Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. - Charles Baudelaire

Modernity itself goes by different names and glides by under different guises. As one raised in a fairly stereotypical conservative evangelical home, I particularly remember associating modernism with atheism, with evolution and humanism—to be modern was to be of the world, in the worst possible way. Modernity was the avant-garde—the art which put crucifixes in vials of urine, which spilt buckets of paint over canvases. Modernity was at the same time the hyper-rationalism of the scientist in his God-proof laboratory where he killed babies in utero in order to perform stem-cell research. Modernity also, to my mind, managed to produce confusing literature populated with anti-heroes and confused sexuality.

The reader should be aware of this personal background. However, while modernism can certainly claim these associations, the sense in which I now wish to define modernity takes a different angle....