The Worseness Accelerating

James Poulos, whom the Bookman interviewed in 2009 about “postmodern conservatism,” recently wrote a series of pieces for the Federalist on what he describes as the “pink police state,” a kind of totalitarian regime that neither contemporary liberalism nor...

A Theological Reflection on Virtual Religion

Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life, by Robert M. Geraci. Oxford University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 368 pages, $35.Reviewed by Matthew C. MillsapAs individuals living in the twenty-first century, we find ourselves unable to deny the...

Making Meaning in Virtual Worlds

An interview with Robert GeraciThe University Bookman is pleased to present this interview with Robert Geraci, a professor of religious studies at Manhattan College and author of Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life (Oxford...

Playing for Virtual Transcendence

Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life, by Robert M. Geraci. Oxford University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 368 pages, $35. Reviewed by Kevin Schut In Virtually Sacred, religious studies scholar Robert M. Geraci tackles the topic of...

Playfulness and Profundity

Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life, by Robert M. Geraci. Oxford University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 368 pages, $35.Reviewed by Daniel J. HolmesIt requires a certain sense of academic playfulness to take a theological approach to...

Navigating a Secular Age

How (Not) to Be Secular by James K. A. Smith. Eerdmans, 2014. Paper, 152 pages, $16.In early August I went backpacking in the Glacier Peak Wilderness of the North Cascades. The terrain was unfamiliar to me, and I knew very little of what to expect other than what I...
No More Idols: Taking Measure of a Modern Prophet

No More Idols: Taking Measure of a Modern Prophet

Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World by Edward E. Ericson, Jr. Regnery Gateway 1993. Cloth, xi + 432 pp., $24. As breathing returns after our swoon, as a glimmer of consciousness breaks through the unrelieved darkness, it is difficult for us at first to regain our...

Words and Deeds

Maya Angelou (1928–2014)There is a scene near the end of Old Goriot in which the young Rastignac, still new to Paris and Parisian society, observes that “[n]oble natures cannot dwell in this world.” In Balzac’s eponymous novel, Goriot, having literally given...

An Integrated Vision

Aethereal Rumours: T. S. Eliot’s Physics and Poetics, by Benjamin G. Lockerd, Jr. Bucknell University Press, 1999. 320pp., $48.50 cloth. The title of this book, intriguing though it is, may seem forbidding and suggestive of recondite subject matter. Certainly, it is a...

The 2015 Burke Conference

The Edmund Burke Society of America invites you to its third conference, “Edmund Burke and Patriotism” to be held at Villanova University on February 27–28, 2015. The conference aims to trace the development in the relationship between patriotism, liberty, and duty...