The Surprise of Order

The Surprise of Order

Beauty: What It Is and Why It Matters by John-Mark L. Miravalle. Sophia Institute Press, 2019. Paperback, 176 pages, $15. Reviewed by John Tuttle A plate garnished and well seasoned, a garden bed of blooming flora, the yawning archways of a grand cathedral, and 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...
What Makes a Life

What Makes a Life

The Index of Self-Destructive Acts: A Novel by Christopher Beha. Tin House Books, 2020. Hardcover, 528 pages, $28. Reviewed by Jessica Hooten Wilson This is a story that begins with the end of the world. As a young man named Sam Waxworth arrives from “the provinces”...
The Unfashionable Statesmanship of John Courtney Murray

The Unfashionable Statesmanship of John Courtney Murray

SymposiumMurray’s We Hold These Truths: 1960 and Today Hunter Baker John Courtney Murray is often thought of as the American Catholic who did the most to bridge the gap between the American constitutional tradition and the Church of Rome on the relationship between...
The Unfashionable Statesmanship of John Courtney Murray

A Reminder of Reality in an Ideological Age

SymposiumMurray’s We Hold These Truths: 1960 and Today Bruce P. Frohnen We Hold These Truths is about “the American Proposition,” that is, the American public philosophy that once shaped our civil social order. More importantly, it is about truth, about the reality...