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Friendship and Its Discontents

Samuel Johnson believed that Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy made the finest bedside reading, in the morning as well as the evening, of any book he knew (and he knew a lot of them). C. S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy, reflecting upon books that are good to read while eating—which . . . . Continue Reading »

Scripture for the Gender-Correct

The Women’s Bible Commentary edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe Westminster/John Knox Press, 396 pages, $20Like most children of my era who got a religious education, I grew up on Bible stories. The stories of the women in the Bible—rare as pearls of great price among the . . . . Continue Reading »

The Limits of Populism

Jeffrey Bell has been an aid to both Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, a candidate for the Senate, and fellow at a number of different institutes. He is currently president of Lehrman Bell Mueller Cannon, Inc., an economic and political forecasting firm in northern Virginia. This book, clearly based in . . . . Continue Reading »

The Perils of Historical Positivism

Of the many obstacles that the modern world has thrown up in front of Judaism and Christianity, certainly one of the most damaging would be the historical-critical method. This form of intellectual inquiry has transformed radically the manner in which modern persons construe the origins of Scripture . . . . Continue Reading »

The Cultural Middle Ground

What Joan Shelley Rubin aims to do in The Making of Middlebrow Culture is “redress the disregard and oversimplification of middlebrow culture in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s by illuminating the values and attitudes that shaped some of its major expressions.” Thus she lets us know at . . . . Continue Reading »

The Death of the Goddess

It has been thousands of years since goddesses have been so much on people’s minds, at least in the West. What has brought them back with a vengeance (often literally so) is the feminist movement. “Earth-centered, immanent, and immediate, the Goddess of modern neopaganism serves as a refuge . . . . Continue Reading »

The New Class Reconsidered

Roughly twenty years ago social scientists and intellectuals discovered the existence of a “new” class. Unlike the Marxist division of the world into bourgeoisie and proletariat—a division defined by each class’s relationship to production—new class theory stressed control over the . . . . Continue Reading »

The Unfathomable Mystery of Autism

Of all the many states of mind, disorders, and aberrations of man, autism is certainly among the most mysterious. Autistic people give one an uncanny feeling. They provide a vivid reminder that no person can ever fully fathom the mystery of another. Autistic people spend a good part of their energy . . . . Continue Reading »

Getting the Name Right

It is an index of the success of this volume that one could read it with profit even if one were not very interested in the issue that provoked it, the gender-feminist critique of Trinitarian language. That is to say, the authors, with very few exceptions, do not rely on denunciation and defensive . . . . Continue Reading »

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