“I doubt if we ever come back home,” says Helen, who until recently taught English to second- and third-graders in Mykolaiv, a southern Ukrainian city of several hundred thousand. “Putin wants Mykolaiv,” Helen says. A large majority of Mykolaiv residents speak Russian at home. The . . . . Continue Reading »
Italy, once the country of large families with many children, is today a country of the elderly. Twenty-three percent of the Italian population is over the age of sixty-five, and the mean age of Italian citizens is above forty-four. At the end of the nineteenth century, the fertility rate per woman . . . . Continue Reading »
The multiverse is upon us! Everywhere you turn in popular culture these days, it seems like the world is not enough: From hit TV shows to blockbuster films, plot lines run through multiple parallel realities, a cosmic cornucopia that invites us to feast on “what-ifs” and “if-thens.” . . . . Continue Reading »
Whether we describe our current condition in terms of postmodernism, neoliberalism, or globalization, the core problem is the loosening of traditional social bonds and institutions. The impact of social media and the transformation of the public sphere by the internet have surely accelerated this . . . . Continue Reading »
The Watergate scandal began in 1972 with a burglary of the Democratic Party’s headquarters and ended with the resignation of Richard Nixon two years later. Almost as soon as Nixon had left Washington, the politicians, lawyers, and journalists who had rallied to oust him began recording for . . . . Continue Reading »
Why concord? That’s the question historian Robert Gross asks at the beginning of this weighty study of the hottest setting of literary-philosophical thought in antebellum America. (Weighty, indeed—the volume in my hand has 608 pages of text, 178 pages of footnotes, and fifteen pages of . . . . Continue Reading »
What are Christians to make of corruption in the history of the Church? There are two common approaches. The first we can dismiss without much consideration. This is the tack taken by those conservative apologists who more or less deny that the Church is ever corrupt. The Inquisition, for example, . . . . Continue Reading »
Toward the end of his short life, Anton Chekhov penned one of his shortest stories, “The Student.” Debates over Chekhov’s own faith continue; however, no one doubts that at the root of his soul sprang a human compassion that was without peer. He knew how to “weep with those who weep” (Rom. . . . . Continue Reading »
In her delightful essay “Harry Potter and the Reverse Voltaire,” the philosopher Mary Leng tries to understand why a colleague of hers has denounced J. K. Rowling. Although the colleague believes that “there are contexts in which [biological] sex matters politically,” she has condemned . . . . Continue Reading »
In the first, surreal weeks of the lockdowns of 2020, we all marveled at how COVID had hit at just the right time. Thanks to our Silicon Valley saviors, we had the perfect technologies to shift all “nonessential” activities and gatherings into virtual space. Zoom, which few of us had heard of in . . . . Continue Reading »
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