Christopher Dawson was an English historian in the middle of the last century, one of those intellectuals prominent in his own day—T. S. Eliot called him “the most powerful intellectual influence in England”—but mostly overlooked in ours. Which is the usual treatment posterity gives . . . . Continue Reading »
In reading this intelligent, useful, and timely book, I was reminded of the challenges I and some of my fellow students encountered back in the Vietnam era. Our intention was to get invited to various synagogues where we could present Jewish law perspectives on the morality and practice of war. The . . . . Continue Reading »
At first glance, it seems odd that a major academic publisher should commission a volume on, as it were, the phenomenology of religious life. Insofar as they are perceptible at all, religious have retreated to the margins of our imaginative universe, as defendants in court cases, amiable extras in . . . . Continue Reading »
The Palo Alto suicides started in 2002, when Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto High School class of 2007 and author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, must have been in middle school. I, a year ahead in the class of 2006, was adjusting to the awkward realities of the . . . . Continue Reading »
Winter is a bad time. Whether for a season or for a life, it dampens the self. Or so a recent writer claimed. “Mankind endured a long winter of the Dark Ages” for a thousand years, “repressing” the human spirit in a barren season that lasted centuries. The human individual, as fate would . . . . Continue Reading »
Southerners have a way of burying their actual thoughts under a welter of pleasantries. So it is perhaps worth asking what lies beneath this apparently straightforward morality tale by Russell Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today. As Moore presents it, Losing Our . . . . Continue Reading »
“Judaism is not even a religion.” This striking line appears in Immanuel Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, a book devoted to winnowing down the articles of Christian faith to what is strictly demanded by rational morality. Kant considered himself a sincere friend of . . . . Continue Reading »
Tis the season of “The Artist”: On screen, in print, and on stage, the man of the hour is the creative genius, the absolutist, the martyr, the suffering sinner redeemed only when he gives himself away, lovingly and without reservations, to his art. Just ask Hollywood, which is all aflutter at . . . . Continue Reading »
We live in paradoxical times. Over the last two generations, college students, especially at top-ranking universities, have been educated to believe that there is no transcendence. Human beings are a bundle of instincts, they’re told, or software in meat hardware, or some other reductive . . . . Continue Reading »
The day I lost my sight,I could no more see you, my love,Still God is in the remnant. The day I can not hearYour lovely voice reveal your thoughts,Yet God is in the remnant. The day I can not moveMy lips to speak my love to you,Still God is in the remnant. The day I lose my memory,And all the times . . . . Continue Reading »
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