Edward T. Oakes

God: The Evidence. The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World By Patrick Glynn Prima. 224 pp. $22 In 1987 a famous political leader gave this diagnosis of the ills of his society: “Interest in the common good has slackened, callousness and skepticism now dominate the political . . . . Continue Reading »

How the Mind Works . By Steven Pinker. Norton. 660 pages, $29.95. The MIT linguist Noam Chomsky once drew an important distinction between problems and mysteries. A “problem” in Chomskian parlance is a question that is symbiotically fused to an ascertainable answer; it is an explanandum (a . . . . Continue Reading »

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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 from . . . . Continue Reading »

Modernity and Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna by jacques le rider translated by rosemary morris continuum, 380 pages, $34.95 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 . . . . 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 book, . . . . 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 religion”working . . . . Continue Reading »