Mark Bauerlein is Senior Editor at First Things and Professor of English at Emory University, where he has taught since earning his PhD in English at UCLA in 1989. For two years (2003-05) he served as Director of the Office of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. His books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (1997), The Pragmatic Mind: Explorations in the Psychology of Belief (1997), and The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (2008). His essays have appeared in PMLA, Partisan Review, Wilson Quarterly, Commentary, and New Criterion, and his commentaries and reviews in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Weekly Standard, The Guardian, Chronicle of Higher Education, and other national periodicals.
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Mark Bauerlein
“All my brothers went West and took up land, but I hung on to New England and I hung on to the old farm, not because the paint mine was on it, but because the old house was on it—and the graves.” That’s what Silas Lapham tells a Boston journalist in the opening scene of William Dean . . . . Continue Reading »
A research center whose subject is religion doesn’t take seriously the actual religion of its subjects. Continue Reading »
The old job of the dictionary to prescribe proper usage is over, say the lexicographers. How did we end up with these people in charge? Continue Reading »
James K. A. Smith's attack on the so-called “new alarmism” is unfair and uncivil. Continue Reading »
Everyone should have a copybook of maxims. So I tell my students at the start of freshman year. “You will meet priceless bits of wit and wisdom in the next eight semesters—write them down and tap them often.” They hear it as bad advice, though. Don’t they have enough to do already? But the . . . . Continue Reading »
The idiom of adolescence must go. Continue Reading »
I made my first confession last month, and it was easier than I expected. Not that I enjoyed recalling misdeeds from 2010, or that I wasn’t nervous when I stepped away from the parishioners in the middle of Mass that morning in St. Vincent Ferrer and entered the dark quiet of the confessional. But . . . . Continue Reading »
If anyone had said to me in 2005 that a decade later I would be saying prayers every night and working at a religious magazine during the day, I would have laughed. Continue Reading »
When a humanities department selects its materials because they reflect identity groups, it no longer functions as a humanities department.
Continue Reading »
While progressives are happy to recognize this or that identity, provided that doing so demonstrates their pluralistic instincts, in truth the divisions among these “aggrieved groups” only conduce to centralization. Continue Reading »
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