This business of signing the inside covers of books is both charming and macabre. People die; books live forever. Scrawling on a flyleaf is a down payment on immortality. Think of me, it says. Memento mori. Continue Reading »
Take a stand against the electrification of reading and consider the following, in properly bound form, as gifts for those on your Christmas—not “Holiday”—list: Continue Reading »
Reading classics is humbling. Myopia becomes impossible. Millennia of human history unfold with the pages of books—and with an authenticity that no textbook or documentary can mimic. Continue Reading »
We suffer nowadays from a surfeit of literary anniversaries. One blurs into the next until we begin to long for a moratorium. And yet even so, a few such occasions are welcome. The 150th anniversary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland yielded a splendid array of exhibitions, lectures, and books, . . . . Continue Reading »
We asked some of our writers to contribute a paragraph about the most memorable books they read this year.Michael LewisThere is a special chagrin when we belatedly discover the greatness of some author we have been perversely avoiding for decades—in my case, Dostoevsky and Jane Austen. But there . . . . Continue Reading »
It’s been a good reading year and I highly recommend the following to the readers on your Christmas (not “holiday”) shopping list:God or Nothing, by Cardinal Robert Sarah (Ignatius Press): It was the book being discussed at Synod-2015 and with good reason, for this interview-style . . . . Continue Reading »
I was brought up in a culture that made no special place for the “intellectual” as a distinct human type, and which regarded learning in the same way as any other hobby: harmless and excusable, so long as you kept quiet about it. The person who studied the classics at home, who wrote poetry . . . . Continue Reading »
To say, as people do from time to time, that science is the only source of meaning available to human beings is to consign large swaths of everyday experience to insignificance. (And to offer an open goal to any quick-footed apologist for religion who may be passing.) The implication of the maximal . . . . Continue Reading »
I am reading The Blondelian Synthesis: A Study of the Influence of German Philosophical Sources on the Formation of Blondel's Method and Thought by John McNeil. It's a really fine, detailed scholarly study of the influence of Spinoza, Kant, Schelling and Hegel on Blondel. I was enjoying it so much I googled John McNeil to find out if he wrote anything else! Continue Reading »
Over Labor Day weekend I sat down with two books by Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History and Christian Human Rights. Both recount the emergence of human rights as a distinctive moral and political idea in the twentieth century.
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