Paul Tuns, Review: We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn edited by Ignat Solzhenitsyn (Notre Dame University Press, $38, 195 pages) The novelist and essayist Aleksander Solzhenitsyn is best-known as a Soviet dissident who spent time in communist concentration camps known as the gulag, of which he became their most famous chronicler. He is one of [...]
From the editor’s desk: We live in an age in which far too many people live lives of anguish because they lack meaning or are searching for it in the wrong places. In Be not Afraid of Life: In the Words of William James (Princeton, $24.99, 377 pages), John Kaag and Jonathan Van Belle say that seekers looking for meaning could do [...]
Paul Tuns Review: We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine by Jordan Peterson (Portfolio, $48, 544 pages) Former University of Toronto psychology professor and international darling of the Right Jordan Peterson’s fourth book, We Who Wrestle with God seems to have landed with a thud after two bestselling self-help books. The massive tome is an exegesis on Genesis, Exodus, and [...]
Let me start this month by introducing a new columnist, Victor Penney. His “Sporting Life” column (on page 8 this month) will look at the intersection of the world of sports and life/faith/family issues. It is a bit of an experiment but I think you might enjoy the lighter side of these serious issues (although it might not always be so light). [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture by Aaron Renn (Zondervan, $33.50, 247 pages) Aaron Renn is a fellow at American Reformer and former research fellow at the right-of-centre Manhattan Institute for Public Policy. You might be familiar with his work if you are regularly reader of First Things, his subscription newsletter or his Substack. His [...]
Almost immediately upon becoming the Democratic candidate for president, Kamala Harris started attacking her Republican opponents, Donald Trump and JD Vance, as weird. To emphasize the difference between the Democratic ticket’s ostensible normalness and the Republicans’ alleged weirdness, she picked the mostly non-descript Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a former high school football coach. No sooner had Harris delivered the broadside that “weird” [...]
Paul Tuns: There is a scene near the end of Billy Madison in which the title character played by Adam Sandler compares the Industrial Revolution to a puppy. Astonished at the vacuity of the answer, the principal who posed the question said: “What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be by Timothy P. Carney (Harper, $36.99, 343 pages) Invariably, it seems, Timothy Carney’s Family Unfriendly and Brad Wilcox’s Get Married are getting reviewed together. Not here. Both are deserving of their own treatment. The Wilcox review will appear next month. Carney, a Catholic father of [...]
All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism by Kevin Vallier (Oxford, $36, 305 pages) Version 1.0.0 Kevin Vallier has set out to reply to the integralist challenge to liberalism in his important 2023 volume, All the Kingdoms of the World. Vallier takes a dozen pages to define integralism but if it can be summarized in [...]
Paul Tuns The Vatican has once again muddied the waters of Catholic moral teaching with the release of Fiducia Supplicans – On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings, which was widely reported on the front pages of newspaper and the leads of many news broadcasts as the Roman Catholic Church officially sanctioning the blessing of same-sex unions. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of [...]
From the editor’s desk Two recent books, both published by Broadside Books, delve into the roots of today’s woke ideology to describe its origins and march “through the institutions” as Antonio Gramsci called for: The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and The Triumph of Identity Politics by Richard Hanania ($39.50, 270 pages) and America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical [...]
Paul Tuns: From the editor's desk Typical headlines on a local crime story read “Nebraska teen who used pills to end pregnancy gets 90 days in jail” (New York Times) and “Nebraska teen sent to jail over illegal abortion” (Rolling Stone). The first is misleading, the second an outright lie. Read the actual news story and one discovers that Celeste Burgess, 18, [...]
From the editor's desk: We have reported in this paper (and to their credit, the corporate media has done a good job covering, too) stories about Canadians being euthanized due to their social circumstances. Men and women, some middle-aged, are choosing to be killed by their doctor because they have trouble paying the rent, live in subsidized housing that does not accommodate [...]
From the editor’s desk: I have noted before that the greatest influence on my thought and writing is George F. Will, but he has not the only writers to guide my political thinking and career choice. Two others were the historian Paul Johnson and journalist Patrick J. Buchanan. In January, we lost Johnson who died at the age of 94 and Buchanan, [...]
From the editor’s desk Paul Tuns I read a lot and many of the books I read get reviewed in these pages, either in longer reviews or essays under my byline or as unsigned brief reviews. But there are many that I can’t get around to writing a review about and I want to let you know about several of them, and [...]