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Suicide of the Radical Right​

Matthew Rose

On May 21, 2013, the French writer Dominique Venner took his own life in front of the main altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Venner was seventy-eight years...

A Rabbi for Christians

Matthew Rose

Judaism is not even a religion.” This striking line appears in Immanuel Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, a book devoted to winnowing down the articles of...

Leo Strauss and the Closed Society

Matthew Rose

In the spring of 1941, as Hitler was laying plans for his invasion of the Soviet Union, Leo Strauss gave a lecture at the New School for Social Research...

The Imagined Citadel

Matthew Rose

René Guénon was one of the twentieth century’s most important traditionalist thinkers, as well as one of its strangest intellectual figures. In more than two dozen books, he claimed...

Masters and Slaves

Matthew Rose

In the autumn of 1933, ­Alexandre Kojève announced to his class that history was over. He did not mean that the apocalypse was at hand, that wars and violence...

The World Turned Upside Down

Matthew Rose

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the Worldby tom holland basic, 624 pages, $32 After the Second World War, American intellectuals promoted a grand narrative about the origins and...

The Outsider

Matthew Rose

I want to read something to you. I want you to really listen to this.” Rush Limbaugh opened his radio show on January 20, 2016, in the tone he...

The Anti-Christian Alt-Right

Matthew Rose

As you may know, many young conservatives have left Christianity,” the message begins. “Although I was raised Catholic, I too am leaving Catholicism, as I believe it is no...

Our Secular Theodicy

Matthew Rose

I live in Berkeley, one of the most religious cities in America. Its churches are being converted into mosques and Buddhist temples, but its one true faith endures. A...

Death of God Fifty Years On

Matthew Rose

On April 8, 1966, a five-thousand-word cover story appeared in Time magazine, sending the country into a panic over a group of theologians few had heard of then and...

Tayloring Christianity

Matthew Rose

Why was it once virtually impossible not to believe in God, while today many of us find this not only easy, but inescapable?” The question is Charles Taylor’s, and...

Karl Barth’s Failure

Matthew Rose

Karl Barth was the greatest theologian since the Reformation, and his work is today a dead letter. This is an extraordinary irony. Barth aspired to free Christian theology from...

Unremarkably Lutheran

Matthew Rose

When given the option,” Garrison Keillor tells us, “Lutherans will always downsize.” So far as I can tell, personal “downsizing” is the only way to make sense of what...