R. R. Reno

The intemperate, even violent tone in recent criticisms of faith is quite striking. Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens: They seem an agitated crew, quick to caricature, quick to denounce, quick to slash away at what they take to be the delusions and conceits of faith. And the phenomenon is not strictly . . . . Continue Reading »

In his meditation on the sources of human community, “ Death and Politics ,” Jody Bottum makes a case for the foundational importance of death, mourning, and the grave. The dark universality of grief, he argues, glues us together. “We create true communities,” Bottum writes, . . . . Continue Reading »

Books are like minerals, buried and waiting to be found. They lie in dusty corners of used books shops or in the virtual nooks and crannies of online megastores or in remote library stacks¯or in unread piles at home. Not all are precious. In fact, most are more like coal than gold: useful in a . . . . Continue Reading »

I’ve often wondered about the strangely verbose and self-important irrelevance of contemporary universities. Think about it. In 1968 the universities were at the center of political and social ferment. Students were in the streets. Professors such as C. Wright Mills, Norman O. Brown, and . . . . Continue Reading »

Poor Omaha. I’ve been noticing my adopted hometown cropping up more and more frequently as shorthand. Fargo is “out there” (or, more accurately, “up there”) as a place of unimaginable isolation. Buffalo represents postindustrial irrelevance made all the more poignant by the . . . . Continue Reading »

In recent days students and faculty activists has kicked up a lot of dust at the venerable Sapienzia University in Rome which was founded in 1303 by Pope Boniface VIII. Benedict had been invited to give an address to the university. The protestors, well, protested. Stated reason: accusations that . . . . Continue Reading »

A careful reader wrote to complain. My recent web essay on General Education at Harvard cited the following from the Final Report: “The aim of liberal education is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient . . . . Continue Reading »

A few years ago, the academic mandarins in Cambridge embarked on a round of curricular revision. This does not surprise. The no-there-there Core developed in the 1960s was never coherent. It endorsed the suspect “teaching ways of thinking” approach to education that basically divided up . . . . Continue Reading »

Well, the Clinton express seems to have suffered a delay in Iowa. Barack Obama is an interesting political phenomenon. His inter-racial identity makes him a symbolic blank screen onto which Americans can project their perennial post-cultural fantasies. The early Republic was filled with claims that . . . . Continue Reading »

In America we tend to have a division of labor. The university professors are dry and dusty academics. Jim Lehrer brings them on to his show , and they pull their beards and make well-considered comments about Afghan or Kurdish or Shi’ite history and its possible relevance to present affairs. . . . . Continue Reading »