Edward T. Oakes

In the course of the lectures that later became The Idea of a University , John Henry Newman neatly de­ scribed the favorite rhetorical trick of secular intellectuals: “They persuade the world of what is false,” he said, “by urging upon it what is true.” Newman wrote these . . . . Continue Reading »

Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper By Bryan Magee Modern Library. 512 pp. $13.95 paper Philosophers, it would seem, are born, not made. At least that is the impression one gets from reading some of their childhood reminiscences. Stephen . . . . Continue Reading »

Leaving aside genuine scientific discoveries such as relativity and the helical structure of the genetic molecule DNA, or the truly original innovations in linguistics from Noam Chomsky, the twentieth century has, in retrospect, shown itself to be singularly poor in intellectual creativity. Even a . . . . Continue Reading »

Edward T. Oakes Copyright (c) 1999 First Things 98 (December 1999): 17-24. When debate about an artist’s merit no longer seems to have any point, one is left either with an icon of culture, too sacred to enjoy, or with a target of satire, brought down to our more humdrum level by a vaudeville . . . . Continue Reading »

As a way of dividing up history into discrete, manageable wholes, the habit of clustering events according to centuries is probably no more (or less) superficial than any other. And surely it must be safer and more reliable than bandying about such descriptive monikers as “the Age of Faith,” . . . . Continue Reading »

I finished this book with only one lingering question: Why, having alerted his readers so effectively to the dangers of natural law in Jewish theology and having shown, nonetheless, its absolute indispensability, did the author not then go back, in true Thomist fashion, and answer his prior . . . . Continue Reading »

Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend Edited by Frederick Crews Viking, 301 pages, $24.95 In his book Modern Essays , Cambridge University’s distinguished literary critic Sir Frank Kermode called book reviewing”at least when honestly done and not just as an adjunct to the . . . . Continue Reading »

No doctrine inside the precincts of the Christian Church is received with greater reserve and hesitation, even to the point of outright denial, than the doctrine of original sin. Of course in a secular culture like ours, any number of Christian doctrines will be disputed by outsiders, from the . . . . Continue Reading »

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 . . . . 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 . . . . Continue Reading »