The Problem with the World is You?

God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get it by Jim Wallis. New York: HarperCollins, 2005, 2006. 432 pages. Nearly a century ago G. K. Chesterton asked “what’s wrong with the world?” His first and last answer was always the same: “I am.” In...

A Stirring Defense of the Conversation

Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life by Anthony T. Kronman. Yale University Press (New Haven), 320 pages, hardcover, $27.50; 2007 In the decades since The Closing of the American Mind became a bestseller, many critics...

Books in Little

T. S. Eliot, by Craig Raine (Oxford University Press, 202 pp., 2006). “It has been a chief purpose of good poetry,” Russell Kirk wrote, “to reinterpret and vindicate the norms of human existence.” In his thorough reading of Eliot’s work, particularly his poetry, Raine...
A University Lecture

A University Lecture

The Regensburg Lecture by James V. Schall, S.J. St. Augustine’s Press (South Bend, Ind.), 174 pp., $20 cloth, 2007“The bravest act of our time is the act that insists, in a public university lecture, that what is unreasonable must defend itself in reason.” It should...
Chicago and a New Schema for the Liberal Arts

Chicago and a New Schema for the Liberal Arts

Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America by Donald N. Levine. University of Chicago Press (Chicago), 299 pp., $39.00 cloth, 2006; $19.00 paper, 2007 Donald N. Levine has lived most of his life at the University of Chicago. He earned his three...