Category: Reviews (Books)
Finitude for the Faithful
Oliver Burkeman. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. 288 pp, $27.00. St. Augustine taught that the fundamental condition of human beings is ignorance and difficulty. This truth can seem outdated in the...
The Book of Revelation is for the Church
Timothy Beal. The Book of Revelation: A Biography. Lives of Great Religious Books. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. $26.95, 288 pp. First things first: Let me state my disagreement with two premises of Timothy Beal’s “biography” of the Book of...
The American Style in Traditionalist Parenting
Paula S. Fass. The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. $19.95, 352 pp. Perhaps more than anything else, Paula S. Fass’s learned and engaging...
Boredom in a World Without Windows
James Dankert and John D. Eastwood. Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020. $27.95, 282 pp. In a study where participants were instructed to sit in a room with nothing to do for only...
Atheist Nones and the Problem of Soviet Atheism
Victoria Smolkin. A Sacred Space is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. $32.95, 360 pp. It is perhaps too easily forgotten that Soviet Communism began as a vibrant ideology, full of optimism for the...
The Prophet of Re-Alignment: Reading Michael Lind in the Ruins of the Old Republic
It has become a tired cliché to lament the polarization of American politics, yet after a year that witnessed a post-election assault on the US Capitol, and in which even epidemiology became a partisan issue, few would contest the truth...
Dragons in the Deep Places
Ross Douthat’s new book, a memoir of his experience with chronic illness, is far more than that simple description would suggest. It recounts, in excruciating detail, his journey with Lyme disease, which began in 2015. It tells of the pain...
Why We Are Restless
Ben and Jenna Storey met while doing their doctorates at the University of Chicago. Ben is the Jane Gage Hipp Professor of Politics and International Affairs, and Director of the Tocqueville Program at Furman University. Jenna is Assistant Professor of...
Book Review: Black Fundamentalists by Daniel Bare
Daniel Bare. Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era. New York: New York University Press, 2021. 272 pp, $30. I was born and raised in the Pentecostal church, steeped and simmered in the rhythms of the AOG...
Market Apocalypse
Rodney Clapp. Naming Neo-Liberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2021. 250 pp, $24.00 In recent years liberalism has been on the ropes. Not the liberalism of the Democratic Party, where the L-word means “left of center.” Liberalism...