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...
Everyone Worships
Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World by Tara Isabella Burton. PublicAffairs, 2020. Hardcover, 279 pages, $28. Reviewed by Scott D. Moringiello Bookman readers are likely to know Tara Isabella Burton from her op-ed in the New York Times entitled...
The Power Has Flowed Away
Serotonin: A Novelby Michel Houellebecq. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. Hardcover, 320 pages, $27. Reviewed by Zak Slayback “Did we yield to the illusion of individual freedom, of an open life, of infinite possibilities? It’s possible,” Michel Houellebecq’s...
Hope for a Rebirth of Common Sense in the Academy?
Walk Away: When the Political Left Turns Right Edited by Lee Trepanier and Grant Havers. Lexington Books, Political Theory for Today Series, 2019. Cloth, 202 pages, $95. Reviewed by Stephen B. Presser There’s a famous aphorism often wrongly attributed to Oscar Wilde,...
For America250, @lsheahan enters the fray:
What the American Revolution Secured: Order, Justice, and Freedom
A "revolution not made, but prevented.” Russell Kirk fondly and frequently quoted E. J. Payne’s pithy summary of Burke’s view of the Glorious Revolution.
"So yes, Lord Alfred, perhaps you are right after all. ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world! Perhaps one last Ulyssean adventure remains beyond the sunset, and perhaps some work of noble note may yet be done."