Various

Waco Revisited Certainly Dean M. Kelley did not know when he wrote, and you did not know when you published, “Waco: A Massacre and its Aftermath,” (May), that the April 19, 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City would occur. The motivation behind the bombing is not yet . . . . Continue Reading »

Three Messengers for One God . By Roger Arnaldez. Translated by Gerald W. Schlabach, Mary Louise Gude, and David B. Burrell. University of Notre Dame Press. 219 pages, $29.95. This book was first published in French in 1983. Its author then held a chair in Islamics at the Sorbonne, and is one of . . . . Continue Reading »

Defending Distributism Rambling in the April Public Square the other day, minding my business and enjoying the view, I was suddenly set upon by a distantly familiar figure. It was Father Neuhaus, armed with nothing stronger than a back issue of the Chesterton Review and a bad dose of pique . . . . Continue Reading »

The Philosopher and the Provocateur: The Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky. Edited by Bernard Doering. University of Notre Dame Press. 118 pages, $25.95. For those of us who knew of the warm friendship that existed between Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky, it always seemed to be . . . . Continue Reading »

Cautions About Utopia I was much intrigued by the Patrick Glynn-Glenn Tinder exchange (“Time for Utopia?” March). As I read Mr. Glynn’s rather buoyant piece, I wondered whether the citizens of Sarajevo or Grozny (what is left of it-and them) would want to join the party. To be . . . . Continue Reading »

What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance. By Murray Friedman. Free Press. 423 pages, $24.95. The American Jewish congress reported in January that black and Jewish members of the U.S. Congress continue to share “a common core of interests and values,” but in . . . . Continue Reading »

Cult or Religion? I rarely find anything in the pages of your journal that is mean- spirited and ungenerous, but I’m afraid that cannot be said of Benjamin Wittes’ opinion piece, “The Scent of a Cult” (January). The burden of this piece is that there are stigmata by which . . . . Continue Reading »

A Nation Under Lawyers. By Mary Ann Glendon. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 331 pages, $24. In a witty and readable blend of anecdote and analysis-a portion of which appeared in First Things (“Legal Ethics-Worlds in Collision,” March 1994)-Mary Ann Glendon, the Learned Hand Professor of . . . . Continue Reading »

On Natural Law: Carl F. H. Henry & Critics In “Natural Law and a Nihilistic Culture” (January), Carl F. H. Henry argues that Thomistic natural law was unable to be a “cohesive social force.” Dr. Henry suggests that such a natural law has lost its appeal because evolution . . . . Continue Reading »

Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge. By Gerald Gunther. Knopf. 818 pp. $35 Professor Gerald Gunther sets out in this ambitious biography to depict both the inner life and judicial career of one of the cynosures of American law, Learned Hand. Alas, neither aspect of this immensely complex man-Felix . . . . Continue Reading »