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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
Isaac T. Hecker, The Diary: Romantic Religion in Ante-Bellum America edited by John Farina. Paulist Press (“Sources of American Spirituality” Series) 1988, 456 pp., $14.95 cloth. Americans are an incorrigibly religious people. In spite of the predictions—primarily by...
America’s Spiritual Capital by Nicholas Capaldi and Theodore Roosevelt Malloch St Augustine’s Press (South Bend, Indiana), 2012. Paper, 176 pages, $17. Over the past thirty years, increasing numbers of social scientists and economists have invested more time in...
Taking Movies Seriously, Perhaps Too Seriously
Thomas Banks on "The Screen and the Mirror: What Movies Show Us About Ourselves, the World, and God" by Gina Dalfonzo.
