Renovatio: The Incoherence of Modernity's Messiahs

In Renovatio's Spring 2024 edition, "The Incoherence of Modernity's Messiahs," our writers take aim at the totalizing ideologies that plague our world today. Chief among them remains scientism, including its strands such as machine "consciousness" in today's AI forecasting; the reduction of the human to the brain; and the fantasist notions of transhumanism. Marxism also stubbornly persists as a defining ideology of our time, especially through an absolutism that ignores the cautions of sacred traditions about inviolability of innocent life, even under conditions of extreme provocation. As Renovatio's writers demonstrate, these ideologies seek—but inevitably fail—to fill the void left by the absence of religion in modern society.

Table of Contents

The Sin of Cosmocide

For Jews and Muslims, killing a soul means killing all of humanity according to their own scriptures. Yet, adherents of both faiths persist in betraying God’s teaching.

Juan Cole

The Incoherence of Secular Messiahs

The modern world knows it faces a void of meaning—and in a strange recurrence of 
history, some secular intellectuals are now calling for various forms of paganism.

Faraz Khan

Suffering and Character

Is it really the case that character can always be exercised—that moral choices can be made—under conditions of significant suffering?

Sophia Vasalou

The Importance of Being Earnest about Islamic Philosophy

Without grounding in traditional Islamic philosophy and metaphysics, Muslims risk jeopardizing a profound intellectual heritage that can contribute, on its own terms, 
to modern society.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Hamza Yusuf

On the Mind’s Devotion to Reality

Modern philosophy presumes consciousness is a subjective phenomenon—but, as Aquinas teaches, consciousness is far greater than mere awareness. 

Mark Damien Delp

The Climate Emergency 

Understanding the existential threat we face in philosophical terms can give us tools to think more wisely about the crisis and how we ought to respond.

Rosabel Ansari

Alfarabi’s Political Teaching 

Although we can learn enough to make sound choices and avoid harmful errors, our awareness of the whole and the way it works is limited—simply put, we cannot easily know everything needful for our well-being. 

Charles E. Butterworth

Justice, Nonaggression, and Military Ethics in Islam

True justice requires a commitment to temperate behavior and the exercise of self-restraint, even in the face of extreme provocation.

Asma Afsaruddin

Islam as One Thing, Anything, or Nothing

Despite often impressive erudition and empathy, Western academics attempting to
“conceptualize Islam” miss something significant: that they must first identify a group of Muslims they take as a standard before theorizing their practice and their legacy.

Caner K. Dagli

When Technology Becomes Theology

If human beings are not special—not designed for some great purpose—but are merely a random species thrown up by the intrinsically meaningless process of evolution, then we’re seen as bodies that are limited and limiting and can be transcended through technology. 

Carl R. Trueman

We Are Not Our Brain

The authority of science in culture has reduced the human self to the brain, but if we relearn how the poets and philosophers of the past understood the self, we’ll see how we’ve regressed, not progressed.  

Muhammad U. Faruque 

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