Gilbert Meilaender

The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideasby Isaiah BerlinAlfred A. Knopf, 277 pages, $22 Henry Hardy, the editor of this hook, describes it as “in effect the fifth of four volumes” of Isaiah Berlin’s collected essays. Like one of its predecessor volumes (Against the . . . . Continue Reading »

Recently I was a speaker and panel member at a small educational workshop on “advance directives” sponsored by the ethics committee of our local hospital. The workshop was an opportunity to provide information about, and discuss the relative merits of, living wills and durable powers of attorney . . . . Continue Reading »

Memoirs in Exile: Confessional Hope and Institutional Conflict by John H. Tietjen Fortress Press, 368 pages, $19.95 In the spring of 1969, near the completion of my first year as a student at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, John Tietjen was named the seminary’s president. Most of the . . . . Continue Reading »

For much of human history death was associated at least as much with infancy and youth as with old age. To live to be old was an achievement—a modest victory over death, and one often thought of in religious terms as a blessing. In our time, however, when death and old age so often go hand in . . . . Continue Reading »

In his engagingly titled book, What’s Wrong With the World, G. K. Chesterton argued that his fellow citizens could not repair the defects of the family because they had no ideal at which to aim. Neither the Tory (Gudge) nor the Socialist (Hudge) had an ideal that viewed the family as sacred, an . . . . Continue Reading »

When the Loyola Marymount basketball team, riding the crest of an emotional high after the death of star player Hank Gathers, was making its spirited run in the NCAA basketball tournament last spring, CBS did a short feature on Gathers before one of the team’s games. At one point. Brent Musberger . . . . Continue Reading »

Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity by charles taylor harvard university press, 601 pages, $29.95  To describe Sources of the Self as a learned book would be a little like describing Michael Jordan as a skilled basketball player: accurate, but hardly adequate to the . . . . Continue Reading »

The Giving and Taking of Life: Essays Ethicalby james turnstead burchtaelluniversity of notre dame press, 324 pages, $29.95 A powerful truth, pressed too far, may finally mislead. That, or something like it, seems to me the right way to describe this book. The essays gathered in this volume are . . . . Continue Reading »