Nothing More to Prove

Nothing More to Prove

The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965–2005 By Zachary Leader Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. Hardcover, 784 pages, $40. Reviewed by Carl Rollyson I was hard on the first volume, The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964, in the June 2015 issue of The New...
Liturgies Real and Imagined

Liturgies Real and Imagined

The 21: A Journey into the Land of Coptic Martyrs by Martin Mosebach. Plough, 2019. Hardcover, 272 pages, $26. What Was Before: A Novel, by Martin Mosebach. Seagull Books, 2014. Hardcover, 248 pages, $27.50. Reviewed by Trevor C. Merrill This powerful little book...
Humanism, Reform, Heresy

Humanism, Reform, Heresy

Calvin’s Tormentors: Understanding the Conflicts That Shaped the Reformer by Gary W. Jenkins. Baker Academic, 2018. Paperback, 208 pages, $28. Reviewed by Chris Butynskyi In the wake of the five hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, Christians are...
Weaponized Christianity

Weaponized Christianity

The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity By Daniel J. Mahoney Foreword by Pierre Manent. Encounter Books, 2018. Hardcover, 163 pages, $24. Reviewed by Grant Havers In this age of numerous polemics against “political correctness,” “Social...
Narrating the Future

Narrating the Future

Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future By Jason Phillips. Oxford University Press, 2018. Hardcover, 320 pages, $35. Reviewed by Carl Lawrence Paulus “What is past is prologue.” William Shakespeare’s line from The Tempest is inscribed...