This volume accompanies another substantial collection, Christianity and Freedom: Volume 1, Historical Perspectives, prepared by the same editors. Professor Hertzke is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences as well as the faculty of the University of Oklahoma. Mr. Shah is associate director of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and associate professor in the Government Department at Georgetown University. Continue Reading »
Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, now granted an afterlife in Boris Dralyuk’s lyrical and fluid translation, consists of thirty-five episodic stories about the Soviet First Cavalry Army.
Too often, the teaching of English literature lacks the developmental sense that other disciplines have. As you go from a basic English course to an advanced one, it isn’t clear how one step builds on the other. Each math course, for instance, presumes knowledge developed in previous courses, and other humanities fields have a graduated curriculum.
For some time now, First Things has sought to bring Catholics and evangelicals together. Richard John Neuhaus, Charles Colson, and their fellow travelers have engaged in an fruitful ecumenism of the trenches, discovering as they went along that they had more in common than they knew, particularly with respect to Christian ethics and the church’s public witness. And much though not all of First Things’ work has been in the service of a religiously informed “public philosophy,” seeking to find a common language for perennial truths about marriage, life, freedom, and other issues in the public square. Continue Reading »
The book is presented as a follow-up to Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, published nearly thirty years ago. Even its cover imitates the very ’80s design of Bloom’s, minus the Miami Vice pastels. But the impressive roster of scholars, journalists, and editors takes a broader survey of the landscape than Bloom, who focused on higher education.
Atheism and religious indifference are growing in the United States. In Faith No More, recently reissued in paperback, Pitzer College sociologist Phil Zuckerman cites Pew surveys showing that “20% of Americans now claim ‘none’ as their religion.” Harris polls register an uptick of atheism, from 4 percent in 2003 to 10 percent in 2008, with another 9 percent identifying themselves as agnostics.
The author of this book, a professor of history at the University of Delaware, is an academic of diverse interests, having published volumes on the maritime communities of colonial Massachusetts and the origins of fervent Protestantism in the American South. She is also married to a retired Pentagon official who survived the terrorist atrocities of September 11, 2001.
Several years ago, Giorgio Agamben began one of his lectures by asking why he had made law and theology the areas of his recent investigation. “A first answer,” he said, “which is obviously a joke, but every joke has a serious core, would be, because these are the only two fields in which . . . . Continue Reading »
In the Shadow of the Sword The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire by tom holland doubleday, 526 pages, $29.95 Islam is widely understood by both Western and Islamic scholars to have substantially engaged with the intellectual traditions of the late antique Near East’s . . . . Continue Reading »
As is usual in religious struggles, François Fénelon lost the battle in the early-modern debate over mystical prayer but is winning (for now) the war. Censured by the pope for some of his views regarding “pure love,” he has sometimes been cast as the naïve dupe of the illuminist widow Madame . . . . Continue Reading »
