Catholic Zen
Person Means Relation By David Walsh. St. Augustine’s Press, 2024. Paperback, 110 pages, $16. Reviewed by Robert Grant Price. Those familiar with the writing of personalist philosopher David Walsh know that he’s densely aphoristic. Large tracts of his works, notably...
Outlining Sanity in the Garden
The Tao of Vegetable Gardening: Cultivating Tomatoes, Greens, Peas, Beans, Squash, Joy, and Serenity By Carol Deppe. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015. Paperback, 288 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Eric Scheske. American gardening literature is a big thing. Amazon has an...
Holy Living After the Fall
After Christendom By Michael Warren Davis. Sophia Institute Press, 2024. Paperback, 213 pages, $17.89. Reviewed by Thomas Banks. This is a fairly simple book—part polemic and part spiritual manual. Mr. Davis, its author, is best known for his previous work, The...
Frontier Fiction at Its Best
The Cannibal Owl By Aaron Gwyn. Belle Point Press, 2025. Paperback, 80 pages, $15.95. Reviewed by Daniel Cowper. The Cannibal Owl, by Aaron Gwyn, is a novella about Levi English, a boy on the Texas frontier of the 1820s who grows up among a band of Comanche. It is...
The Dangers of Modern Nationalism
A Generation of Materialism, 1871-1900 By Carlton J. H. Hayes. Harper Collins, 1941. Reviewed by John Rossi. When I started teaching an introductory European History course over 60 years ago, I chose as my textbook Carlton Hayes’s two volume A Political and Cultural...
Prospects for Anglo-American Conservatism in the Tradition of Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton
Prospects for Anglo-American Conservatism in the Tradition of Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton Join us on June 27 and 28, 2025, for a very special conference that considers the contemporary prospects for the Anglo-American intellectual conservative tradition. ...
Education in the Light of Glory
Unless the Lord Builds the House: Shared Foundations for Christian Education By Andrew Kern. CiRCE Institute, 2024. Paperback, 118 pages, $20.99. Reviewed by Jesse Hake. Andrew Kern’s vision for education in Unless the Lord Builds the House is as expansive and as...
Connecting with Aquinas, Connecting with Ourselves
Why Aquinas Matters Now By Oliver Keenan. Bloomsbury Continuum, 2025. Hardcover, 240 pages, $22. Reviewed by J. Camden Kidwell. More than seven-hundred years have elapsed since Dominican friar St. Thomas Aquinas passed away. With all the changes in the world since the...
Et in Arcadia Ego
Fret Not By Michael Shindler. Finishing Line Press, 2024. Paperback, 40 pages, $17.99. Reviewed by Dan Rattelle. A first look at Fret Not quickly reveals that its author, Michael Shindler, does not have an MFA. Good. Absent is any sort of knowing irony in its deeply...
There are metaphorical hills on which I would be willing to die. The Oxford comma is one of them.
So easy to forget that the best way to educate yourself is to read great works of literature and philosophy, then talk about them. Bring back the salon!