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Book Reviews

Kids and technology

The Kids Are Not All Right: A Review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation

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Catholic Church

A Review of True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church, by Francis X. Maier

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Maier’s love for the Church comes through in this book and is why others who love the Church will want to read it. Perhaps we can hope for a sequel in which we will get to hear more of Maier in his own words. 
pope

In the Courts of Three Popes: An Insider’s Insight

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Faithfully living what we claim to believe as Catholic Christians shapes the future. And the fact is, we can no longer afford a sclerotic Church, a comfortable Church, a get-along Church. We need to be a confessing Church, not just in our diocesan structures, but in the pews and family homes of every parish.
Lincoln memorial

The Real Mover of “the Civic Bargain”: A Review of Manville and Ober

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Self-interest in a democracy is not necessarily an evil. It only becomes an evil when democratic government grows so intrusive in ordinary life that self-interest can only be interpreted as a kind of dissent from a general—but now all-pervasive—good.
oath

Disintegrating Conscience in a Fragmented Age 

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Although one might find oneself disagreeing with Smith, as I have on occasion, one will be better for it. And I can say that with a clear conscience.  
chastity

How to Think about Chastity

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Chastity is a way of being more holistically directed toward our happiness regardless of the desires and attractions we experience.
Catholic integralism

All the Kingdoms of the World

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Vallier has done a valuable service by patiently pointing out all the moral and political problems entailed by any attempt to establish integralism. The most important problem with integralism, however, is less in its conception of the state than in its conception of the Church.
flying birds at sunset

Impossible but True? A Review of They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos Eire

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Eire’s absorbing and impeccably researched book invites us to at least ponder that alternative balancing act while reminding us of historian Ethan Shagan’s apposite observation that “every era is credulous, but they are credulous in different ways.”
gender confusion

What’s at Stake in Sexual Difference? A Review of Trouble with Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions by Alex Byrne

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Until everyone, including Byrne, sees that the point of gender ideology is to change our understanding of human being, our arguments and clarifications will ultimately be impotent.
Aristotle

Why Liberalism Needs Piety

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According to Nichols, Aristotelian human flourishing requires piety,  the acknowledgment that humans are akin to the divine but cannot be divine themselves. The task of the political community is to support the life of piety.
gender dysphoric child

It’s “Time to Think” about the Irreversible Damage of Shoddy Sciences: A Review of Hannah Barnes

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Barnes repeatedly emphasizes the many parents or clinic employees who had tried to sound the alarm but whose warnings were ignored by clinic authorities. But Barnes is loath to draw any firm conclusions from these stories. Her cautious wording and frequent qualifiers undermine some of the book’s most important points and questions. 
sparks and fire

China’s Dissident Historians

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We have become accustomed to the darkness of today’s China. But Johnson shows us flickering sparks of light, hidden on hard drives and thumbnails, that tomorrow may become blazing fires.  
old cracked wall and cross

Losing Our Religion­ and the Fracturing of American Evangelicalism

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Moore’s writing is something of a memoir and a testimony, in good evangelical fashion, taking us back to the heartfelt and fervent faith of his youth and through what can only be described as a painful and poignant break-up with the religious tradition that nurtured and raised him.
history

Journeys of the Mind: Peter Brown and the Excitement of History

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Many of us find it difficult to be forced to revise our assumptions and change our views, but for Brown, it seems to be one of the great joys in life.
faith and fiction

Jon Fosse’s Septology and Faith in Fiction

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The phenomenon now arising around Fosse’s work, crowned by his widely honored and beloved Septology, supports the thought that the novelistic tradition’s centuries of exploring this tension have not yet come to an end. Fictionists of faith in the twenty-first century—far from being marginalized, suppressed, or silenced—face a wider horizon for hope and for endeavor than many may have ever dreamed of seeing. What remains to be seen is what writers will choose to do with such a vista of freedom.
Max Weber, Germany

The Use and Abuse of Max Weber

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Surely one way of fending off the Right, a way that does not involve waiting for a charismatic savior, is to reject policies that are destroying American cities. There is not an iota of criticism of such tendencies of the contemporary Left in Brown’s book; yet she would like to assure us that the next leftist charismatic leader will be animated by an ethic of responsibility.
Vatican

Papal Power and the Obedience of the Faithful

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While a book like John Rist’s is diminished by its flaws, it’s not entirely unfair about our current moment.
Divided America

Conservatism and Identity Politics: A Review of George Hawley’s Conservatism in a Divided America

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This book illuminates the path the modern conservative movement has taken heretofore and therefore will be an important aid to conservatism’s ongoing quest for self-definition.
The Iliad

A New Iliad

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The first word of Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Iliad signals that this is not quite the Homer we’re used to. You may well ask whether anyone today can be used to an epic, conventionally attributed to a blind bard named Homer, that was composed some 2,750 years ago in a stylized form of Greek that no one spoke natively. But surprisingly, there have been more than a dozen translations into English in the past thirty-five years alone.
communal cafe

Art and Politics in Roger Scruton’s Conservative Philosophy

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Hörcher adeptly elucidates how Scruton’s belief in the intertwining of aesthetics, morality, and politics stands as a bulwark against the often fragmented worldview of today’s modern thinkers.
art

The Art of Virtue and the Virtue of Art

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By co-creating with God, we imitate his goodness, participate in his governance, and bring more of creation into the divine unity.
Liberal as an adjective

“Liberal” as an Adjective: The Politics of Michael Walzer

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The liberal tradition is an ongoing conversation in which participants speak in a wide range of accents, reflecting the various “nouns” to which speakers are committed: liberal individualists and liberal communitarians, liberal nationalists and liberal internationalists, liberal believers and liberal skeptics, liberal socialists and—yes—liberal free marketeers.
AI/ GPT3

What Makes Us Human?

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At the moment, large language models are nothing like us, however easy it is for us to anthropomorphize their outputs. But as AIs develop, it will become increasingly necessary to ask: How much do we want them to become like us? Answering that question will certainly require human wisdom.
Expressive individualism

In Defense of Individuality: A Friendly Critique of Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

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In his impressive 2020 book, Carl Trueman rightly exhorts readers to solidify their commitments to God and moral truth in a world of “expressive individualism.” But by reading human nature through the Marxist-Hegelian lens of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, he undermines the true individualism at the heart of the ethics that he wants to defend.
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