When Eleanor Roosevelt and a small group of people gathered at the behest of the U.N. in early 1947 to draft the world’s first “international bill of rights,” they cannot have had very high hopes for their endeavor. The world was awash in colonial oppression, discrimination, poverty, and . . . . Continue Reading »
I finished teaching a university course in faith and ideas a little while ago by administering individual oral exams to forty first-year students. The exams took place in a hotel bar overlooking a volcanic lake. The pope’s summer palace shone in the distance, and the Mediterranean gleamed . . . . Continue Reading »
Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark by alan taylor polygon, 244 pages, $18.95 Muriel Spark Centenary Editions by muriel spark polygon, 4,156 pages, £219.78 A Good Comb: The Sayings of Muriel Spark edited by penelope jardine new directions, 96 pages, $13.95 One . . . . Continue Reading »
More than any other philosopher, Thomas Hobbes highlighted the claim that fear serves as a foundation for establishing the authority of the sovereign ruler. But fear has served not only the cause of political authority. Fear has always played a central role in the evolution of morality and in the . . . . Continue Reading »
After a lifetime of impeccably correct opinions, Ian Buruma found himself on the wrong side of the liberal consensus in September 2018, when he was forced to resign as editor of the New York Review of Books for having commissioned a piece called “Reflections from a Hashtag” from the . . . . Continue Reading »
No one who welcomed the sixties as a liberation can understand what it has been like to grow up in their wake. Authorities mouth the rhetoric of revolution, shocking slogans have become clichés, and the anthems of Woodstock and Altamont sell sedans to aging Baby Boomers. A banner at the Paris . . . . Continue Reading »
The Best American Poetry 2018 edited by dana gioia scribner, 240 pages, $18.99 American poetry lost three greats last year: John Ashbery, Richard Wilbur, and Donald Hall. But it also welcomed A. R. Ammons’s “Finishing Up,” A. E. Stallings’s “Pencil,” and Anne . . . . Continue Reading »
Like a number of poets, Terrence Malick fumbles to express a common experience: the inexplicable longing that elevates the soul and fills it with an agonizing hope. Continue Reading »
George Weigel offers book suggestions for all the readers on your Christmas gift list. Continue Reading »
The Coens’ hipness isn’t skin deep, but it doesn’t go all the way down either. Continue Reading »
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