Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey’s article “Insight at First Sight” (May 2023) was perceptive and timely. I have experienced the negative attitude toward love-at-first-sight and happily-ever-after stories while studying English in college. Students often resort to thinking of these . . . . Continue Reading »
Sergius Bulgakov has long been hailed by Orthodox and non-Orthodox alike as a titan of twentieth-century theology. He wrote on everything. After a youthful flirtation with Marx, he published Philosophy of Economy (1912), an anti-Marxist work of social theory. In The Tragedy of . . . . Continue Reading »
The most important book you can read right now is a little (and little-known) Russian novel titled We. First published in English in 1924 by E. P. Dutton, it soon landed its author, Yevgeny Zamyatin, in trouble. An early and enthusiastic Bolshevik—he was arrested in 1905 for his . . . . Continue Reading »
“Facts and great personages in world history occur, as it were, twice . . . the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” The Synod on Synodality seems destined to confirm Marx’s words (themselves a revision of Hegel). The tragedy arises from the deep theological and philosophical division . . . . Continue Reading »
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow have claimed that Russia’s so-called Special Operation is needed to defend the wider russkiy mir, the “Russian world.” By this term they mean the Orthodoxy-based Russian-language civilization that Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus . . . . Continue Reading »
Nonverts—people who once identified with a religious tradition but now identify with none—are the fastest-growing group in surveys of American religion. They make up the great majority of those (now a quarter of the adult population) who say they have no religion. In this study, Stephen . . . . Continue Reading »
A Presbyterian colleague once explained to me that his rule of faith is to believe whatever is most “uplifting.” He found it more uplifting to believe in reincarnation than in death, judgment, and resurrection, because reincarnation “gives us as many chances as we need to get it right.” The . . . . Continue Reading »
One of the books that most influenced my moral and personal imagination was a small novel, Une vie de boy (“Houseboy,” 1956), by Ferdinand Oyono. An early novel by a great Cameroonian writer, diplomat, and civil leader, it made a minor splash on the French literary scene when it first . . . . Continue Reading »
In 2009, one of Google’s self-driving cars came to an intersection with a four-way stop. It came to a halt and waited for other cars to do the same before proceeding through. Apparently, that is the rule it was taught—but of course, that is not what people do. So the robot car got completely . . . . Continue Reading »
“What we are witnessing in America is a regime that is exhausted,” writes Patrick Deneen in his new book. The United States is fabulously rich; our military remains peerless. But on such key metrics as life expectancy and mental health, America is deteriorating, and the indictment of a former . . . . Continue Reading »
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