“Good Things Out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Friends” is the epistolary record of Flannery O’Connor’s other life, the life lived behind the printed page in small-town Georgia. This life is not nearly as “large and startling” as her fiction, but it is unforgettable all the same. Good Things Out [...]
In 1954, “Lucky Jim” was a new planet: When Kingsley Amis wrote it, English satirical fiction had been for a third of a century a decidedly mandarin and highbrow business. Unlike his predecessors, Amis depicts representatives of the lower orders and the previously inaccessible university world that is not so much a garden of [...]
As Robert R. Reilly explains in “America on Trial,” the United States restored the founding of government based on reason in a Constitution that produced the most successful government experiment in history. If the American Founding was a rational and social success, why has the American experiment now come under modern attack? America on [...]
Despite all efforts to cancel good sense, common decency, a real sense of justice, respect for the law, and fear of God, these things will reassert themselves, as will the gifts of faith, hope, and charity. What better summer reading for an age of martyrs than the great works of the Western tradition that [...]
Written in the shadow of the Second World War, Ernst Jünger’s “The Forest Passage” reimagines the forest as a symbol of freedom in an age where the “Leviathan,” or all-encompassing totalitarian state, threatens to encroach on liberty and free space. Yet as long as the “forest rebel” has access to the domains of art, [...]
Ever since the first stir they created in the early 1930s the Southern Agrarians have been difficult to assess. How serious, politically and economically, were they in what they advocated? How much agreement was there among them? The four collected above papers point up and even accentuate their divergence, investigating wide-ranging and, at least [...]
For Joseph Conrad, the struggle between good and evil in the human soul was a permanent reality, a reality one might prefer to avoid, or try to sublimate, but one that nobody who has lived long can absolutely deny. Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, by George A. Panichas (165 pages, Mercer University Press, 2005) [...]
In “The Language of God,” Francis Collins breaks into the debate between faith and reason with intelligible writing and with the strength of his experience as a scientist and the nine-years director of the Human Genome Project. He is a man who found God while deciphering the hidden codes of life. The Language of [...]
Despite America’s flawed past, despite the fact that previous generations honored some questionable individuals, our history did not unfold solely within the grid of racism. New England pioneers possessed high ideals of justly ordered freedom, and they carried those ideals west, and in “The Pioneers,” David McCullough is on nothing less than a civilizational [...]
Theodore Roosevelt was the obvious victor in both of the “battles to transform American capitalism.” He refused to do the bidding of the coal operators and instead helped engineer a compromise. American capitalism was not so much transformed as tamed in the process. The Hour of Fate: Theodore Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan and the Battle [...]
Together, the corrupting sins of pride and envy destroyed the democracies of ancient Athens and Rome. But what lies at the root of these two greatest of sins? And is there any remedy or antidote that can cure us, and our society, once we give way to them? Fr. Dwight Longenecker’s “Immortal Combat” offers [...]
Historicist humanism has been largely ignored in the American intellectual consciousness. But for those individuals who realize the depth of our national crisis, who sense the emptiness of mainstream culture, and who lament that society is fracturing for lack of common identity and purpose, historicist humanism has much to offer. The Historical Mind: Humanistic [...]
In “The Decadent Society,” Ross Douthat’s definition of decadence reaches more deeply into the underlying causes of our present rot. Is American society sick, sclerotic, sterile, and stagnant, as he suggests? The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, by Ross Douthat (272 pages, Avid Reader Press, 2020) There is [...]
Against a rising river of pro-socialist sentiment, mainstream liberals and libertarians have been stacking sandbags on the banks in an attempt to disabuse younger generations of what they see as a potentially disastrous political mistake. The latest sandbag on the bank is Trent Horn and Catherine R. Pakaluk’s “Can a Catholic Be a Socialist?” [...]