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America’s Greatest Explorer

On July 4, 1776, as several dozen sweating American colonists sat in the stuffy Pennsylvania State House wondering what would befall them for having dared to rebel against their king, a lone, hungry Spanish priest lay in the windswept stone plaza of a Hopi village wondering what would befall him for . . . . Continue Reading »

Why I Went to a Catholic College

I was seventeen when my father and I embarked on the long flight to Denver from Amsterdam, with a layover in London. He read George Eliot; I read Batman: The Long Halloween. It was dark by the time we checked into the hotel, and still dark the next morning when we set out in our rental car. We drove . . . . Continue Reading »

Rancher Rebels

At a time when most of the news on television is at some level fake, the 2014 standoff at the Bundy ranch in Nevada stood out as a real event. Here was no pseudo-­spectacle thrown together for the cameras. Cliven Bundy, a Mormon rancher in Nevada, had a real quarrel with the Bureau of Land . . . . Continue Reading »

Against the Open Society

The title of R. R. Reno’s ­Return of the Strong Gods requires qual­ification. To begin with, most of what Reno tells us concerns not the gods’ return, but their expulsion. As for the gods themselves, they “are not golden idols or characters in ancient mythologies,” Reno writes. . . . . Continue Reading »

Russian Jeremiah

Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978 by aleksandr solzhenitsyn notre dame, 480 pages, $35 The first volume of Solzhenitsyn’s memoir of exile, Between Two Millstones, begins with the author’s expulsion from the Soviet Union and closes with him viewing the landscape . . . . Continue Reading »

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