Latin America’s Five Deadly Sins

by | Sep 9, 2007

Liberty for Latin America: How to Undo Five Hundred Years of State Oppression by Alvaro Vargas Llosa. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York) 276 pp., $25.00, 2005. As co-author of the 1997 classic The Manual for the Perfect Latin American Idiot, Peruvian journalist...

On Pilgrims and Park Rangers

by | Sep 9, 2007

The Right to Be Wrong: Ending the Culture War Over Religion in America by Kevin Seamus Hasson. Encounter Books (New York), 220 pp., $25.95 cloth, 2005. When the federal courts ordered Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore to remove his Ten Commandments monument from the...

Seeking God in Strange Places

by | Sep 9, 2007

The Truth is Out There: Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction by Thomas Bertonneau and Kim Paffenroth. Brazos Press (Grand Rapids, Mich.), 272 pp., $18.99 paper, 2006. The idea of finding a Christian moral lesson in TV science fiction could occur only...

The Void in Daniel Bell’s Soul

by | Sep 9, 2007

A Retrospective Review of The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Thirty Years Later Tthirty years and more after its appearance, Daniel Bell’s challenging book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), still merits the Times Literary Supplement’s...

Who Gets it Right? Liberals or Originalists?

by | Sep 9, 2007

The Myth of Judicial Activism: Making Sense of Supreme Court Decisions by Kermit Roosevelt III. Yale University Press (New Haven and London), 272 pp., $30.00 cloth, 2006. By the celebrated “switch in time that saved nine” in 1937, the United States Supreme Court,...

On Living in the Present

by | Sep 9, 2007

Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics by Elizabeth Campbell Corey. University of Missouri Press (Columbia, Missouri) xi + 253 pp., $39.95, cloth, 2006. Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin are arguably the three most important political...

Faith and Reason, Reconsidered

by | Sep 9, 2007

Christianity and the Soul of the University: Faith as a Foundation for Intellectual Community edited by Douglas Henry and Michael Beaty. Baker Academic (Grand Rapids, Michigan) 192 pp., $24.99 paper, 2006. Since the death of John Henry Newman in 1890, the justly...

Ideologues at the Podium

by | Sep 9, 2007

The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America by David Horowitz. Regnery Publishing, Inc (Washington, D.C.) 448 pp., $27.95 cloth, 2006. Prof. Ward Churchill’s ugly characterization of the 9/11 victims of the Twin Towers attack as “little Eichmans” who...

A Storm-Tossed Nation

by | Sep 9, 2007

Pakistan: Eye of the Storm by Owen Bennett Jones. Yale University Press (New Haven, Connecticut), xxx + 328 pp., second edition, $17.00/£10.99 paper, 2003. (This is the second essay of a two-part review, the first half of which appeared in the Winter 2007 issue.)...

Prudential Conservatism?

by | Sep 9, 2007

The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and its Times by Jeffrey Hart. ISI Books (Wilmington, Delaware), 410 pp., $28.00 cloth, 2006.Jeffrey Hart’s The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times is both a memoir of...