Archive

Peter Harrison is one of today’s finest intellectual historians. He writes clearly, explains complex ideas lucidly without sacrificing accuracy or complexity, and supports his arguments with massive learning, from...

Who hangs on the center tree at the Place of the Skull? That’s the question of Good Friday, the conundrum of the cross. It’s also the scandal of Jesus’s...

In Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Ludwig von Mises explains how enlightened self-interest, rather than love, is the lubricant of social collaboration:  Social cooperation has nothing to do...

To most Americans, “capitalism” means “free economy,” a market system in which individuals and freely formed groups have the liberty to innovate, collaborate, produce, distribute, buy, and sell, all...

At the beginning of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna, withdraws from the city for undisclosed reasons and leaves his full “terror” in the hands of...

The Epistle to the Hebrews proclaims the superiority of the new to the old, the second to the first. Israel had its luxuriant wilderness sanctuary, its venerable Aaronic priesthood,...

In real life, I’m a gentle soul—easygoing, tolerant, deferential, emotionally steady with a tilt toward whimsical joviality. There are exceptions. Behind the wheel of a car, I turn into...

Since the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, the story goes, we’ve lived more and more in a machine world of cogs, pistons, and flywheels, devoid of meaning and mystery....

Élisabeth-Paule Labat (1897–1975) was an accomplished pianist and composer when she entered the abbey of Saint-Michel de Kergonan in her early twenties. She devoted her later years to writing...

R. R. Reno I was in a Goodwill in Denver when my eyes fell upon a paperback Penguin edition of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. I bought it, and while...

Paul Kingsnorth’s 2024 Erasmus Lecture, “Against Christian Civilization,” was less a lecture than an exhortation. His target was partly “civilizational Christianity,” represented by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Jordan Peterson,...

For Christians, the advent of the Son of God has become commonplace. It’s celebrated, sung, preached about, wondered at, but simultaneously domesticated by nativity scenes, cutesy Advent calendars, and...

Once granted unchallenged supremacy, a GOP establishment is every bit as entrenched, every bit as self-protective, as every other establishment.

Jane Austen’s DarknessBY JULIA YOSTWISEBLOOD BOOKS, 86 PAGES, $8 A glance at the cover of Julia Yost’s short book on Jane Austen is enough to tell you this isn’t...

Back in the misty recesses of time—2020—the Los Angeles Times announced that newly-elected President Biden would remake the United States in the image and likeness of California. The prospect...