Founders’ Faith: None of the Above
The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders: Reason, Revelation, Revolution by Gregg L. Frazer. University Press of Kansas, 2012, 296 pp., $35. The religious views of America’s founders have been fiercely contested in the public arena for many years. The principal...America Is Hard to See
The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny by Orestes A. Brownson [1865]. Reprinted by Augustus M. Kelley, Publishers: Clifton, New Jersey, 1972.[ISI 2002] It is always a great intellectual experience to examine the operations of a powerful,...On the Long March of the Wolves through the Sheep-pen
Intellectuals and Society: Revised and Expanded Edition by Thomas Sowell. New York: Basic Books, 2012, 669 pages, $19.99. In her novel Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor promenades a remarkable gallery of grotesques through the life of her protagonist Hazel Motes, a...personal hell
To live with a gnawing grudge against one’s own civilization is the way to a personal Hell, not to a Terrestrial Paradise.Many Liberalisms
Against Liberalism, by John Kekes. Cornell University Press, 1997, 287 pp., $30 cloth. Before one can be “against” something, one has to have a fairly clear definition of what that something is. Thus, John Kekes’s new book, Against Liberalism, begins by trying to list...What We’re Reading (Summer 2012)
The Bookman is a reliable source for books worth reading, thanks in no small part to our reviewers, who cull through the massive numbers of books published to focus on those worth reading, discussing, and digesting. So we have asked some of our regular contributors...For a Thousand Memes to Sing
Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self by Marilynne Robinson. Yale University Press, 2010. 176 pages, $24.Marilynne Robinson is America’s leading literary Calvinist. This title may give her short shrift, for she is also a...Liberal Idealism Critiqued
Cultural Conservatism, Political Liberalism: From Criticism to Cultural Studies by James Seaton. University of Michigan Press, 1996. 287 pp., $42.50 cloth.This wonderful book defends a tradition of American cultural self-criticism that includes Irving Babbitt, H. L....Signs of Contradiction
The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature, 1850–2000 by Richard Griffiths. Continuum (London & New York) xii + 260 pp., $35 cloth, 2010.In 1989, Gregory Wolfe uttered a cri de coueur bemoaning academic neglect of the modern “Catholic Intellectual...
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…