The Superhero and the City
Superhero Ethics: 10 Comic Book Heroes; 10 Ways to Save the World; Which One Do We Need Most Now? by Travis Smith. Templeton Press, 2018. Hardcover, 190 pages, $25. Reviewed by Ryan Shinkel Classical art imitated life to cultivate it. In Greek sculpture, great souls...
Hope When There’s Nowhere to Hide
A Quiet PLace Directed by John Krasinski. Paramount, 2018. Run time: 90 minutes. Reviewed by Ryan Shinkel Apocalypses are one way to get religious at the box office. End times unveil moral character as wheat from chaff: the hopeful sacrifice for a better future while...
The Neighborliness Not Taken
Won’t You Be My Neighbor directed by Morgan Neville. Tremolo Productions, 2018. Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes. By Ryan Shinkel The neighborhood could have never been that friendly. There must have been scars or tattoos underneath all his sweaters, my fellow...What Can We Learn from Ancient Sophistry?
Sophistry and Political Philosophy: Protagoras’ Challenge to Socrates by Robert C. Bartlett. University of Chicago Press, 2016. Hardcover, 272 pages, $40. Reviewed by Ryan Shinkel One should be silent where one cannot speak, philosophy says, yet sophistry somehow...
The book’s defense of McCarthyism also fares even better over half a century after its publication, as the opening of the Soviet archives gave Americans far more information than the authors had in 1954 and made abundantly clear not only the reality of Soviet infiltration of the…
Today, we know so much more about the communist infiltration of our government and society in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s than William F. Buckley, Jr. did in his early career. Yet, it turns out that Buckley and his allies were closer to the truth about domestic communism than their…