Navigating a Secular Age

by | Sep 7, 2014

How (Not) to Be Secular by James K. A. Smith. Eerdmans, 2014. Paper, 152 pages, $16.In early August I went backpacking in the Glacier Peak Wilderness of the North Cascades. The terrain was unfamiliar to me, and I knew very little of what to expect other than what I...
No More Idols: Taking Measure of a Modern Prophet

No More Idols: Taking Measure of a Modern Prophet

by | Sep 7, 2014

Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World by Edward E. Ericson, Jr. Regnery Gateway 1993. Cloth, xi + 432 pp., $24. As breathing returns after our swoon, as a glimmer of consciousness breaks through the unrelieved darkness, it is difficult for us at first to regain our...

Words and Deeds

by | Sep 1, 2014

Maya Angelou (1928–2014)There is a scene near the end of Old Goriot in which the young Rastignac, still new to Paris and Parisian society, observes that “[n]oble natures cannot dwell in this world.” In Balzac’s eponymous novel, Goriot, having literally given...

An Integrated Vision

by | Sep 1, 2014

Aethereal Rumours: T. S. Eliot’s Physics and Poetics, by Benjamin G. Lockerd, Jr. Bucknell University Press, 1999. 320pp., $48.50 cloth. The title of this book, intriguing though it is, may seem forbidding and suggestive of recondite subject matter. Certainly, it is a...

The 2015 Burke Conference

by | Aug 28, 2014

The Edmund Burke Society of America invites you to its third conference, “Edmund Burke and Patriotism” to be held at Villanova University on February 27–28, 2015. The conference aims to trace the development in the relationship between patriotism, liberty, and duty...

Third Burke Conference Announced!

by | Aug 27, 2014

The Edmund Burke Society of America is pleased to announce a call for papers and open registration for “Edmund Burke and Patriotism,” their third conference on Edmund Burke. It will be held on February 27 and 28, 2015 at Villanova University. Keynote addresses will be...

The Rock Star of One First Street

by | Aug 25, 2014

Scalia: A Court of One by Bruce Allen Murphy. Simon & Schuster, 2014. Cloth, 656 pp., $35.This is an unusual book. One has the feeling that the author does not really care for his subject, but, in spite of himself, Bruce Allen Murphy, the Fred Morgan Kirby...

Coke and the Western Legal Tradition

by | Aug 18, 2014

Common Law. El pensamiento político y jurídico de Sir Edward Coke (Common Law. The political and juridical thought of Sir Edward Coke) by Elio A. Gallego García. Madrid: Ediciones Encuentro, 2012. Paperback, 204 pages, $24.Has the past still something to tell us? Is...

Thinking Like Edmund Burke?

by | Aug 11, 2014

The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence. By David Bromwich. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 512 pages, $40. This first installment of a two-volume intellectual biography of Burke is...