Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne by edward haviland miller university of iowa press, 596 pages, $35 Jefferson’s public career focused on securing for Americans,” the historian Edmund S. Morgan has written, “a right of expatriation from the past.” This was a large . . . . Continue Reading »
Theology and Dialogue edited by Bruce D. Marshall University of Notre Dame Press, 302 pages, $14.95 paper. These “essays in conversation with George Lindbeck” are also essays in deserved celebration of a thinker who has done as much as anyone in the last half-century to advance ecumenical . . . . Continue Reading »
The Founders of the Western World: A History of Greece and Rome by Michael Grant Scribner’s, 351 pages, $27.50 Michael Grant has written so many books about the Greeks and Romans that his latest reads like a textbook. As he acknowledges in the introduction, the present book is a shortened . . . . Continue Reading »
After a period of relative quiescence, the quest for the historical Jesus has again become a center of controversy. Two major contributions to the theme—John P. Meier’s A Marginal Jew and John Dominic Crossan’s The Historical Jesus—appeared just before Christmas 1991 . . . . Continue Reading »
Covenant Of Love: Pope John Paul II on Sexuality, Marriage, and Family in the Modern World edited by Richard M. Hogan and John M. Levoir Ignatius Press, 328 pages, $14.95 For those who have had enough of the dull and deadly conformism of recent decades, a manifesto for a sexual revolution that . . . . Continue Reading »
For the historian, as for the philosopher, the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns is being superseded by a quarrel between the Moderns and the Postmoderns. If the great subversive principle of modernity is historicism—a form of relativism that locates the meaning of ideas and events . . . . Continue Reading »
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 »
Toward the end of this collection of essays, Professor Iván Völgyes gently chastises his brethren in the history and political science confraternities for the fact that “all too frequently … many of us in our profession … made compromises with the Communist regimes” of the old . . . . Continue Reading »
Every year during the winter quarter my yearlong course in the history of Christianity reaches the eleventh-century Gregorian Reform and the Investiture Conflict. Every year my students struggle to make sense of the positions of Emperor Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII. With great effort some of them . . . . Continue Reading »
Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil by Hyam Maccoby Free Press, 213 pages, $22.95 Maccoby is noted, or notorious, for his argument, made here once again, that anti-Semitism is inherent in Christian faith. Judas Iscariot, he claims, is for Christians the demonic symbol of Judaism, which . . . . Continue Reading »