J. Budziszewski

(with apologies to John Bunyan) I dreamed that when Amoralist saw that he could neither make Pilgrim turn back by the blows of his hammer, nor pierce him with his darts, he left him for a time. And though Pilgrim had been weakened in the battle, he resumed the path, making such time as he could. He . . . . Continue Reading »

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 »

My nomination for the twentieth“century “Must Read” list is not a good book, but a revealingly bad one. When I first began teaching political theory and my students asked about a mysterious document called the “Humanist Manifesto,” I thought I had stumbled across the . . . . Continue Reading »

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 call his bluff. Yet only a year later, when historian Mark Noll, himself a . . . . 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 »