Antoine Campagnon, translated by Catherine Porter (Belknap Press, $29.95, 168 pages) A Summer with Pascal is a light, breezy introduction by Antoine Campagnon to one of the most important Christian apologists, Blaise Pascal. Campagnon, who has written about other French writers (Montaigne, Proust) turns his eye to the 17th century writer who famously gave us Pascal’s Wager, which posits that it is [...]
Oswald Clark: American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified our Nation – and Could Again by Yuval Levin (Basic Books, $41, 341 pages) For the last century, the American Left has been frustrated by the U.S. Constitution’s limits on government because, they claimed, it prevented necessary political action to remedy all of life’s ills. In recent decades, some on the American Right have likewise [...]
Pity for Evil: Suffrage, Abortion, and Women’s Empowerment in Reconstruction America Monica Klem and Madeleine McDowell (Encounter, $45.99. 328 pages) In Pity for Evil, historians Monica Klem and Madeleine McDowell, provide a well-documented, scholarly but accessible account of how most people, including feminists, viewed abortion in post-Civil War United States. Using the speeches of suffragists and the writings in publications of the [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements It’s been a rough four years. Everybody knows that. And though their struggles don’t register much with the public, journalists have arguably been having a rough 20 years, probably more. They’d ask for your sympathy but know they’re not likely to get it, though they can write books like Nellie Bowles’ Morning After [...]
The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power and People Paul Seabright (Princeton University Press, $44, 485 pages) Paul Seabright, an economist at the Toulouse School of Economics, ambitiously applies not only economics but anthropology, history, philosophy, political science, psychology, science, and sociology, to understand how the world’s religions, which he calls platforms -- “structures that bring individuals together in mutually [...]
Paul Tuns: Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization by Brad Wilcox (Broadside Books, $39.50, 293 pages) Sociologist Brad Wilcox, director of the National Family Project at the University of Virginia and a fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, promises a lot – or at least argues that marriage promises a lot – in [...]
Dictionary of Fine Distinctions: Nuances, Niceties, and Subtle Shades of Meaning Eli Burnstein (Union Square & Co, $26, 201 pages) Dictionary of Fine Distinctions is a charming little book that uses pithy descriptions and cute illustrations to delineate the meaning of words that are often confused for one another. Most of these clarifying notes are done so in easily to digest one [...]
Brave New Words: How AI will Re/volutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing) Salman Khan (Viking, $39.99, 237 pages) Salman Khan is the founder of the Khan Academy, a non-profit that provides free online educational instruction for all ages. His Khan Academy videos have been viewed billions of times by more than 150 million users as he has dedicated his life [...]
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 [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements There was a point, nearly a quarter century ago, when the war to protect children online was probably lost. Writing about the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in his new book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Jonathan Haidt notes that the [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements Two years ago at a Munk Debate about public trust in mainstream media, journalist Matt Taibbi was repeatedly smeared by his opponent, essayist Malcolm Gladwell, with a charge that he harboured an “affection” for (as Taibbi recalled) “Jim Crow, the ‘50s, and the ‘golden moment’ when media was ‘dominated by white men’.” It [...]
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, Review: Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (And the Truth About Residential Schools) edited by C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan with foreword by Conrad Black (True North and Dorchester Books, $21.99 343 pages) In May 2021, the news broke that the remains of 221 missing children were discovered in an unmarked, mass grave in an apple orchard at a residential [...]
Interim Staff: Roe Canada: The True North in a Post-Roe World was released Jan. 12 on Vimeo. Produced and directed by Kevin Dunn of Dunn Media and Entertainment, the 80-minute documentary interviews Canadian and U.S. pro-life activists, academics, politicians, and even a retired abortionist, to examine whether Canada could have its own post-Roe moment of turning the legal and political tide of [...]
Meaning of Life by David L. Bahnsen (Post Hill Press, $29, 205 pages) Paul Tuns, Review: David Bahnsen is the founder and Chief Investment Officer of a wealth management company and a committed Christian, and he brings a wealth of knowledge from both perspectives to Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life, a brief and highly readable book about the importance of work. Bahnsen condemns [...]