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Criminal Justice Reform
The late William J. Stuntz spent his life studying the American criminal justice system. In a 2001…
Shattered World
In her “new history” of The Reformation, Lee Palmer Wandel offers a stark, sobering summary of the…
Charles Taylor and the Communion of the Saints
Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option issues a call for orthodox Christians to develop communal ways of living that…
The Monologue Beyond the Dialogue
Why are Dostoevsky’s novels so compulsively readable? What makes his characters seem so alive? No one has…
Austen in Autumn
Two hundred years ago this month, Jane Austen put aside her pen for the last time, dating…
War and Inequality
Summarizing the argument of Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler, the Economist reports: “inequality within countries is almost…
Retrotopia
Zygmunt Bauman thinks we are awash in nostalgia. We have created a Retrotopia. Nostalgia, he argues, “is…
Pop Sacred
“There’s a new ‘sacred’ in town,” write Juan and Stacey Floyd-Thomas in The Altars Where We Worship.…
Temple to the Nation
Patrick Deneen (Democratic Faith, xiv) tells the story of the desacralization of the Cathedral of Saint Genevieve…
Art, Craft, Expression
In his Aesthetics of Architecture, Roger Scruton summarizes RG Collingwood’s distinction between art and craft. It has…
Consider the Wick
In his book, Disenchanted Night, Wolfgang Schivelbusch considers the difference between lighting by torches and lighting with…
Trump and Russia
At the American Interest, James S. Henry examines Trump’s Russian connections. It’s an unnerving read. Whatever his…
Hymn to Hekate
Hesiod’s “Hymn to Hekate” seems to interrupt the Theogony to no good purpose. Hekate isn’t a major…
Multiconfessional Communion
Beginning in 1559, the magistrates of the German city of Wesel, in the North Rhine-Westphalia region, required…
Triumph of the Unchurched
Molly Ball’s Atlantic piece on “America’s empty-church problem” is a must-read. It provides a penetrating, and sobering…