American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time. Joshua Mitchell. New York: Encounter Books, 2020. While the United States has enjoyed material prosperity, its…
Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation. Daniel Philpott. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Should war criminal be granted amnesty if their assent is…
“The private life is dead”—thus spoke Strelnikov, Pasternak’s infamous prophet of a new “manhood,” in Doctor Zhivago. The private life is supposed to entail a selfishness to…
The word Ideology is a neologism coined by Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, Comte de Tracy. Tracy was a materialist who argued that ideas are formed by physical…
Reformations. The Early Modern World, 1450-1650. Carlos M. N. Eire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. Reformation is a retelling of this epochal change in western…
The Reformation: A History. Diarmaid MacCulloch. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. The word “Protestant” was originally related to a specific occasion in 1529 when at the…
Christ and the Kingdoms of Men: Foundations of Political Life. David C. Innes. Phillipsburg, New Jersey: P&R Publishing, 2019. While the modern state is only around…
There seems to be some universal tendency to want to find the single underlying thing or principle that unites and explains everything. The person regarded as the…
Remi Brague’s observation about the historical essence of Rome shows that “Romanity” is not an ideology. It is, rather, a powerful hypothesis, to be tested by the…
Christopher Dawson has identified Six Ages in the history of the Church. In Dawson’s First Age, we witness a unique encounter of the “Barbarian” East with the…
Christopher Dawson’s Six Ages of the Church exhibit a cyclical pattern in historical events. Each Age exhibits an overall pattern of “rise and fall” during each cycle…
It was AD 1517. In China then, it was the twelfth year of Emperor Zhengde (1491-1521, reign 1505-1521) in the Ming dynasty. According to the traditional Chinese…
You call me Teacher and Lord--and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you…
The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel. Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Despite the contemporary trend to…
Religion in the Public Square: Sheen, King, Falwell. James M. Patterson. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Patrick Deneen’s provocative book, Why Liberalism Failed (Yale, 2018), argues…
