Fear and Deconstruction
In Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inaugural speech, he told the American people that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The country was enduring a major economic crisis and would soon face the threat of fascism encircling the...
The Third Reformer
Bruce Gordon. Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet. New Haven: Yale, 2021. xxii + 349 pp, $32.50. The contemporary of Martin Luther and predecessor of Jean Calvin within the Reformed family of churches, Ulrich Zwingli is sometimes described as “the third reformer.”...
When the Ad Replaced the Icon
Ellen Wayland-Smith. The Angel in the Marketplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 288pp, $30. Throughout the 2010s the signs of a new holy month became undeniable. Each June seemed to mark an exponential increase in rainbow flags. Early summer...
Who’s Going to Clean the Toilets in Your Utopia? Anna Neima’s The Utopians
Anna Neima. The Utopians: Six Attempts to Build the Perfect Society. London: Picador, 2021. 320pp, $39.95. “I saw a horse collapse in the street: the driver was knocked aside by the starving people, who rushed to cut chunks from the...
Who is This New Man?
The rubber band of our American common life is stretched to breaking.[1] Our connections are tenuous, our politics polarizing, and our sense of civic housekeeping — where we provide for others for the common good — seems like a foreign...
Calvinism and Liberty
If you had to summarize Calvin’s teaching on resisting tyrants it would be: don’t. Even as his Protestant compatriots, the Huguenots, faced persecution and he fled France to Geneva, Calvin was firmly on the side of maintaining political order. He...
Learning to See with Norman Wirzba
Soon after we moved to Australia, my family hiked in a temperate rainforest in the Yarra Ranges, an hour-and-a-half from our house. Southern Victoria is home to several of these rainforests. They challenge my prior knowledge of rainforests as places...
Hobbits and Empire: Geography and the Life of Nations in Tolkien’s Writings
As we journey through J.R.R. Tolkien’s world of Middle-earth, we find a remarkable variety of distinctive landscapes, from the rural towns of the Shire, to the abandoned halls of Moria, the Elvish tree-city of Lothlórien, the Forest of Drúadan, the...
The Transcendentalists and Their World
Robert A. Gross is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. His widely regarded book, The Minutemen and Their World won the Bancroft Prize. The following interview revolves around...
The Case for the Christian Liberal Arts in a Polarized, Fractious Age
Physicist Leonard Mlodinow opens his entertaining book The Drunkard’s Walk with the story of a lottery winner whose lucky ticket ended with the number 48.[1] However, according to the contestant, luck had nothing to do with it. Claiming clairvoyance, they dreamt the...