Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept by Brent Nongbri Yale, 288 pages, $35 In Before Religion, Brent Nongbri makes the case that once there was no religion and then modern Westerners invented it. This claim will strike many as both preposterous—

The institutions of Conservative Judaism—its synagogues, its summer camps, its youth organizations, its sisterhoods and men’s organizations, its seminaries, its rabbinate—will live on. Conservative Judaism as a movement, defined as a significant number of peo

Menachem Begin: A Life by Avi Shilon translated by Danielle Zilberberg and Yoram Sharett Yale, 584 pages, $40 The early decades of Israeli politics were dominated by Labor Zionists, mainly secular Ashkenazis (Jews from central and eastern Europe) whose goa

The Next Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation marks the end of the heroic generation. Writing as I am before the conclave, I can’t know who will be his successor, but I can foresee this: No longer will the chief pastor of the Catholic Church be a man who partic

This is the end—for me, the beginning of life.               —Dietrich Bonhoeffer               (from his last recorded words) Words to a prison friend, spoken in haste. Gestapo men had come to transfer him, Low Sunday, sixty-seven years ago Today. The next

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil Viking, 352 pages, $27.95 What goes into making a human mind? Two key elements, distinguished by Aristotle and Aquinas, are phantasms and concepts—a distinction entirely overlooked

The One Thomas More by Travis Curtright CUA, 231 pages, $64.95 Pius XII went from being a “righteous Gentile” to an anti-Semite. The “man for all seasons,” we’ve recently learned, is really a “hater.” He had an admirable start, as an urbane, witty reforme

Elect Voters At the outset of his thoughtful “The Evangelical Voter” (February), John G. West complains that the Romney campaign did not do more to cultivate Evangelical support while it did establish “outreach groups” for Catholics and Jews. But this was

Most often the story is told like this: There is some feature of the world that science is at a loss to explain. Christians rush to claim that this feature can only be explained by God. Science later produces probable non-theistic hypotheses, and the Christia

My fourth son’s Afghanistan deployment ceremony was in March. It has taken me a while to sort through my still incomplete thoughts. We missed the actual ceremony. An overnight Kansas City snowstorm dropped eight inches over the seventy-five mile route to W

When Dallas Willard’s magnum opus, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God, came out in 1998, I was a junior in high school. I can’t recall now what made me pick up a copy, but I knew soon thereafter that I’d found a book that would prove

Some twenty-three years ago, Ambassador Max Kampelman—former nuclear arms reduction negotiator with the Soviet Union and Counselor to the Department of State—decided that I needed a bit of diplomatic experience and invited me to be a public member of the U.S.

Two issues back, I spoke ill of a modern form of natural law theory that unsuccessfully attempts to translate an ancient tradition of moral reasoning into the incompatible language of secular reason. Because of an obscurity I allowed to slip into the fourth p

In 1986, Paul Simon took a look at the headlines full of pain and promise—stories about a boy in a bubble, bombs in baby carriages, ubiquitous cameras, and the ever-constant streams of information that engulf us—and wrote “Boy in the Bubble.” His lyrics, coup

The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom by Candida Moss HarperOne, 320 pages, $25.99 The tedium of repeated déjà vu in this sad little volume did at least send me back to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. It is as if a publish

We are not suffering from significant threats to economic freedom and capitalism. Instead, our political challenges mostly flow from the triumph of capitalism. And American conservatism is in trouble because it can’t acknowledge much less respond to this fact

In an episode from the first season of HBO’s series Girls, Hannah Horvath—played by the show’s creator and chief writer, Lena Dunham—is having sex with her occasional lover Adam when Adam does something odd. The description I am about to give will strike some

Last week in this space R. R. Reno set out to challenge the foundational beliefs of economic conservatives. They must, he said, come to grasp what the postmodern left already sees: that current economic and regulatory conditions are such that market forces an

We are becoming a society in which “choice” and self-defined identities trump once-common values and traditional beliefs. But contrary to the rhetoric of its defenders, this shift is not a simple advance for freedom. The privileging of “choice” above all else

R. R. Reno interviews Joseph Bottum on his article “The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline,” which appeared in the August/September 2008 edition.