Edward T. Oakes

Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture By Jaroslav Pelikan Yale University Press, 267 pages, $25 In 1938 a famous Jewish novelist had to flee his native Austria after its annexation by Nazi Germany. Because of his poor health the journey was slow going, and in 1940 he and . . . . Continue Reading »

Moral philosophers are caught in a peculiar paradox these days. On the one hand, their field is flourishing: No longer intimidated by the logical positivists (who denied truth to moral assertions except as expressions of likes and dislikes), thinkers as diverse as Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, and . . . . Continue Reading »

The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics By Martha Nussbaum Princeton University Press 558 pages, $29.95 In 1986 Martha Nussbaum published The Fragility of Goodness , a study of the ethics of Plato, Aristotle, and the Greek tragedians that won immediate acclaim, not only . . . . Continue Reading »

To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet compared the Vienna of Freud’s time with Periclean Athens; but if it ever happens, I will understand why, especially after reading this remarkable book. Merely to cite the roster of artists, thinkers, and creators who at one time or another resided . . . . Continue Reading »

Love and Friendship by Allan Bloom Simon & Schuster, 590 pages, $25 “Christianity gave Eros poison to drink. He didn’t die, but became vice.” This is one of Nietzsche’s more famous obiter dicta , and Allan Bloom finds the occasion to cite it more than once in this, his last . . . . Continue Reading »

Once upon a time, in what must now seem like the Stone Age—that is, before the invention of the personal computer—most graduate students would carefully copy out and assemble their research data on 3-by-5 index cards before writing up, in dissertation form, the results of their painstaking . . . . Continue Reading »

No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology by David F. Wells Eerdmans, 318 pages, $24 .99 One of the common oddities of our time is the invocation of statistics to provide comfort and consolation to the religious believer. To be sure, numbers offer an almost irresistible . . . . Continue Reading »

Jewish Social Ethics by David Novak Oxford University Press, 252 pages, $39.95 The renowned scholar of Talmudic Judaism, Jacob Neusner, once characterized the divergence between first-century Judaism and nascent Christianity as fundamentally a divergence of locale. That is, each . . . . Continue Reading »

Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition” An Essay by Charles Taylor With Commentary by Amy Gutmann (Editor), Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, and Susan Wolf Princeton University Press, 112 pages, $14.95 Last summer a man was arrested in Germany for walking down the . . . . Continue Reading »

Wittgenstein on Ethics and Religious Belief by Cyril Barrett, S.J. Blackwell, 285 pages, $44.95 As is well-known, teachers are often in the habit of giving pop quizzes, and I indulge the habit here. Quick, who said the following? “Ordinary language . . . is the only language in which we can . . . . Continue Reading »