The Rise of the State, the End of Enlightenment
Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans: The Genevans and the Irish in Time of Revolution By Richard Whatmore. Princeton University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 512 pages, $37.52. Reviewed by Nayeli L. Riano We often consider the Treaty of Westphalia the beginning of the...
The Renaissance Reimagined
The Beauty and the Terror: The Italian Renaissance and the Rise of the West by Catherine Fletcher. Oxford University Press, 2020. Hardcover, 384 pages, $30. Reviewed by Clayton Trutor Not all that long ago, the Renaissance was common cultural terrain in American life....
The Unfashionable Statesmanship of John Courtney Murray
SymposiumMurray’s We Hold These Truths: 1960 and Today Hunter Baker John Courtney Murray is often thought of as the American Catholic who did the most to bridge the gap between the American constitutional tradition and the Church of Rome on the relationship between...
A Reminder of Reality in an Ideological Age
SymposiumMurray’s We Hold These Truths: 1960 and Today Bruce P. Frohnen We Hold These Truths is about “the American Proposition,” that is, the American public philosophy that once shaped our civil social order. More importantly, it is about truth, about the reality...
This Nation Under God
SymposiumMurray’s We Hold These Truths: 1960 and Today Richard M. Reinsch II America is a country split apart. There is little room for authentic conversation, civility, and compromise between opponents, Left and Right. Even more disturbing is the rise of ruination of...
Murray, Sixty Years On
SymposiumMurray’s We Hold These Truths: 1960 and Today William Gould John Courtney Murray’s justly celebrated We Hold These Truths, published six decades ago, was written with two distinct but related aims in mind. The first was to establish that Catholicism and...
Murray and 21st-Century Challenges
SymposiumMurray’s We Hold These Truths: 1960 and Today Mary C. Segers Sixty years ago, Sheed & Ward published John Courtney Murray’s We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, a now-classic book explaining how and why Roman Catholics...
Maoism Exported
Maoism: A Global Historyby Julia Lovell.Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.Hardcover, 610 pages, $37.50. Reviewed by Thomas Albert Howard As if parodying the era’s radical chic, a 1967 issue of Lui magazine (France’s Playboy) included a supplement illustrated with quotes from Mao...
The Towns Brexit Forgets
Little Platoons: How a Revived One Nation Can Empower England’s Forgotten Towns and Redraw the Political Map By David Skelton. Biteback Publishing, 2019. Paperback, 304 pages, £12.99. Reviewed by Gerard T. Mundy The 2016 popular vote in favor of the United Kingdom’s...
Ah, just your typical 663-page light summer beach read for a @ubookman book review. Makes Wealth of Nations look like a Substack essay.