A Return to the Thought-Murders
Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow. Viking, 2000. 233 pages.Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s roman à clef about the last years of philosopher-provocateur Allan Bloom, may be the best post-9/11 novel published in the year 2000. Ravelstein has as many virtues as its subject has...Last Scholastic Standing
Neo-Scholastic Essays by Edward Feser. St. Augustine’s Press, 2015. Paperback, 392 pages, $26. Reviewed by Ryan Shinkel When the Prodigal Son decided to auction off his inheritance, his half of the estate did not disappear. Rather, the number of owners and of...Did the Burger Court Suffer from the ‘Greenhouse Effect?’
The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right, by Michael J. Graetz and Linda Greenhouse. Simon and Schuster, 2016. Hardcover, 468 pp., $30. The two authors of this provocative book are card-carrying members of the legal elite, and their work is a revisionist...A Partial Introduction to Black Conservatism
Black Conservatism: Essays in Intellectual and Political History edited by Peter Eisenstadt. Routledge, 2015. Paperback, 328 pages, $55. Black Conservatism, a collection edited by Peter Eisenstadt, is an introduction to the lives of lesser-known figures who can be...Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition … to Be Explained Fairly
Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History by Rodney Stark. Templeton Press, 2016. Hardcover, 280 pages, $28. Rodney Stark, while doing research into the history of religion, discovered that the popular history of Catholicism is rife with...
.@JM_Butcher himself admits that there are in fact important divisions within American society, but he believes that “Americans are united on some very important questions that are driving debates in statehouses, schoolhouses, and even your house.” In this, as in nearly all that
Despite [Kirk's] and others’ efforts to prevent further decline in transcendent beliefs, more than a century later, it is clear that those Americans who adhere to them represent a small and frequently marginalized minority. @fhmcclatchey must be counted among their number, for he