Must the University Be Political?
The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s By Ellen Schrecker. University of Chicago Press, 2021. Hardcover, 616 pages, $35. Reviewed by Ethan Schrum. Should academic departments and scholarly societies issue position statements on current political matters?...
What Do Fungi Have to Do with Athens?
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures By Merlin Sheldrake. Random House, 2020. Hardcover, 368 pages, $28. Reviewed by Eve Tushnet. There are fungi that hunt their prey. Fungi can communicate, trade, and defend. They...
Perspicuity at the Bar of History
The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity By Casey J. Chalk. Emmaus Road Publishing, 2023. Hardcover, 320 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Tyler Curtis. In 1925, when John T. Scopes was on trial for teaching...
The Classically Educated Mind of W. E. B Du Bois
Co-Workers in the Kingdom of Culture: Classics and Cosmopolitanism in the Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois By David Withun. Oxford University Press, 2022. Hardcover, 256 pages, $80.00. Reviewed by Chris Butynskyi. Race, class, gender. These are three important components...
Cormac McCarthy’s Historical Literary Influences
Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy’s Expanding Worlds By Bryan Giemza. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Hardcover, 184 pages, $100. Reviewed by Philip D. Bunn. Works of scholarship on art, literature, or poetry can take multiple forms. One form might be scholarship...
Two Cities: The Public and the Private
A reflection on Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities By Igor Damous. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every...
Remembering Our Unruly Character
Character in the American Experience: An Unruly People By Bruce P. Frohnen and Ted V. McAllister. Lexington Books, 2022. Hardcover, 208 pages, $95. Reviewed by Ryan R. Holston. Truth-telling with regard to historical life is never a question of laying bare “the...
Why Public Reason Fails
Tradition and the Deliberative Turn: A Critique of Contemporary Democratic Theory By Ryan R. Holston. State University of New York Press, 2023. Paperback, 218 pages, $34.95. Reviewed by Gene Callahan. Political theorists have recently devoted a great amount of...
Friends, Countrymen, Romans
Rome and America: Communities of Strangers, Spectacles of Belonging By Dean Hammer. Cambridge University Press, 2023. Hardcover, 262 pages, $110.00. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. Since its inception, America has been many things, but, in a certain sense, it has always...
There are metaphorical hills on which I would be willing to die. The Oxford comma is one of them.
So easy to forget that the best way to educate yourself is to read great works of literature and philosophy, then talk about them. Bring back the salon!