J. Budziszewski

Jonathan Glover is stirred and troubled by the atrocities of the twentieth century, and wants to know why ordinary people can commit such terrible deeds and how to prevent them. The volume that he gives us is clear, interesting, full of agonized tenderness”and deep in a suffocating darkness. . . . . Continue Reading »

How Now Shall We Live?by charles colson and nancy pearceytyndale, 580 pages, $22.99 In 1993, when Washington Post writer Michael Weisskopf issued his notorious declaration that evangelicals are “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command,” conservative Protestant intellectuals were quick to . . . . Continue Reading »

In one sense this is a postmodern book. I don’t mean precisely that it propounds postmodernism, but rather that it is the kind of thing one would expect all books to be if postmodernism, despite itself, were true. For postmodernists, says Stanley Hauerwas, there is no such thing as an author . . . . Continue Reading »

Among activists who want to keep the “hetero” in “sexuality,” a consensus is developing that we need a “public philosophy,” a way to speak wisdom to the people. It is pretty much taken for granted that means something different from quoting Scripture to our fellow citizens; they don’t . . . . Continue Reading »

If you want to know why the United States is in a constitutional crisis, a good place to begin thinking about it is the series of outrages perpetrated by the 1992 Supreme Court decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld the outcome, though not the reasoning, of the infamous abortion . . . . Continue Reading »

For Fidelity: How Intimacy and Commitment Enrich Our Lives By Catherine M. Wallace Knopf. 177 pages, $22 For Fidelity is written for baby boomers who got married without knowing what they were doing and are now trying to explain the matrimonial ideal to their kids”kids who are, predictably, . . . . Continue Reading »

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Moral Judgement: Does the Abuse Excuse Threaten Our Legal System? By James Q. Wilson Basic Books. 134 pp. $18 James Q. Wilson has written an important book that is almost certain to be misunderstood in ways that conceal both its strengths and weaknesses. Though it brilliantly analyzes the effect of . . . . Continue Reading »

Why America Needs Religion: Secular Modernity and Its Discontents By Guenter Lewy Eerdmans, 160 pages, $18 In its scant 160 pages, this book has everything: riveting argument and thrilling mystery sandwiched between an incoherency and a paradox. Apparently nothing in its writing went according to . . . . Continue Reading »

My first conservative experience was in second grade, when I learned America the Beautiful. Verses one and two were merely baffling: I could not picture waves of grain, I could not believe that mountains were purple, and I could not form an association between liberty and pilgrim’s feet. But the . . . . Continue Reading »