Effing the Ineffable

Effing the Ineffable

Music as an Art by Roger Scruton. Bloomsbury Continuum, 2018. Hardcover, 272 pages, $32. Reviewed by Robert Grant Price In Music as an Art, the late Roger Scruton seeks to defend Western high culture by defending its summit, classical music. It was a defense Scruton...
Champagne Flute with an Iron Spine

Champagne Flute with an Iron Spine

Dystopia and Providence in Five Novels Eve Tushnet The political upheavals of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries bore all kinds of names, from the euphemistic “people’s republic” to the dystopian “total war.” It’s hard to name precisely what was born of these...
Constitutional Arguments, Constitutional Stories

Constitutional Arguments, Constitutional Stories

An interview with Ken I. Kersch We are pleased to publish this interview with Ken I. Kersch, about his recent book, Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Ken I....
Making a Home Among Monsters and Martians

Making a Home Among Monsters and Martians

Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians, and the Weird in Flyover Country by B. J. Hollars. University of Nebraska Press, 2019. Paperback, 208 pages, $20. Reviewed by Jacob A. Bruggeman It was around the time of my ninth birthday that I realized the Loch...
Metaphysics for a Broken Western World

Metaphysics for a Broken Western World

The Discovery of Being and Thomas Aquinas: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives Edited by Christopher M. Cullen, SJ and Franklin T. Harkins. Catholic University of America Press, 2019. Hardcover, 320 pages, $75. Reviewed by Gerard T. Mundy The Western world...
Faith and Works and the Novel

Faith and Works and the Novel

The Decline of the Novel by Joseph Bottum. St. Augustine’s Press, 2019. Hardcover, 153 pages, $25. Reviewed by Trevor C. Merrill In this wide-ranging essay, Joseph Bottum has managed to turn a stale topic—the death of the novel—into fresh cultural criticism, arguing...
Scientism Is Not Science

Scientism Is Not Science

By Pedro Blas González Scientism, Science, and Technology Scientism is not science but an ideology that reduces man’s hope and aspiration to the scientific method. Scientism promises postmodern man an alarming sense of control over the here-and-now. Scientism, along...
Genuine Realism in a Multipolar World

Genuine Realism in a Multipolar World

A Common Human Ground: Universality and Particularity in a Multicultural World by Claes G. Ryn. University of Missouri Press, 2019. Paperback, 178 pages, $21.95. Reviewed by Eric Adler With the problems facing international relations today, political leaders and...
Dharma and the Constitution

Dharma and the Constitution

American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War by Duncan Ryūken Williams. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 400 pages, $30. Reviewed by Jason Morgan The Pacific War is generally understood as a political and military...
The Last Inkling

The Last Inkling

A farewell to Christopher Tolkien. By Michael Toscano By the time Christopher Tolkien was called up, His Majesty’s Royal Air Force had already been chased off the continent of Europe, losing nearly five hundred fighters over Belgium and France; had turned around and...