Archive

The new film Young Adult , the latest from the writer/director team of Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody of Juno fame, features Charlize Theron as Mavis Gary, a writer...

A Case for Irony by Jonathan Lear Harvard, 224 pages, $29.95 Not long before 9/11, a young Harvard graduate, Jedediah Purdy, published a jeremiad against irony, For Common Things...

A young son in Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life asks his mother, “Tell us a story from before we can remember.” Malick begins his story even earlier by telling...

More famous for her Broadway productions of The Lion King and the upcoming Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark than for films such as Titus , Frida , and Across...

Dimiter by william peter blatty forge, 304 pages, $24.99 The Exorcist—as William Peter Blatty, the now eighty-two-year-old author of the original novel and the screenplay based on it, is...

In a 1932 letter Leo Strauss wrote, “I cannot believe and . . . therefore I search for a possibility to live without faith.” That search, which began in...

According to Aristotle, is the performance of virtuous acts with ease and delight. On that basis, as well as others, Ralph McInerny was a remarkably virtuous man. One of...

In a scene in the Oscar-nominated film An Education , an older British man with designs on a precocious teenage girl concocts a story for her parents about how...

Woody Allen’s Whatever Works , a serious contender for worst movie of 2009, is noteworthy mostly as a disastrous attempt to channel Allen’s humor through the caustic verbiage of...

On a Wednesday afternoon I made my way from my office on the Baylor University campus over to the central administration building to begin the process of reviewing candidate...

The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence By David Walsh Cambridge, 518 pages, $29.99 CHARLES TAYLOR ONCE lamented that, on the topic of modernity, scholars seem divided into...

Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate is an engaging, witty, and largely successful critique of the new atheists, especially Christopher Hitchens (author of God...

The Writings of Charles De Koninck, Volume 1 edited by Ralph McInerny University of Notre Dame Press, 496 pages, $50 Founder of the Laval school of Thomism, a school...

Work on Oneself: ­Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Psychology by Fergus Kerr Institute for the Psychological Sciences Press, 119 pages, $19.95 As he lay dying, awaiting a last visit from friends, Ludwig...

God and the Between by William Desmond Wiley-Blackwell, 368 pages, $44.95 Running through William Desmond’s latest book”the third in a series of philosophical reflections from the Irish philosopher”is a...