifter than spices.” Rumors of Ottoman fleets could shift the price of cinnamon. Satirical verses, recited sotto voce, mocked the deafness of patricians: “A house of nodding heads, deaf to its people.”

And when night fell, the Rialto became something else entirely. Carnival transformed it into a stage where anonymity and satire thrived. Masked singers, some of them patrician youths disguised as artisans, improvised verses lampooning senators and guild leaders. One chronicler described young nobles in Greek disguise singing ballads about the Senate’s obsession with ceremony. The laughter echoed across the Grand Canal, tolerated because, as Venetians said, “the republic breathes satire as easily as air.”

The Grand Canal itself was Venice’s liquid stage. By day it was an artery of commerce, alive with the slap of oars, the curses of gondoliers, the hammering of crates. By dusk the atmosphere shifted. Lanterns swayed from boats, their reflections shimmering across the black water. Gondoliers sang what would one day evolve into the barcarolle. Noble families staged boat processions with lutes and trumpets, music drifting across the canal in competing layers of sound. Commerce by day, serenade by night—the same canal a bazaar and a ballroom.

And then there was the Piazza San Marco, the great stage of the republic. On feast days, choirs filled the basilica, their plainsong swelling into polyphony that ricocheted off Byzantine domes. Trumpeters announced the Doge, banners unfurled, and processions wound through the square until, as Dandolo wrote, “the piazza shone with gold and sounded with voices and trumpets.” During Carnival, the sacred gave way to the profane: jugglers, acrobats, and improvisatori recited comic verses in dialect. A fire-breather might draw crowds near the bronze horses while a masked singer mocked senators. It was noisy, unruly, profoundly Venetian—a place where art, politics, and voice collided.

Artisans, too, had their stages. The scuole, confraternities of tradesmen, were gatherings where chants gave way to orations. Statutes might be inscribed, but obligations were enforced aloud. A shoemakers’ statute from 1360 commanded that “each master shall stand and speak before his fellows, giving account not only of his work but of his conduct.” Eloquence was honor; to falter was to risk shame.

The courts offered a harsher stage. Justice, too, was spoken. The Statuta Veneta emphasized testimony over parchment: “testimony is judged not by parchment but by voice.” In 1362, a fisherman accused of theft protested, “Non rubai, ma trovai.”—“I did not steal, I found.” His trembling voice, the notary observed, betrayed him. Eloquence could acquit; faltering speech could condemn.

And words could also damn. After the plague, prophets thundered in piazzas, sailors cursed saints in taverns, women repeated visions too vividly. One inquisitorial record recalls a woman accused of declaring, “the plague is God’s punishment for the pride of merchants.” Whether prophecy or lament, her words were evidence of heresy.

To live in Venice was to live in a polyphony of languages. From Dalmatia to Crete, Cyprus to Trebizond, the city’s empire infused it with voices. The pilgrim Ludolf of Sudheim marveled that in one square he heard “Latin, Greek, Saracen, and Hebrew, all arguing.” Translators ferried not only goods but ideas—fragments of Averroes, Byzantine theology, Jewish philosophy. Did a spice-seller at the Rialto know he was transmitting the seeds of the Renaissance?

In patrician libraries and monastic scriptoria, another kind of voice was taking shape: Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, arriving in Latin translation, read aloud in candlelit chambers. By 1364, copies of Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics were circulating among patricians. What did it mean to live a life of virtue? Could the common good outweigh private interest? Such debates mattered in a republic balancing mercantile ambition with civic restraint.

Thomas Aquinas, too, was debated in Dominican houses. His Summa Theologica offered a scaffolding that united reason and faith. Did divine law supersede human law, or did the latter participate in the former? A friar might thunder against usury on Sunday while echoing Aquinas’s careful distinctions on just exchange.

What is striking is that these scholastic voices did not remain confined to cloisters. They mingled with guild disputations, senatorial deliberations, carnival satire. And just beyond the horizon, Humanism was stirring. Petrarch, uneasy yet pivotal, urged Venetians to recover eloquence from Cicero and Livy. The republic was poised between worlds: the scholastic synthesis of Aquinas and the humanist insistence that civic life could be ennobled by rhetoric and classical virtue. Venice in 1364 was thus not only a theater of speech but also a laboratory of ideas.

At dusk, the bells tolled once more. Gondoliers sang across the black canal, masked youths mocked senators in the Rialto, choirs rehearsed in San Marco. Senators lingered in debate, artisans rehearsed speeches, children recited prayers before sleep. Venice in 1364 was not only a republic of ships, coins, and statutes. It was a republic of voices. Andrea Dandolo wrote that “our city is a harmony of voices, discordant yet united, a choir upon the waters.”

Perhaps that is the truest way to understand the city at its zenith. Its power lay not only in fleets or treaties, but in the ceaseless interplay of sound and sense: the preacher stirring unease, the envoy swaying senators, the gondolier echoing Aristotle, the satirist mocking the elite. The same city that hammered out galleys in the Arsenale was also hammering out philosophies in its libraries, rhythms in its shipyards, and laughter in its carnivals. To live in Venice in 1364 was to inhabit a world where speech, spectacle, and speculation were indivisible, where every bridge or piazza might become a stage. The republic endured not because it silenced discord but because it orchestrated it—turning sermon, satire, and song into the polyphony of civic life. Venice was, and remains, a choir upon the waters.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Culture, Essays, Ethics, Gender, History

Beyond A Gender Binary: Its History And Humanity

By Sue Passacantilli, August 2, 2025

Gender diversity is as old as humanity itself, woven into the fabric of cultures, religions, and eras long before modern debates framed it as a new or threatening concept. Yet, the intertwined forces of colonialism, certain interpretations of Christianity, and rigid social structures have worked to erase or punish those who defy binary norms. This essay restores what has been forgotten: the rich history of gender diversity, the powerful forces that attempted to erase it, and the urgent need for compassion and inclusion today.

Gender non-conformity is not a lifestyle experiment or a fleeting cultural trend; it’s a fundamental and authentic expression of human identity. It isn’t a choice made on a whim or a rebellious phase to be outgrown, but rather a deep, internal truth that often emerges early in life. Decades of research in neuroscience, endocrinology, and psychology reveal that gender identity is shaped by a complex interplay of genetic influences, hormonal exposures during prenatal development, and brain structure. These forces operate beneath conscious awareness, forming the foundation of a person’s sense of self. To reduce gender non-conformity to a “choice” is to ignore both science and the lived experiences of millions. It is not a deviation from nature; it is a variation within it.

People living beyond traditional gender norms have always been part of our world. They prayed in ancient temples, tended fires in Indigenous villages, danced on European stages, and lived quiet lives in small homes where language could not even name who they were. They loved, grieved, and dreamed like anyone else. But they were often misunderstood, feared, or erased. History remembers kings and conquerors, wars and revolutions, and empires that rose and fell. Yet, woven silently between these grand narratives are countless untold stories—stories of people who dared to live outside society’s rigid lines. As author Leslie Feinberg once wrote, “My right to be me is tied with a thousand threads to your right to be you.” The struggle of gender-nonconforming people is a reflection of humanity’s larger fight for freedom—to live authentically, without shame or fear.

A Timeless Tapestry: Gender Diversity Across Cultures

Gender variance is not a modern phenomenon—it’s woven into the fabric of ancient societies across continents. In Mesopotamia, as early as 2100 BCE, gala priests—assigned male at birth—served in feminine roles and were respected for their ability to communicate with the goddess Inanna. Myths told of Inanna herself possessing the divine power to “change a man into a woman and a woman into a man,” reflecting an understanding of gender as mutable and sacred.

This fluidity wasn’t confined to the Near East. In Ancient Greece, myths celebrated fluid identities, like the story of Hermaphroditus, who merged male and female traits into a single divine being. Roman history offers one of the earliest known examples of a gender-variant ruler: Emperor Elagabalus, who ruled Rome from 218–222 CE. At just fourteen, Elagabalus openly defied gender norms, preferring feminine pronouns and even declaring, “Call me not Lord, for I am a Lady.” Though hostile historians often portrayed Elagabalus as scandalous, their life reflects a complex truth: gender non-conformity has existed even at the pinnacle of imperial power.

Outside Europe, gender diversity flourished openly. Many Native nations in North America recognized Two-Spirit people, individuals embodying both masculine and feminine spirits. One notable figure, Ozaawindib (c. 1797–1832) of the Ojibwe nation, lived as a woman, had multiple husbands, and was respected for her courage and spiritual insight. Another early 19th-century leader, Kaúxuma Núpika, a Ktunaxa prophet, lived as a man, took wives, and was revered as a shaman and visionary. These individuals exemplify a long-standing understanding of gender beyond binaries, deeply embedded in Indigenous spiritual and communal life.

In the Pacific Islands, Hawaiian māhū served as teachers and cultural keepers, blending masculine and feminine traits in roles considered vital to their communities. In Samoa, fa’afafine were recognized as a natural and valued part of society. In South Asia, Hijra communities held respected ceremonial roles for centuries, appearing in royal courts and religious rituals as bearers of blessings and fertility. Their existence is recorded as early as the 4th century BCE, long before European colonizers imposed rigid gender codes. Across continents and millennia, gender non-conforming people were present, visible, and often honored—until intolerance began rewriting their stories.

Colonialism, Christianity, and the Rise of Gender Binaries

If gender diversity has always existed, why do so many modern societies insist on strict binaries? The answer lies in the intertwined forces of colonialism and Christianity, which imposed narrow gender definitions as moral and divine law across much of the globe.

In Europe, Christian theology framed gender as fixed and divinely ordained, rooted in literal interpretations of Genesis: “Male and female He created them.” These words were weaponized to declare that only two genders existed and that deviation from this binary was rebellion against God. Early Church councils codified these interpretations into laws punishing gender variance and same-sex love. Gender roles became part of a “natural order,” leaving no space for complexity or authenticity.

As European empires expanded, missionaries carried these doctrines into colonized lands, enforcing binary gender roles where none had existed before. Two-Spirit traditions in North America were condemned as sinful. Indigenous children were taken to Christian boarding schools, stripped of language, culture, and identity. Hijra communities in India, once celebrated, were criminalized under British colonial law in 1871 through the Criminal Tribes Act, influenced by Victorian biblical morality. The spiritual and social roles of gender-diverse people across Africa, Asia, and the Pacific were dismantled under colonial pressure to conform to European Christian norms.

The fusion of scripture and empire transformed biblical interpretation into a weapon of social control. Gender diversity, once sacred, was reframed as sin, deviance, or criminality. This legacy lingers in laws and religious teachings today, where intolerance is still cloaked in divine sanction.

Yet, Christianity is not monolithic. Today, denominations like the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church, and numerous Methodist and Lutheran congregations advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. Many re-read scripture as a call to radical love and justice, rejecting its weaponization as a tool of oppression. These voices remind us that faith and gender diversity need not be in conflict—and that spiritual conviction can drive inclusion rather than exclusion.

Modern History and Resistance

Despite centuries of oppression, gender-nonconforming people have persisted, resisting systems that sought to erase them. In 1952, Christine Jorgensen, a U.S. Army veteran, became one of the first transgender women to gain international visibility after undergoing gender-affirming surgery. Her decision to live openly challenged mid-20th-century gender norms and sparked a global conversation about identity.

The 1969 Stonewall Uprising in New York City, led in part by trans women of color like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, marked a turning point in LGBTQ+ activism. Their courage set the stage for decades of organizing and advocacy aimed at dismantling legal and social barriers to equality.

Recent decades have brought new waves of activism—and backlash. By 2025, more than 25 U.S. states had passed laws banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Civil rights groups have filed dozens of lawsuits challenging these bans as unconstitutional. At the federal level, Executive Order 14168 (January 2025) redefined gender as strictly binary and rolled back non-binary passport options. While several parts of the order have been temporarily blocked by courts, its chilling effect on rights is undeniable.

At the same time, grassroots activism is creating change. In Colorado, the Kelly Loving Act—named after a transgender woman murdered in 2022—was enacted in May 2025, strengthening anti-discrimination protections. In Iowa, the repeal of gender identity protections sparked immediate lawsuits, including Finnegan Meadows v. Iowa City Community School District, challenging restroom restrictions for transgender students.

Globally, progress and setbacks coexist. In Hong Kong, activist Henry Edward Tse won a landmark case in 2023 striking down a law requiring surgery for transgender men to update their legal gender. In Scotland, the 2025 case For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers restricted the recognition of trans women under the Equality Act, prompting mass protests. In the U.S., upcoming Supreme Court hearings will determine whether states can ban transgender girls from school sports—a decision likely to affect millions of students. Even within sport, battles continue: in 2025, the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee banned trans women from women’s competitions, sparking anticipated First Amendment and discrimination lawsuits.

As Laverne Cox says, “It is revolutionary for any trans person to choose to be seen and visible in a world that tells us we should not exist.” Every act of resistance—from legal battles to quiet moments of authenticity—is part of a centuries-long movement to reclaim humanity from the forces of erasure.

The Cost of Intolerance

The erasure of gender diversity has never been passive—it has inflicted profound harm on individuals and societies alike. Intolerance manifests in violence, systemic oppression, and emotional trauma that ripple far beyond personal suffering, representing a failure of humanity to honor its own diversity.

Globally, around 1% of adults identify as gender-diverse, rising to nearly 4% among Gen Z. In the United States, an estimated 1.6 million people aged 13 and older identify as transgender. These millions of people live in a world that too often treats their existence as debate material rather than human reality.

For many, safety is never guaranteed. Trans women of color face disproportionate rates of harassment, assault, and murder. Laws rooted in biblical interpretations still deny rights to gender-diverse people—from bathroom access to legal recognition—perpetuating danger and marginalization. The psychological toll is staggering: surveys consistently show higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide attempts among gender-diverse populations, not because of their identities, but because living authentically often means surviving relentless hostility.

Even those who avoid overt violence face systemic barriers. Healthcare access is limited, IDs often cannot be changed legally, and discrimination in housing, employment, and education persists worldwide. Societies lose creativity, wisdom, and potential when people are forced to hide who they are, weakening humanity’s collective strength.

Addressing Counterarguments

Debates about gender identity often center on two concerns: whether children are making irreversible decisions too young and whether allowing trans women into women’s spaces threatens safety.

Medical interventions for transgender youth are approached with extreme caution. Most early treatments, like puberty blockers, are reversible, providing time for exploration under professional guidance. Surgeries for minors are exceedingly rare and only proceed under strict medical review. Leading medical organizations worldwide, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the World Health Organization, support gender-affirming care as life-saving, reducing depression and suicide risks significantly.

Regarding safety in women’s spaces, decades of data from places with trans-inclusive policies show no increase in harm to cisgender women. Criminal behavior remains illegal regardless of gender identity. In fact, transgender people are often at greater risk of violence in public facilities. Exclusionary laws protect no one—they only add to the vulnerability of marginalized communities. Compassionate inclusion doesn’t ignore these concerns; it addresses them with facts, empathy, and policies that protect everyone’s dignity.

A Call for Compassion and Inclusion

The history of gender diversity tells us one thing clearly: gender-nonconforming people are not a problem to be solved. They are part of the rich tapestry of humanity, present in every culture and every era. What needs to change is not them—it’s the systems, ideologies, and choices that make their lives unsafe and invisible.

Compassion must move beyond sentiment into action. It means listening and believing people when they tell you who they are. It means refusing to stay silent when dignity is stripped away and challenging discriminatory laws and rhetoric wherever they arise. It’s showing up to school board meetings, voting for leaders who protect rights, and holding institutions accountable when they harm rather than heal.

Governments can enact and enforce robust non-discrimination laws. Schools can teach accurate history, replacing ignorance with understanding. Faith communities can choose inclusion, living out teachings of love and justice instead of exclusion. Businesses can create workplaces where gender-diverse employees are safe and supported. Inclusion is not charity—it is justice. Freedom loses meaning when it applies to some and not others. A society that polices authenticity cannot claim to value liberty.

Conclusion: Returning to Humanity

Gender diversity is not new, unnatural, or dangerous. What is dangerous is ignorance—the deliberate forgetting of history, the weaponization of scripture to control bodies and identities, and the refusal to see humanity in those who live differently. For thousands of years, gender-nonconforming people like Elagabalus, Ozaawindib, Kaúxuma Núpika, Christine Jorgensen, Marsha P. Johnson, Henry Edward Tse, and countless others have persisted, offering new ways of loving, knowing, and being. Their resilience reveals what freedom truly means.

Maya Angelou once wrote, “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.” This truth cuts through centuries of prejudice and fear. At our core, we all want the same things: to live authentically, to love and be loved, to belong. This is not a radical demand but a fundamental human need. The fight for gender diversity is a fight for a more just and humane world for all. It is a call to build a society where every person can exist without fear, where authenticity is celebrated as a strength rather than condemned as a flaw. It’s time to move beyond the binaries of the past and return to the shared humanity that connects us all.

*This essay was written by Sue Passacantilli and edited by Intellicurean utilizing AI.

Children, Education, Essays, Motherhood, Society

Reclaiming Intellectual Life Within Motherhood

By Renee Dellar, Founder, The Learning Studio, Newport Beach, CA

In homes filled with toy-strewn floors, half-read bedtime stories, and the quiet rituals of care, another kind of cultivation is quietly unfolding: a woman tending both her children and her own mind. For centuries, motherhood has been framed as noble sacrifice—an often invisible labor etched into the margins of cultural discourse. But in 2025, a growing chorus of voices is reviving a different vision. One in which caregiving is not a detour from intellectual life, but its fertile ground.

Two works lead this revival: Karen Andreola’s Mother Culture and Laura Fabrycky’s Motherhood and the Intellectual Life. Each, in their own way, reshapes how we understand the maternal vocation—not as a trade-off between thought and nurture, but as a textured synthesis of both. The intellect, they argue, can live among the ordinary. It can thrive there.

The Domestic as Intellectual Soil

Andreola’s Mother Culture is a quiet revolution disguised as a homemaking guide. Rooted in the Charlotte Mason tradition, an educational philosophy that relies on living stories, literature and engaging with nature, the book encourages mothers to nurture their spiritual and intellectual lives alongside the children they raise. The term “mother culture” describes this practice of personal cultivation within caregiving: reading short chapters, journaling reflections, taking time for beauty and prayer—not as indulgence, but as daily nourishment.

Fabrycky’s Motherhood and the Intellectual Life deepens and broadens the premise. Drawing inspiration from A.G. Sertillanges’s The Intellectual Life, she proposes that intellectual formation is not incompatible with diapers and dinner prep—it may, in fact, be refined by them. Maternal knowing, she argues, is less linear and more contemplative: “a slow epistemology,” where insight emerges through relational rhythms, interruptions, and quiet repetition.

Taken together, these texts offer a radical proposition: that raising children can coexist with the pursuit of meaningful thought—and even become its crucible.

Growth Through the Tension

This vision is not utopian. Fabrycky grapples openly with the fragmented time, emotional exhaustion, and cultural myths that haunt modern motherhood. The notion that one must be endlessly available and self-effacing to be “good” creates a psychic double bind—especially for those who also feel called to write, study, or lead.

A 2025 GBH essay titled “What Does It Mean to Be a Good Mom in 2025?” critiques these cultural pressures and calls for relational authenticity over performative self-sacrifice. Similarly, Amy Shoenthal, writing in Forbes, identifies five emerging trends in maternal identity, including the recognition of unpaid caregiving and the reframing of “career pauses” as formative, not deficient. Both voices echo Andreola’s and Fabrycky’s reframing of homemaking and child-rearing as reflective, generative domains.

Matthew Crawford, in The Hedgehog Review, adds philosophical weight by critiquing the hyper-individualism that isolates mothers from communal meaning. He exposes the autonomy trap—a false promise of liberation that, in practice, leaves caregivers unsupported and intellectually adrift.

Andreola’s response to this fragmentation is practical and merciful. She doesn’t ask for hours of solitude, but twenty minutes a day—a chapter read, a line copied, a prayer whispered. Her method is cumulative, not competitive. Fabrycky reinforces this by insisting that intellectual life shaped by interruptions isn’t inferior—it’s simply different. Perhaps even deeper. A mind accustomed to chaos may grow uniquely capable of synthesis, perception, and grace.

Maternal Knowledge As Intellect

Both authors offer a profound challenge to prevailing epistemologies. Motherhood, in their telling, is not only a form of care, but a form of knowledge—a way of seeing, sensing, and interpreting the world through embodied, relational experience.

Fabrycky names this “maternal knowing,” a quiet but potent resistance to systems that privilege abstraction, quantification, and speed. It is its own category of intellect.

This view finds broader support. In The Journal of Futures Studies, the 2025 essay “Mother, Motherhood, Mothering” uses the Futures Triangle framework to propose mothering as a disruptive force within systems of power. It highlights interdependence, memory, and ancestral wisdom, and calls for “care-full academic spaces” that honor the knowledge generated in relationship.

Andreola, while less overtly political, participates in this resistance through recovery. Her invitation to read poetry, observe nature, and write in stolen moments is not escapism—it is restoration. She sees the home not merely as a workplace, but as a sanctuary of moral imagination.

Kate Lucky’s Comment essay, “Consider the Zoo,” resonates deeply here. Reflecting on containment and longing, Lucky honors domestic life as sacred terrain. Through metaphor and meditation, she illustrates how the architecture of the home—though often confining—can also be spiritually expansive. She, like Andreola, affirms that a richly cultivated mother begets a richly cultivated home.

Motherhood And The Technological Bind

In 2025, new tools offer both hope and hazard. AI tutors, digital reading groups, and remote learning platforms create flexible ways for mothers to remain intellectually engaged. But they also threaten to erode the quiet margins in which thought can truly root.

Editorialge’s “Motherhood in 2025” outlines this double bind. Technology promises convenience, but also expects omnipresence. It can enable, but it can also overwhelm. The modern mother may feel pressure not only to mother well, but to optimize the experience—socially, intellectually, emotionally, and aesthetically.

Andreola responds with a counter-rhythm. Her practice of “mother culture” requires no devices, no tracking apps, no metrics—just twenty minutes and an open soul. Fabrycky, too, advocates what she calls “sacred margins”: spaces where rest and contemplation are guarded from digital encroachment. Whether reading a psalm or journaling in twilight, these acts reclaim time not as commodity, but as communion.

This is an intellectual life that resists acceleration. One rooted not in productivity, but in attention.

Theological Embodiment

Beneath both texts lies a theological current. Andreola’s work is explicitly faith-based, casting motherhood as a sacramental calling. She ties personal growth to spiritual rhythms, blending domesticity with liturgy. Fabrycky’s theology is more implicit, but no less rich. She draws on incarnational motifs—suggesting that just as Christ entered time, mothers enter it fully, redemptively, lovingly.

Paul Kingsnorth, writing in First Things, critiques empire-building models of Christianity and calls instead for mystical humility. It is a useful lens for understanding maternal life. In resisting the culture of achievement, mothers enact a kind of mysticism: the shaping of souls not through acclaim, but through sandwiches and lullabies.

Plough Quarterly’s “Autonomy Trap” extends this idea. The essay argues that liberal autonomy undermines moral formation and calls for renewed celebration of dependency and mutual obligation. Mothers, whose daily lives revolve around interdependence, know this deeply. Their labor is not a retreat from intellectual life—it is its lived expression.

Even empirical research backs this. A 2025 study published by the APA, titled “Nurturing Now, Thriving Later,” found that maternal warmth fosters personality traits associated with intellectual openness and conscientiousness. Far from being anti-intellectual, caregiving becomes a crucible of human formation—for both parent and child.

Reimagining Flourishing

The question, then, is not whether mothers can be intellectuals. It is whether society can reimagine what intellectual life actually looks like.

Both Andreola and Fabrycky challenge the false binary between academic scholarship and domesticity. Intellectual flourishing, they argue, need not wear robes or require citations. It can live in a threadbare armchair, beside a half-finished sketch, or in a whispered poem before lights-out.

Joseph Keegin, writing in Point Magazine, coined the term “commit lit” to describe literature that shapes the soul—not just the intellect. This is the literature of mothers: clarifying, sustaining, quietly transformative. It is what Andreola asks women to read—not for utility, but for delight and reflection. The habit itself becomes a philosophy.

Andreola’s readers praise her for practicality: short chapters, gentle prompts, and the conviction that the inner life matters—even if cultivated between errands and lunchboxes. Fabrycky echoes this, calling us to reject the tired binaries of ambition versus nurture, head versus heart. In doing so, she articulates a vision of womanhood that is fully integrated—thinking, feeling, forming, and formed.

Conclusion

To speak of motherhood as intellectually fruitful is not to romanticize its trials. It is to honor its inherent generativity.

A mother tends more than bodies and schedules. She tends minds, questions, values, and souls. Her daily life is strewn with philosophical inquiry: What does love require when exhausted? How should justice look between siblings? What is the rhythm of truth-telling in a bedtime ritual?

This is not incidental. It is profound.

Karen Andreola’s Mother Culture affirms the mother not only as caregiver, but as curator of wisdom. Through short chapters and gentle urgings, she equips women to reclaim the interior life—to read, think, pray, and study amidst the hum of the washing machine and the chaos of toddler negotiations. It is philosophy shelved among the laundry. Theology scribbled between school pick-ups.

Laura Fabrycky extends this sacred motif, framing motherhood as epistemology itself. In her vision, maternal knowledge is slow and embodied—shaped by noise, honed through disruption. It is knowledge with fingerprints, and fingerprints with knowledge.

Culture often demands a choice: between ambition and nurture, visibility and devotion. But this is a false binary. The intellectually vibrant mother is not the exception—she is the mirror. Her search for meaning, amid fractured time, is no less rigorous than that of the cloistered scholar. It may, in fact, be more so.

With new tools, communal voices, and literary recoveries blooming in 2025, the conditions are ripe for reframing. Writers, theologians, educators, and artists are clearing space for caregiving not as an interruption of intellect, but as its generative soil.

The mother who lights a candle for evening reading, who sketches thoughts between lessons, who whispers poetry over lunch—is not delaying her intellectual life. She is living it. And in doing so, she is cultivating a garden of wisdom whose fruits will shape families, culture, and the age to come.

She is, in every way, a thinker.

And the home—far from a site of confinement—is one of the most intellectually fertile landscapes of all.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN BY RENEE DELLAR UTILIZING AI

Culture, Essays, Society

The Evils Of Rationalism

COMMENTARY MAGAZINE (March 14, 2025):

Late last year, when Luigi Mangione was arrested and charged with the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, something unexpected happened: A lot of people praised him for his actions, elevating Mangione to the status of secular saint for gunning down a man in cold blood. Both on social-media platforms, where he was hailed as a folk hero, and in person outside the New York City courthouse where dozens if not hundreds of supporters waved “Free Luigi” signs, a disturbingly large number of people seemed to be in agreement with Mangione’s claim, in the three-page manifesto found among his belongings, that “frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.”

Mangione’s views aren’t simply run-of-the-mill anti-capitalist rantings. They are grounded in part in the principles of the so-called Rationalist movement. Like many Rationalist (also called Gray Tribe) enthusiasts, Mangione is from a wealthy family, has an advanced degree, and has worked in the tech industry. He shares with the Gray Tribe an obsession with AI and some of ideas that the progression of artificial intelligence has brought to the fore.

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Similarly, a culture that embraces the idea that anything is fluid—even one’s own physical body or biological sex or even one’s reality—has a hard time making the case for limits. What comes to take the place of that case is an understanding of the world that says a man can become a hero for fatally shooting someone he doesn’t even know on a New York City street corner. Right now, it may go by the name of Rationalism, but it’s something older and deeper and more terrifying.

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Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Culture, Essays, Social Media

Social Media: Instagram – Is Life Online Real?

YALE REVIEW (March 10, 2025)

Reality is a medium, and I’m thumbing through it. I’m on Instagram, where a video is a “Reel.” I land on an influencer who eats upsetting amounts of food and then runs until he has burned off all the calories. In this video, he eats eleven thousand calories of Taco Bell and then runs eighty-plus miles across thirteen-plus hours, posting a screenshot of his fitness tracker to prove it. He intersperses footage of himself on the toilet, audio included. He has posted dozens of videos using this formula. More than 140,000 people follow him.

What, exactly, is happening to me, my self, and my reality when I scroll on Instagram?

Without Instagram, I never would have seen something like this happen; in fact, it never would have happened at all. It’s a performance conducted by an individual but also the product of billions of human inputs. Our participation on social media as both creators and viewers trains the algorithms that organize their content, and these algorithms shape our tastes in turn. The influencers and the feeds they populate evolve together, recursively.

In the digital, reality, like scroll, becomes more verb than noun.

We are not even two decades into a vast, largely unregulated experiment in human psychology. This blur of experience, a composite of varied partial glimpses, is not something I or any of us evolved to digest. All these people, all these loops. I think of my baby nephew. Even in our one-to-one conversations on FaceTime, we inevitably shape his expectations of the real, setting a baseline for his neuroplastic brain that’s so tremendously different than mine. In the digital, reality, like scroll, becomes more verb than noun. Reality doesn’t merely exist; reality reels. My nephew will never know otherwise.

I’m haunted by that video of the runner. I thumb back up to find it, pop over to his profile. I see that in his more recent videos, he has begun challenging friends and strangers to eat-offs: a new shape for the performance. I’m grossed out and keep watching. I should know better, but I can’t help myself.

Jesse Damiani is a writer, curator, and foresight strategist. He hosts the Urgent Futures podcast and writes the Reality Studies newsletter.

Essays, History, Politics

Politics & History: ‘The Gilded Age Never Ended’

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE (February 24, 2025):

When, in the nineteen-nineties, people decided that we were living in a new Gilded Age, the meaning was plain. The term, borrowed from the 1873 Mark Twain novel of the same name—a mediocre book by a great writer with a memorable title, like Anthony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”—indicated an efflorescence of wealth and display, of overabundance and nouveau-riche excess. It referred mostly to the Veblenian side of American life: status competition through showy objects, from the cloud-level duplexes of the New York skyline to the Met Gala. Perhaps not enough attention was paid to the original concept, which implied a contrast between the truly golden and the merely gilded.

Hierarchies of power are intrinsic to human societies, no doubt, and sometimes the best we can hope for is that those on top become devoted to a higher ideal of education or common welfare or simple beauty.

What we didn’t anticipate was that our new Gilded Age would become even more like its precursor—not only in the seeming concentration of overwhelming wealth into fewer and fewer hands but in the gravitation toward a plutocracy. In the industrial age, the totemic figures were Frick and Morgan and Rockefeller; in our post-industrial era, they are Bezos and Musk and Zuckerberg. During that first Gilded Age—if we imagine it running from the eighteen-seventies to 1910—a counter cast of characters had a glamorous appeal of their own. These were the anarchists, whose isolated but highly publicized acts of individual retaliation were intended as inspirational melodramatic theatre rather than as actual revolutionary politics. In these years, anarchists claimed the lives of a French President, an American President, an Italian king, and a Russian tsar, and threw bombs at several American tycoons. Whether or not Luigi Mangione’s recent alleged murder of a helpless insurance executive on a cold New York morning belongs to this tradition, its affect and effect certainly evoke the past, with the curly-haired Ivy-educated youth conferring, in the realm of social media, an improbable aura of martyrdom and purpose on what otherwise would have seemed a sordid act.

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Culture, Essays

‘The Commitment To Collaborate’ (Essay)

AEON (February 22, 2025): Every week at the office, you and your fellow employees have meetings to discuss progress on group projects and to divide tasks efficiently. Perhaps in the evening, you go home and cook dinner with your partner. At least once in your life, you might have seen a team of firefighters work together to extinguish a fire at a burning house and rescue those inside. You have probably also witnessed or participated in political demonstrations aimed at bettering the treatment of those in need. These are all examples of human cooperation toward a mutually beneficial end. Some of them seem so commonplace that we rarely think of them as anything special. Yet they are. It is not obvious that any of the other great ape species cooperate in such a way – spontaneously and with individuals they have never before met. Though there has been some evidence of cooperation in other great apes, the interpretation of studies on ape cooperation has also been contested. In the human case, cooperation is unequivocal.

One crafts a spear head, the other crafts a shaft. To do so, they need some means of communicating

The evolution of cooperation has been of interest to biologists, philosophers and anthropologists for centuries. If natural selection favours self-interest, why would we cooperate at an apparent cost to ourselves? You might say that none of these examples is costly; they all benefit the person cooperating as well as the recipient of the cooperation. This is true, but there is still a puzzle to solve. If I can reduce the cost of cooperating by deception – pretending to pull my weight in the group project or in the rescue mission – and still reap the benefits, why would I not do so? This is known as the ‘free-rider’ problem.

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Saira Khan is a research associate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol in the UK, working on Samir Okasha’s Representing Evolution project.

Culture, Essays, Opinion, Social Media

‘Americans Are Trapped In An Algorithmic Cage’

THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE (February 7, 2025): Shortly before President George W. Bush was reelected, in 2004, an anonymous Bush-administration source told The New York Times, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Those in what the adviser called “the reality-based community” would be left “studying that reality—judiciously, as you will.” Then “we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.”

The private companies in control of social-media networks possess an unprecedented ability to manipulate and control the populace.

Arrogant as this declaration was, I now wonder whether it was merely premature. Although Bush won the 2004 election, reality came crashing down rather rapidly—Bush’s agenda failed in Congress, the American people came to view the war in Iraq as needless folly, Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006, and the economy tumbled into the Great Recession in 2008, after which Democrats recaptured control of the White House.

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