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The Crisis of the Common Era

by John Heers, First Things Foundation

What is time? It’s weird, right?

If you think of time you inevitably start to think of aging and movement, a passing, a thing that is going “forward” and something that catches up. Most of us think of time this way. If you’re a student of history, time and the notion of a timeline go together. This Substack article is about the way people and cultures understand themselves in time, and the crisis of meaning in which we people of the “common era” find ourselves.

The word calendar, which connotes the keeping of time, comes from the Latin calare. Calare means to proclaim, and the connection of the calendar to a proclamation comes from before the reign of Julius Caesar. In those days, a pagan priest of the temple would come to the court and say aloud, “The moon is full, I proclaim the new moon.” In this way the new month began and time was made manifest.

Dostoevsky vs the World

by John Heers, First Things Foundation

Freedom is a hard thing. It can be confusing. It is essential to the understanding of both law and love. It presents itself as both a means to an end and as an end itself. It seems to be everything and nothing, all at once. 

One way to make sense of freedom is to understand it as an inside thing and as an outside thing. As an outside idea, freedom can be found in political theory. It is a word we associate with the American flag, or the word democracy. This freedom has to do with freedom from laws that restrict us and our desires. For the founding American Fathers, freedom was first and foremost a freedom from the overreach of government. In history this kind of freedom presents as “outside” freedom: things outside of me that constrain.

The Binding New World Ligament

by John Heers, First Things Foundation

Most people in the world accept the idea that capitalism is an economic system. For most people capitalism is a thing you use, a system in which you participate so as to gain benefits associated with money. Most people think of capitalism as a slip ‘n slide, something with which you engage in order to enjoy society while also cooling off. For Americans, capitalism is something we use. It’s not something we’ve become. But I think this is wrong. Capitalism, history tells us, is a narrative about human existence, and most of us in the West aren’t telling the story, we are, in fact, living it. We are the products of capitalism.

The first clue that this may be true is the word itself. Capitalism.

Look at the ending. The “ism” suffix tells us a great deal. “Ism” words connote belief.