To Read Without Pleasure is Stupid: On the Novels of John Williams
By E. J. Hutchinson As we (or, at least, I) eagerly anticipate reading Charles J. Shields’ recently published The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel, the first biography of John Williams, it seems a propitious time to provide a brief...
The Real Place for Conflict: On Keeping Controversy Close to Home
By Justin Frank Social media gives unprecedented opportunities to know about and engage in controversy. Many of these controversies are rooted in places far from us; involve people we’ve never met (and will likely never know); and grow out of...
Book Review: The Classical Revolution by John Borstlap
By Jeremiah Lawson In a time when the President has openly questioned what the United States get from being in NATO and fears that Russian and Chinese influence threaten the stability of the Atlantic American-European order, now would not seem...
A Christian Ethic of Sex in a Pornographic Age
By Joshua Heavin In the late fourth and early fifth centuries, the church had no shortage of theological controversies and societal crises at hand. Yet several prominent theologians nonetheless devoted significant time to writing about marriage and human sexuality. St....
Book Review: Music as an Art by Roger Scruton
By Jeremiah Lawson As a written practice, Western music goes back at least a thousand years. Over the centuries music has been made in the service of churches and courts, and from roughly the eighth through the thirteenth centuries was...
Liberalism’s Tax on the Unborn
By Miles Smith In 1781 Thomas Jefferson left the office of governor of Virginia and wrote the sole book-length work attributed to him. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson reflected on what he knew was the great moral...
On Theological Education and the Church’s Health
By Joshua Heavin In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Alan Jacobs described the realization that compelled him to write The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis: “…what was so...
The Latin and Reformed Imagination
By Felipe Vogel “The Reformation … was more a song or a symphony than a system, more lyric than lecture,” claims Peter Matheson in The Imaginative World of the Reformation. Yet lectures and systems are likely what comes to mind...
John Milbank: A Guide for the Perplexed
By Peter J. Leithart I. Theology As Master Discourse. I first met John Milbank, my doctoral supervisor, at a welcome event for new graduate students sponsored by the Divinity School of the University of Cambridge. During the meeting, each faculty member...
Book Review: Philosophy and the Christian
By Nathan L. Cartagena In high school, I rarely took classes with other Christians. This wasn’t intentional. It was the outcome of taking “advanced courses” in a school with “advanced students” who had rejected Christianity by middle school. So though I...