Caesar, princeps, Augustus, god

The shifting identities of Rome’s first emperorOn the Ides of March, 44 BC, Julius Caesar’s great-nephew, Octavius, the future Augustus and first emperor of Rome, was eighteen years of age and a newly arrived student in the Roman province of Illyricum, modern Albania....

Anti-Catholicism and Manifest Destiny

Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War by John C. Pinheiro. Oxford University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 256 pages, $45.Missionaries of Republicanism, a volume in Oxford University Press’s prestigious Religion in America series,...

Homo Economicus, Absurdus, or Viator?

A Brief Philosophical Journey into Modernity.Wavering between the profit and the loss In this brief transit where the dreams cross The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying (Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things From the wide window...

Why the Exorcist Endures

Mark Judge They’re still there almost every day. At the corner of 36th and Prospect Streets in Georgetown. More than forty years later, tourists and even locals arrive at the stairs where the film The Exorcist was shot in the early 1970s. They take pictures, talk...

Time and Permanence in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

Pedro Blas González In my beginning is my end…. … to be restored, our sickness must grow worse. —T. S. Eliot, Four QuartetsT. S. Eliot begins Burnt Norton with a reflection of time as cyclical. Because time-past and present are enveloped by time-future, Eliot...

The Philosophies of the Modern Era and the Catholic Church

The Church and the Culture of Modernity by Richard Divozzo. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011. Paperback, 404 pages, $13.73.Richard Divozzo’s The Church and the Culture of Modernity provides a insightful study of the root causes of the decline in...

Educational Reform: Back to the Future

Living on the Future Edge: Windows on Tomorrow: The Impact of Global Exponential Trends on Education in the 21st Century By Ted McCain, Ian Jukes, and Lee Crockett. Corwin, 2010. Paperback, 184 pages, $33. The scope and force of informational and communicative...

Dueling Visions

Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate, edited by George W Carey. ISI Books, 1998, Cloth, xxii + 231 pp., $25. “Freedom is a great thing, but one should not run the danger of destroying oneself in the pursuit of it,” the libertarian philosopher John...

Propping Up Pretensions

Susan Sontag: A Biography by Daniel Schreiber, translated by David Dollenmayer. Northwestern University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 296 pages, $36.“Susan Sontag, as F. R. Leavis said of the Sitwells, belongs less to the history of literature than to that of publicity.”...

A New Look at George Orwell

George Orwell: English Rebel by Robert Colls. Oxford University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 330 pages, $34.95. Reviewed by John P. Rossi This is a curious book. It is not a traditional biography. Nor is it an intellectual biography. Instead it is an attempt, through a...