Some books—the detective novel is the most obvious genre—must be read as they are written, front to back. Peeking ahead spoils everything. Others, Hebrew texts and now Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen’s The Genocidal Mentality are better approached (though for different . . . . Continue Reading »
In 1948, a young American minister from the conservative Bible Presbyterian Church moved to Lausanne, Switzerland, to serve as a missionary to Europe. Intending lo work primarily as an evangelist, this earnest pastor was relatively sequestered from the contentious and obscurantist tendencies of . . . . Continue Reading »
Politics, Markets, & America’s Schools is an enlightening, albeit statistically overstuffed, study of achievement, organization, and the political context of schooling. The authors, John Chubb and Terry Moe, reach one sound and important conclusion: deep structural reform of U.S. schooling, . . . . Continue Reading »
Our subject is one of those peculiar phenomena taken for granted in the contemporary world but which from an historical perspective seem anomalous. The phenomenon is that the huge numbers of Protestants in the United States support almost no distinctively Christian program in higher education other . . . . Continue Reading »
It was in the early 1960s that my late revered teacher, Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, became the first major Jewish theologian in America to enter into dialogue with Christian theologians on a high theological level. Once during that time, when I was part of a small group of students who . . . . Continue Reading »
Perhaps the most striking feature of our contemporary political landscape is the failure of the tattered labels “liberal” and “conservative” any longer to convey useful distinctions. In my own field of education policy, for example, those who get called conservative are in fact deeply . . . . Continue Reading »
For most people in America, all those not familiar with the complicated ideological positioning on the right end of the political spectrum, the term “conservative” evokes images of the board room, the country club, and the Episcopal church located not far from the latter. In other words, the . . . . Continue Reading »
Lately I’ve been noting an interesting linguistic phenomenon: the all-purpose word. You come across it most often in slang, especially the slang of children and adolescents. Take “narly,” for instance—a word which, in my limited acquaintance, seems capable of an almost infinite range of . . . . Continue Reading »
From time to time, a set of concerns reaches something like a critical mass. Familiar discontents vaguely felt turn into more focused anxieties, and then, all of a sudden it seems, a passel of scholars arrives at a similar analysis of what has gone so thoroughly wrong—and some similar ideas of . . . . Continue Reading »
Almost nobody wants to be called a prude and reactionary, a bluenose puritan and spoilsport. It would not be accurate to say that nobody wants to be perceived that way. Some, when they have been called reactionary once too often, embrace the epithet and exult in it. When he launched National . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
