David P. Goldman

The word “entrepreneurship” hardly was spoken during the recent Republican primaries. That is disturbing, because the empirical evidence argues strongly that today’s capitalism is more “clotted” and more “complacent” than at any time for which we have data. Continue Reading »

Members of traditional religions became moral outlaws in the United States once equal rights for sexual preference and gender choice were enshrined in regulation and law. This Inquisition, though, will not be defeated by reasoned pleas but by concerted counterattacks. Continue Reading »

Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition? by David Nirenberg Norton, 624 pages, $35 World history is the history of Israel, averred Franz ?Rosenzweig, meaning that the nations of the West so hearkened to the Jewish promise of eternal life that their subsequent history was a response to Israel, whether . . . . Continue Reading »

It is consoling to think that the emotions that music arouses in us have something to do with the makeup of the universe. The eternal relation of math and music has been a perennial question since Plato, from Boethius and Cassiodorus in late antiquity, through Dante’s celestial harmony . . . . Continue Reading »

Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience by Richard Landes Oxford, 520 pages, $35 This is a disturbing and momentous book, for modern political thinking has trouble making sense of the intrusion of irrationality. It is conditioned by the Cold War, a geopolitical chess game . . . . Continue Reading »

The curtain rises in silence to reveal a stage composed of parallel white planks. With the first bars of the prelude—an insistent, agitated gesture in the lower strings—the planks dissolve into a single image of storm clouds. The floor of the set rotates vertically into a backdrop, from . . . . Continue Reading »

Simone Weil by Palle Yourgrau Reaktion Books, 189 pages, $16.95, paper Simone Weil continues to fascinate. Civilization could be saved, she contended, only by a Platonic Christianity stripped of its carnal, Jewish side, through identification with the suffering Christ rather than in the hope of . . . . Continue Reading »

Mathematics and Religion: Our Languages of Sign and Symbol by Javier Leach Templeton, 188 pages, $19.95 A man is like a carpenter, mused Tevye the milkman; for a man dies, and so does a carpenter. Fr. Javier Leach, S.J., informs us that mathematics is pluralistic, and so are religion and . . . . Continue Reading »

As of February 28, my position as Senior Editor at First Things will end. Such is the publishing world: the challenge of producing a well-printed book of nearly a hundred pages in a world of sound-bites and digital images compels the journal to undertake major economies. I’ve been invited to . . . . Continue Reading »

Late in the nineteenth century, men and women in apparent possession of their senses heard Richard Wagner’s new operas and announced that their lives had changed forever. Charles Baudelaire saw Tannhäuser in 1861 and gushed, “Listening to this impassioned, despotic music, painted upon . . . . Continue Reading »