Archive
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Articles
Suicide of the Radical Right
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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...