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I Hate the Chiefs
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...

Thinking Twice About Re-Enchantment
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....

The Theology of Music
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...
2024: Our Year in Books
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...
For Christian Civilization
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,...
How Advent Broke Philosophy
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...

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

Jane Austen’s Novels are Darker Than You Think
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...
Hagar and Ishmael as Main Characters
A number of scholars say Genesis 16, the story of Hagar and Ishmael, is the center of the Abrahamic narrative (Gen. 12–25). That’s very odd. Hagar appears to be...
The Black Hole of Sin
The Adversaryby michael crummeyharper, 336 pages, $21.79 Michael Crummey introduces his 2023 novel, The Adversary, with two epigrams. The first is an official NASA description of a black hole: “Although...
Restoring Sexual Sanity
Ours is an age of sexual insanity. Men compete in women’s sports, male nurses share dressing rooms with female nurses, and anyone who objects is a bigot. Drag queens...
Paul, the Christian Socrates
Paul’s apology before the court of the Areopagus (Acts 17) has been held up as a master class in contextualization. Paul accommodates his message to his audience of Greek...
Social Justice Against Smarts
Maniaby lionel shriver harper, 288 pages, $24 In Lionel Shriver’s novel Mania, the main character, Pearson Converse, is at war with the major political dogma of her time. As a result,...
A Hungarian Tocqueville
The Genius of Americaby jános zoltán csák translated by thomas sneddon angelico press, 158 pages, $16.95 It sure pays to be a visiting European observer of the American scene. The Genius...
Augustine’s Apocalypse—and Our Own
Composed in the aftermath of the Visigoth sack of Rome, Augustine’s City of God seems to have everything you need for a summer blockbuster, all four horsemen at full...