Liberty, or Liberties, or Leviathan?
The Lives of the Constitution: Ten Exceptional Minds that Shaped America’s Supreme Law by Joseph Tartakovsky. Encounter Books, 2019. Hardcover, 320 pages, $26. Reviewed by Jeffrey J. Folks Joseph Tartakovsky’s Lives of the Constitution: Ten Exceptional Minds that...
A Quarantine Reading Journal
Eric Hutchinson Charles Portis, Norwood Arkansas’s Charles Portis, most famous as the author of True Grit, died on February 17. Also in February, COVID-19 was spreading around the world. Of these two facts, the first calls for memorialization. The second calls for...
On Goats, and What to Do
How to Burn a Goat: Farming with the Philosophers By Scott H. Moore Baylor University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 224 pp., $29.95. Reviewed by Karl C. Schaffenburg In a brief volume of shorter meditations and several more extended essays, Scott H. Moore, a philosophy...
What Lasch Knew
The Topeka School: A Novel by Ben Lerner. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. Hardcover, 304 pages, $27. Reviewed by Jon K. Lauck Ben Lerner has written an intense new novel that will mark our cultural moment for some time, even in these strange days, but in ways that,...
Tool, Mirror, Goad: What Is Christian Legal Thought For?
Christian Legal Thought. Materials and Cases by Patrick M. Brennan and William S. Brewbaker III. Foundation Press, 2017. Hardcover, 678 pages, $213. Reviewed by Gerald J. Russello Does Christianity have a place in the law? Many American jurists said it did, and most...
The Nation’s First Architect
Building America: The Life of Benjamin Henry Latrobe by Jean H. Baker. Oxford University Press, 2020. Hardcover, 304 pages, $35. Reviewed by Addison Del Mastro Benjamin Henry Latrobe is, in two ways, not Pierre L’Enfant—he was not, despite his surname, French; and he...
Nietzsche’s Puritan Warriors
Power and Purity: The Unholy Marriage That Spawned America’s Social Justice Warriors by Mark T. Mitchell. Regnery Gateway, 2020. Hardcover, 148 pages, $27. Reviewed by John Ehrett It is unfortunate that Mark T. Mitchell’s Power and Purity: The Unholy Marriage That...
The Rise of Sexless Moralism?
By Titus Techera American pop culture has quickly moved on from Game of Thrones to The Mandalorian. From HBO to Disney. From putting the adult in adultery to infantilizing everything virtual reality can infantilize, which is virtually everything, of course. From...
Yes It’s Poetry, But Is It Good?
The Soul is a Stranger in this World: Essays on Poets and Poetry By Micah Mattix. Cascade Books, 2020. Softcover, 164 pages, $21. Reviewed by Karl C. Schaffenburg Lovers of poetry will find much to enjoy in this volume, which collects short essays written by the...
Grateful for @SarahSoltis02's review of *Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic* @ubookman. I've now heard from several moms who have read my book while holding a sleeping baby or a tired or sick child. Intellectual motherhood looks like this sometimes.
https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/halting-the-assembly-line-life/