Evangelicals and Conservatives: On Beyond Worldview

by | Jun 1, 2014

The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life by Bradley G. Green. Crossway, 2010. Paperback, 192 pages, $17.The relationship between conservatism in the United States and Protestant evangelicals is puzzling. Historians who study the rise of...

The Centennial of a Cataclysm: One Life, One Family

by | May 26, 2014

“To you from failing hands we throw The Torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.” John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields,” 1915 One hundred summers ago, one of history’s greatest...

Today’s Totalitarians

by | May 25, 2014

Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It by James Kalb. Angelico Press, 2013. Paperback, 203 pages, $20.In his latest book, James Kalb has produced, among many other things, a phenomenology of the...

America’s Aviation Icons

by | May 19, 2014

The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight by Winston Groom. National Geographic Press, 2013. Hardcover, 464 pages, $30.The young person at Barnes & Noble who led me to the stack of The Aviators, drew a blank...

Paul Elmer More and the Relevance of Life and Letters

by | May 19, 2014

Paul Elmer More, once described as the most “patrician” of American critics, together with Harvard professor Irving Babbitt, founded the short-lived Humanist school of criticism. The name they took for themselves alluded to the spirit of the ancient litterae...

‘I Think I Have Made Poetry’

by | May 12, 2014

The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume I: 1886–1920 Edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen. Harvard University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 811 pages, $45. In a conversation with the late literary scholar Peter J. Stanlis about ten years ago, Stanlis...

The Problem of Democratic Individualism

by | May 12, 2014

By Peter Augustine Lawler From the vantage point of modern liberalism, and especially liberal democracy, America is not without its problems and limitations. The possibility even exists that America’s apparently extreme partisanship on behalf of the individual could...

Turner’s Frontier Thesis, Continued

by | May 5, 2014

The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History by Jon K. Lauck. University of Iowa Press, 2013. Paperback, 166 pages, $35.Let me say at the outset that for me the only definitive “Trails Conference” is the one that occurs toward the end of Zane Grey’s The...

Bully in the Bully Pulpit

by | May 5, 2014

The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Simon & Schuster, 2013. Hardcover,928 pages, $40.Has this country had a providential history? Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin must be tempted to...

Books in Little

by | Apr 30, 2014

A Second Look at First Things: A Case for Conservative Politics. Edited by Francis J. Beckwith, Robert P. George, and Susan McWilliams. St. Augustine’s Press, 2013. Paperback, 400 pages. Hadley P. Arkes must indeed feel vindicated by this work. An intelligent...