Every two or three years, at a small, elite New England university, I offer a graduate-level course on “Nature Writing.” The students, as you might guess, exhibit a keen interest in birds, blossoms, bugs, and bears. Despite shared tastes, the composition of the class is impressively diverse, a . . . . Continue Reading »
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 span of Jaroslav Pelikan’s academic career approaches half a century. In these decades he has made himself the modern master of Dogmengeschichte, the worthy successor of the great Harnack (an achievement appreciated by David Lotz in the May issue of First Things). . . . . Continue Reading »
The good news is that more people are paying attention to the bad news. In the past year there has been an encouragingly widespread discussion of the role played by Politically Correct (PC) opinion on American campuses. Sundry “speech codes” aimed at limiting free expression and adopted in the . . . . Continue Reading »
We made a mistake in a recent public symposium by saying, in response to a question, that we had not listened to enough rock music to have an intelligent opinion about it. A journalist reporting on the meeting cited this as evidence certain that this writer is entirely out of touch with the culture . . . . Continue Reading »
Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry by Alasdair MacIntyre University of Notre Dame Press, 241 pages, $24.95 Over the course of the last five years or so the quality of philosophical inquiry into both ethical and religious matters has increased significantly. Martha Nussbaum’s The . . . . Continue Reading »
If the Vanderbilt transition from Methodist to neuter exhibits a typical pattern of academic secularization, what we will find at the root of these events is a sponsoring church that is nonchalant about its burden: one that wishes to be the patron of a college or university without being its . . . . 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 »
The widely noted appearance of John Chubb and Terry Moe’s Politics, Markets & America’s Schools reminds us again of the fundamental problem in American educational policy: the disposition in every state to fund the public schools at often lavish levels and to tax citizens accordingly, while at . . . . Continue Reading »
. . . pongee-colored girls in white dresses the sun shone through in multiple haloes where they lay alongside streets like sofas reading José Martí behind potted ferns in avenue-knolls paved with Key West grass and long-leaved tobacco shaved and scented like bark strips. . . . . Continue Reading »
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