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The Dante Society is our group for graduate students and anybody beyond college interested in fostering the Christian intellectual life in Pittsburgh. We’re calling this fall’s series “Podcasts and Picklebacks.” We will preview an episode of the new Genealogies of Modernity Podcast and then discuss. The podcast’s main host and Beatrice Institute Senior Research Fellow Ryan McDermott will lead the discussions. Please fill out this form to RSVP!

We often think of modernity as a time period in history. But people have been claiming to be modern since at least c. 550 AD, when the Roman writer Cassiodorus used the term modernus to mark off everything that had happened since the fall of the Roman Empire. Harvard scholar Michael Puett takes us back much further, to the third century BC in ancient China, when a series of emperors claimed modernity to consolidate their rule. Puett argues that modernity is best understood as a claim to freedom from the past. By recognizing two forms of modernity claim—one that tries to erase the past and another that tries to master it—we can better understand what is at stake in our own invocations of “modernity."