book review 33
The Race to the Bottom: A Review of Ross Benes’s ‘1999’
It never fails—whenever Benes defends low culture, he does so in the exact terms that he ought to be using to criticize it
Up From Hell: Timothy G. Patitsas’s The Ethics of Beauty
Look at what has sometimes happened to Christian architecture in America, for example; tragic declines in quality are matched by the inability of people to even notice how bad it…
One Hundred Years of Obscurity
Eloquent and nuanced, never pompous, The Rector’s Daughter sets before us the inexhaustible mystery of persons and the ways they manage to live together.
Two Leftists Walk Into a Pandemic . . .
Not only did the worst consequences of lockdowns occur in the Global South, but lockdowns were pushed on the South from the North, through well-known strongarm tactics of neocolonialism that…
Politics Before History
It is an MSNBC segment with pseudo-historical gloss. Billed as a warning to American democracy, it is a simple yet pretentious work that will do nothing to solve the problems…
Marriage Will Kill You (And That’s Good)
You can either have a hard marriage or an unhealthy marriage. These are your options. And Key not only made me feel normal, but he made me want to live…
From Building Things to Building Institutions
What struck me most in reading the book was the role of risk-taking and personal leadership in an organization’s founding phase, and the necessity of consolidating and institutionalizing its vision,…
No Pawn in the Game: Fannie Lou Hamer, Mississippi, and the Struggle for Human Rights
Like Bob Dylan, Hamer’s life was marked by protest and songs of protest. Her protests, however, grew from her personal experience on the ground in Mississippi. Kate Clifford Larson’s Walk…
A Right to Imperfection
Lauck is unambiguous that he is engaged in a project of “civic retrieval,” to “remind us of our ideals and how many battles we have already won” and promote the…
Delighting in the Great Possessions
Still, Berry maintains, the particularly Amish ways of working, rejoicing, and relaxing work together to promote the “great possessions” enumerated by Kline in his essays. “The lives of fellow creatures…
The Smallest of Seeds: A Review of Fragile Neighborhoods
For Kaplan, when comparing two countries and asking why one has succeeded where the other has failed, what matters most is not national policies but “societal dynamics—the strength of the…
The Cozy Loneliness of Owl at Home
children are inchoately aware of the sadness of the world; it’s another of the human mysteries that they already have access to. Lobel’s genius is in choosing for his subject…
A Humanist Manifesto of Our Times: A Review of The Soul of Civility
In her introduction, Hudson calls The Soul of Civility “a humanistic manifesto.” And she’s right: the book is steeped in humanism, in more ways than one. First, Hudson underscores the…
Walking the Tightrope: A Review of Why Not Moderation?
Liberal values and institutions have failed, that we now require passionate, extreme activists to accomplish what is necessary to address these failings, and that these radical activists must mount campaigns…
Wisdom is Born of Wonder: A Review of Wonder Strikes
A good number of Christian scholars draw first and foremost on Thomas Aquinas for their accounts of beauty. Desmond, though he’s aware of and engages with the Thomistic tradition, has…
Happiness Fit for Humans: A Review of A Web of Our Own Making
Barba-Kay argues that we tend to resolve our cognitive dissonance by outsourcing all the choices that do matter and consoling ourselves with a plethora of choices that don't.
The Pantheon of Ancient Wisdom
The liberty and justice which republics are erected to safeguard requires, as Milton and the Founders knew, a moral, virtuous, and religious citizenry. Without this moral and virtuous spirit, the…
Voices From The Past: The Humanistic Letters of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More
Babbitt and More advocated the study of the humanities as a tool for the shaping of human souls toward virtue, helping confront what Babbitt characterized as the “civil war of…
We Were a Peculiar People Once
What comes out is a story of a small group of Reformed Canadian Baptists who are rural, hardworking, self-educated (largely by reading the Bible), and persistent in becoming holy, but…
Back to the New Jeffersonianism: A Review of Tyranny, Inc.
By now, no one should be shocked when a conservative says something unkind about the free market. Still, those unfamiliar with any right-wing tradition predating Reagan react to someone like…
Private Tyrants, Public Remedies: A Review of Sohrab Ahmari’s Tyranny, Inc.
The “freedom to walk away” from at-will employment seems, in many cases, to be the “freedom” to launch yourself into the unsteady winds of “joblessness and financial misery,” particularly if…
Taste and See: A Review of The Liberating Arts
Perhaps people defended the liberal arts to me, and I was too dense to hear, but I truly cannot remember anyone ever setting out a vision for the liberal arts
Toward Philosophy of Birth? A Review of Natality
For Banks, the glory of natality is not that it is a passage into the world for something or someone else, but that birth is a tool for our own…
Does Food Policy Matter? A Review of Small Farm Republic
Folks reading this site might, and there is a minority of the public that spends the time and money to grow produce or seek out good, local farms. But most…
