The World the Habsburgs Built

The World the Habsburgs Built

The Habsburgs: To Rule the World by Martyn Rady. Basic Books 2020. Hardcover, 416 pages, $32. Reviewed by Avi Woolf At their peak in the sixteenth century, they ruled much of the known world. A beacon of the true, universal Catholic faith to many, a source of sorrow...
Academe’s Poisoned Groves

Academe’s Poisoned Groves

The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done by John M. Ellis. Encounter Books, 2020. Hardcover, $224 pages, $26. Reviewed by Lee Oser The irony of the year 2020 is that our culture is blind. By forsaking the light of...
Discouraging Charity

Discouraging Charity

Who Killed Civil Society? The Rise of Big Government and Decline of Bourgeois Norms by Howard A. Husock. Encounter Books, 2019. Hardcover, 176 pages $24. Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl It’s a likely sign of the times. On a Tuesday last December, the phone rang with...
The Order that Transcends the Upheavals

The Order that Transcends the Upheavals

The Persistence of Order, Vol. I: Essays on Religion and Culture Edited by Christopher Dawson and T. F. Burns. Cluny Media, 2019. Paperback, 304 pages, $19.95 The Persistence of Order, Vol. II: Essays on Politics and Society Edited by Christopher Dawson and...
The Unwritten Constitution

The Unwritten Constitution

A Constitution in Full: Recovering the Unwritten Foundation of American Liberty by Peter Augustine Lawler and Richard M. Reinsch II. University Press of Kansas, 2019. Hardcover, 216 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Luke C. Sheahan C. S. Lewis famously warned that “the...
Great Power Competition Is Like a Bad Designer Drug

Great Power Competition Is Like a Bad Designer Drug

We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power by Jason Blakely. Oxford University Press, 2020. Paperback, 184 pages, $28. Reviewed by Anthony M. Barr It is perhaps the most infamous quotation from the George W. Bush years. Karl Rove has...