Barton Swaim

We Are the Change We Seek:The Speeches of Barack Obamaedited by e. j. dionne jr. and joy-ann reidbloomsbury, 376 pages, $25 The one thing we know about Barack Obama—at least, we think we know it—is that he is a great orator. From the moment he entered the nation’s consciousness in the . . . . Continue Reading »

In both her logorrheic memoirs, Hillary Clinton writes in the anodyne crisis mode of a government spokesman during an agency meltdown—carefully and dryly, never conceding wrongdoing and always interpreting past decisions in the best possible light. Most political spokesmen and many politicians . . . . Continue Reading »

R ecently I bought a copy of John Stott’s brief and famous exposition of the Christian gospel, Basic Christianity, which I intended to give to a friend. The book was first published in 1958 and has sold several million copies. It is at once simple and refined, gentle and uncompromising, and many . . . . Continue Reading »

In a recent essay in the Times Literary Supplement , Steven Weinberg suggested that the reason the West has so far outstripped the Islamic world in scientific knowledge is "religious certitude." In the West, the decline of religion has freed science to move forward at an astonishing pace. . . . . Continue Reading »