C.S. Lewis’s range of work—at a very high level, done with pellucid clarity and frequent epigrammatic wit—places him at, or near, the top of literary figures writing in English since the seventeenth century. In a recent issue of The Spectator (August 2025), Alexander Laman treated us to “Still Roaring,” a left-handed recognition of the staying [...]
Sentimentalism is collectivized, but not like other ideologies. It has no party or movement or protests or marches or manifestoes as such. Rather it is a Spirit of our Age, the oxygen we breathe, our environment. This title, only slightly ironic in both its parts, refers neither to any of the moon-June-swoon ditties that were [...]
Some people frolic in the European Middle Age, whereas most people hearing that designation think hair loss and weight gain. And that is too bad, because there and then resided Geoffrey Chaucer, the second greatest poet in English. If only the selective reading public knew better, they would be dazzled by his masterwork, The Book [...]
We are wired for stories, to make them, to know them, and to be formed by them. Story is everywhere, and is always the way out for meaning, especially the Ultimate Meaning, so that we may, though dimly, know Him who composes the tale, its main Character, and the One who continues to tell it. [...]
Often people do not know they are on a road, walking towards an as-yet unknown Place just there, where the road ends. Distractions abound, interesting and attractive allures along the way, as well as intersecting paths leading away from the road. But always on the road there are intimations of the Place, making it seem [...]
A proponent of African slavery before denouncing it and repenting, a prophet who predicted the fall of the Spanish empire owing to its sinfulness, a priest, bishop, reformer, and scholar, Father Batolomé de las Casas fought the good fight, ran the race, and kept the faith—and that until his very end. “People need to be [...]
What National Review has always been for is limited government, authentic federalism, limited spending, a strong national defense, a respect for cultural pieties, civility and civil order, religious freedom, the Constitution properly construed, and mostly just leaving people alone, as well an understanding that to be free first you have to be born. William [...]
Science writing, especially about the quantum world, has come far as a sub-genre of intellectual historiography. Yet it never occurred to me that a narrative of twentieth-century experimentation, let alone one that engages—even grips—the lay reader, could attain the status of dispositive intellectual history. Such is the achievement of Dr. Suzie Sheehy, whose "The Matter [...]
From innumerable living room debates, I see people not only do not know how to argue, but do not care to. Instead they leap to quarrel, so that interruptions, interjections, a raised rate and volume of speech, heightened emotion, the dismissive sneer, and the personal attack become ‘rebuttal.’ The olden days. We professed rhetoric, always [...]
Slogans gain resonance more quickly and widely than ever before, so that we are governed by bumper-sticker thinking, and entertainment becomes the supra-ideology of all discourse. In favor of a new inauthentic ‘reality’, we bid farewell to a culture, including its history, and devolve into a state of double vision that extends to cultural, social, [...]
During the last third of the twentieth century, Walker Percy was a force to be reckoned with, as essayist, philosopher, vocal Catholic, and, especially, as a prize-winning novelist, often best-selling. (He was considered a first-class stylist.) Describable, I think, as “psychological gothic” (and Southern, though he came to hold no truck with Faulkner), those six [...]
Brian Greene is the latest in a long line of thinkers who assert that there is no God, and no free will, no independent consciousness, no transcendent reality whatsoever. Though we learn much science from Dr. Greene, none of it dull and much of it fascinating, he leaves us perplexed in the end. The very [...]
Though their orbits may differ radically Christian authors are concentric. No one, for example, would confuse Flannery O’Conner with Marilynne Robinson, nor Graham Greene with either one of them. At first their differences (apart from—because of?—the denominational) can be unsettling. But later, when we’ve dwelt upon those differences, a sort of complementarity comes into focus. [...]