The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised by James Pethokoukis (Center Street, $37, 327 pages) Paul Tuns, Review: James Pethokoukis, a policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, has written a call-to-arms for conservatives and policymakers to embrace almost limitless innovation to create the economic growth that will deliver the human flourishing that techno-optimists have been predicting for [...]
Amazing Grace: A Cultural History of the Beloved Hymn James Walvin (University of California Press, $30, 197 pages) The origin story of the hymn “Amazing Grace” is well-known: John Newton, the captain of a 18th century English slave ship, had a dramatic conversion after surviving a story which led him to become an abolitionist and pastor, with “Amazing Grace” written as a [...]
The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a World Without Us Adam Kirsch (Columbia Global Reports, $16, 99 pages) Adam Kirsch’s The Revolt Against Humanity is the best short introduction to the posthuman world imagined by futurists fascinated by the imagined combining of technology and humanity in what is called the singularity. He briefly lays out the literary, philosophic, and scientific literature that imagined [...]
Oswald Clark Where Have All the Democrats Gone: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira (Holt, $38.99, 325 pages) More than two decades ago, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority, predicting demographic changes would result in presidential and congressional victories for the Democrats for the foreseeable future. [...]
Michael Taube: Christmas is a wonderful time of year. Families enjoy time together. Music and carols are heard in the background. The tree is trimmed. Presents are wrapped. The wreath is on the door. Lights flicker either inside or outside the house - or, in some cases, both. Who knows? You may even be called upon to solve a good Christmas mystery [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell, 224 pages, (Basic Books, $35, 224 pages) Economist and writer Thomas Sowell’s latest book, Social Justice Fallacies, examines the incorrect assumption that different outcomes for visible minorities or women are prime facie evidence of unjust discrimination. Sowell says the notion that absent racism or sexism all groups would perform identically is fundamentally flawed. Over [...]
The Political Economy of Distributism: Property, Liberty, and the Common Good Alexander William Salter (Catholic University of America Press, $32.95 pb, $97.95 hc, 238 pages) Distributism, popularized at the beginning of the 20th century by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, is an economic system that draws upon Catholic social teaching and emphasizes a human dimension to the economic sphere, although its advocates [...]
Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements Rick McGinnis: I have a theory that we only started thinking seriously about generations after World War II when – in Western countries at least – it became rarer for multiple generations to inhabit the same household. Instead of being divided roughly into “young” and “old” we became obsessed with the small differences between discrete [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind by Melissa S. Kearney (University of Chicago Press, $32.50, 225 pages) For the second time in two years, a long-time argument made by conservatives became mainstream following the publication of a book that digs deep into the data about a social phenomenon that had previously been both controversial [...]
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 [...]
Life to the Full: True Stories that Reveal the Dignity of Every Human Life Edited by Abby Johnson and Tyler Rowley (Ignatius Press, $16.95 pb or ebook, 178 pages) Life to the Full is a collection of more than 20 first-person accounts by women and doctors as they confront the reality of abortion. Many of the stories are chilling and this is [...]
Oswald Clark, Review: Tyranny Inc. by Sohrab Ahmari (Forum Books, $37.99, 252 pages) There is much material to support the promising subtitle of Sohrab Ahmari’s new book, Tyranny Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty and What to Do About It but Ahmari focuses completely on aspect of supposedly tyrannical companies: their treatment of employees. Readers who know Ahmari as a critic of [...]
The Saint Mary’s Book of Christian Verse Chosen and introduced by Edward Short (Gracewing, $35, 350 pages) The poet Dana Gioia writes in his introduction to Edward Short’s anthology, “this brief and inadequate survey is offered to demonstrate the powerful continuity of Christian poetry in English” as “our literary canon is suffused with religious consciousness, which has expressed itself in ways beyond [...]
Twelve Great Books: Going Deeper into Classic Literature Joseph Pearce (Ignatius Press, $17.95, 226 pages) Joseph Pearce, a well-known literary critic and biographer of Christian novelists, in Twelve Great Books highlights great books as part of our intellectual and spiritual inheritance – in short, part of our civilization. We read these books, says Pearce, to “find ourselves in the presence of Great [...]
The Art of Being Human Michael S. Rose (Angelico Press, $17.95, 146 pages) Michael S. Rose’s The Art of Being Human: What ‘Old Books’ Can Tell Us (and Warn Us) About Living in the 21st Century examines 18 books and one (George Orwell) essay that serve as cautionary tales on science, transhumanism, and totalitarianism. The stories range from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and [...]