Meeting Stalin’s Challenge

by | Nov 17, 2014

Kennan, Lippmann, Burnham, and the Great Strategy Debate in the Early Cold War YearsDuring the late 1940s and early 1950s, in response to repeated Soviet encroachments in the Eastern Mediterranean, Iran, Central Europe, and the Far East, the United States gradually...

“The World’s Last Night”

by | Nov 9, 2014

Provocative titles are meant to, well, provoke. I have always considered C. S. Lewis’s little 1952 book of essays entitled The World’s Last Night (Harcourt) to be one difficult to forget. It takes its title from the last essay in the book, itself redolent of Christian...

Caesar, princeps, Augustus, god

by | Nov 9, 2014

The shifting identities of Rome’s first emperorOn the Ides of March, 44 BC, Julius Caesar’s great-nephew, Octavius, the future Augustus and first emperor of Rome, was eighteen years of age and a newly arrived student in the Roman province of Illyricum, modern Albania....

Anti-Catholicism and Manifest Destiny

by | Nov 3, 2014

Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War by John C. Pinheiro. Oxford University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 256 pages, $45.Missionaries of Republicanism, a volume in Oxford University Press’s prestigious Religion in America series,...

Homo Economicus, Absurdus, or Viator?

by | Nov 3, 2014

A Brief Philosophical Journey into Modernity.Wavering between the profit and the loss In this brief transit where the dreams cross The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying (Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things From the wide window...