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January Letters

Fathers and Sons in Black and White After having read the article by Russell E. Saltzman entitled “Better Than Their Fathers” in your October 1992 issue, I’m a bit puzzled. Why did the First Things editorial hoard accept this piece? Other than the fact that it was written by a Lutheran . . . . Continue Reading »

Divorce, Communitarian Style

Especially in America, when we think of the Catholic intellectual tradition we tend to think exclusively of the many varieties of Thomism. And for the decades between Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) and the Second Vatican Council, this equation was largely accurate. Before . . . . Continue Reading »

Why Universities Went Secular

The source of the advertisement above is not P. G. Wodehouse, nor Anthony Trollope, nor even Mark Pattison. It appeared in the Cambridge University Reporter—in 1973. The eleven essays assembled by George Marsden and Bradley Longfield on the demise of university patronage of religion in . . . . Continue Reading »

The Moral Fragility of Constitutionalism

America’s Constitutional Soul by Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. Johns Hopkins University Press, 236 pages, $32 In this collection of characteristically brilliant essays, Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., one of our nation’s most eminent conservative political theorists, defends the American Constitution as . . . . Continue Reading »

Why Animals Came in from the Cold

The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Choose Domestication by steven budiansky morrow, 190 pages, $18 Having yet again picked up the garbage the raccoons repeatedly spill in my backyard. I was well prepared for Steven Budiansky’s The Covenant of the Wild. These wily creatures, who by all accounts . . . . Continue Reading »

The New Liberal Racism

The shockingly violent reaction to the Rodney King verdict, destined to be remembered as the great Los Angeles Riot of 1992, has provoked more intense discussion among the American public about the nation’s perennial problems of race relations and urban affairs than at any time since the “long . . . . Continue Reading »

The Haunted Mr. Hawthorne

Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne by edward haviland miller university of iowa press, 596 pages, $35 Jefferson’s public career focused on securing for Americans,” the historian Edmund S. Morgan has written, “a right of expatriation from the past.” This was a large . . . . Continue Reading »

The Inescapability of Metaphysics

We as academicians are “lovers of wisdom” first and last, and should we not be so, we would be serving under false pretenses as professors of higher education. To love wisdom is not, of course, to be wise, as if our beginning were our end. To love wisdom is to desire and labor toward wisdom . . . . Continue Reading »

A Primer on the Devil

As modern religionists, we face a curious predicament when we think of the Devil. On the one hand, we know that the forests and glens of Western culture have been cleared of the spirits and goblins that frightened our ancestors. When we are sick, we take a pill. When we are scared by some . . . . Continue Reading »

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