The Lost Art of Memento Mori
Meditations on Death: Preparing for Eternity By Thomas à Kempis. Translated by Fr. Robert Nixon, OSB. TAN Books, 2023. Hardcover, 88 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by Thomas Banks. To scratch an itch of curiosity, I recently entered the word “Death” into the Amazon search...
Fundamentally Religious and Catholic
Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography by Holly Ordway. Word on Fire Academic, 2023. Hardcover, 532 pages, $ 34.95. Reviewed by Adam Schwartz. J. R. R. Tolkien famously described The Lord of the Rings as a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work.”...
A Contemporary Literary Work of the Moral Imagination
The Professor’s Dog and Other Stories By David B. Schock. PenUltimate, Ltd., 2022. Paperback, 155 pages, $11.95. Reviewed by Jonathan R. Eller. David B. Schock’s wide-ranging career as a newspaper editor, filmmaker, and non-fiction author draws inspiration from a...
Must the University Be Political?
The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s By Ellen Schrecker. University of Chicago Press, 2021. Hardcover, 616 pages, $35. Reviewed by Ethan Schrum. Should academic departments and scholarly societies issue position statements on current political matters?...
What Do Fungi Have to Do with Athens?
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures By Merlin Sheldrake. Random House, 2020. Hardcover, 368 pages, $28. Reviewed by Eve Tushnet. There are fungi that hunt their prey. Fungi can communicate, trade, and defend. They...
Perspicuity at the Bar of History
The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity By Casey J. Chalk. Emmaus Road Publishing, 2023. Hardcover, 320 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Tyler Curtis. In 1925, when John T. Scopes was on trial for teaching...
The Classically Educated Mind of W. E. B Du Bois
Co-Workers in the Kingdom of Culture: Classics and Cosmopolitanism in the Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois By David Withun. Oxford University Press, 2022. Hardcover, 256 pages, $80.00. Reviewed by Chris Butynskyi. Race, class, gender. These are three important components...
Cormac McCarthy’s Historical Literary Influences
Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy’s Expanding Worlds By Bryan Giemza. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Hardcover, 184 pages, $100. Reviewed by Philip D. Bunn. Works of scholarship on art, literature, or poetry can take multiple forms. One form might be scholarship...
Two Cities: The Public and the Private
A reflection on Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities By Igor Damous. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every...
Great fiction can form character and cultivate the moral imagination. @JeffOttoNelson reviews @cjscalia's latest book.
Smith’s claims are sobering, but they do raise important questions related to how to be religious and pass on the Christian faith in the modern age. - @PhilDavignon