Joseph Story and the Politics of the Early Republic

Joseph Story and the Politics of the Early Republic

Contending for American Nationhood: Joseph Story and the Debate Over a Federal Common Law By Benjamin Clark. Lexington Books, 2024. Hardcover, 252 pages, $120.00. Reviewed by John G. Grove.  The debate over federal common law does not generally fire the imaginations...
Listening to the Law, and Now Speaking It

Listening to the Law, and Now Speaking It

Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution  By Amy Coney Barrett. Sentinel, 2025.  Hardcover, 336 pages, $32.00. Reviewed by James V. F. Dickey. Listening to the Law reveals the personal and public-facing perspectives of Supreme Court Justice Amy...
One Man’s Journey to Faith

One Man’s Journey to Faith

Taking Religion Seriously  By Charles Murray.  Encounter Books, 2025. Hardcover, 200 pages, $29.99. Reviewed by Jeffrey Folks. Taking Religion Seriously is a thoughtful, moving, and entertaining account of the author’s decades-long journey toward acceptance of...
Yearning and Collapsing

Yearning and Collapsing

Blue Walls Falling Down By Joshua Hren Angelico Press, 2024. Paperback, 436 pages, $22.95. Reviewed by David G. Bonagura, Jr.  Can love reconcile America’s partisan divide between left and right, between racially obsessed identity politics and radicalized nativist...
Our Lives in the Panopticon

Our Lives in the Panopticon

The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control Jacob Siegel. Henry Holt and Co., 2026. Hardcover, 336 pages, $29.99. Reviewed by Albert Norton, Jr. Just within the last year, Paul Kingsnorth published Against The Machine about the source of our increasing...
Plan a Visit Soon

Plan a Visit Soon

Pastorals  By Rachel Hadas. Measure Press, 2025. Hardcover, 88 pages, $25. Reviewed by Midge Goldberg. What are Rachel Hadas’s pastorals? Not poems, not essays, not quite prose poems. What they really feel like are “visits.” You go to a friend’s house, sit down in the...
Preparing for Leisure

Preparing for Leisure

The Leisure Ethic: The End of Work and a Return to Virtue By David Edward Tabachnick. Toronto University Press, 2026. Paperback, 288 pages, $39.95. Reviewed by Robert Rich. In August of 2014, the science educator and YouTuber CGP Grey made the case, in a video titled...
Michigan’s Neglected Civil War Governor

Michigan’s Neglected Civil War Governor

Radical of Radicals: Austin Blair—Civil War Governor—In His Own Words By Jack Dempsey. Mission Point Press, 2025. Paperback, 360 pages, $18.95. Reviewed by Miles Smith IV. In every intelligent history of the Civil War Era, the major players show up on stage, right on...
The Enduring Sources of the Permanent Things

The Enduring Sources of the Permanent Things

What Really Matters: Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family  By Timothy S. Goeglein with Craig Osten. Fidelis Publishing, 2026. Hardcover, 264 pages, $28.00. Reviewed by Cory Andrews. In an age when so many of our inherited institutions seem to be unraveling...
Talking Classical Education

Talking Classical Education

Classical Catechism Anthony Esolen.  Thales Press, 2025.  Paperback, 109 pages, $9.99. Reviewed by Sean Hadley. It would be a rather run-of-the-mill comment amongst any group of Christians to state that catechisms play an important role in the life of the Church....