Reviews

January 16, 2025

The ‘Magic’ of the Mind Is the Science of the Future

It’s hard to look at the culture and not conclude that intellectual secularism is in decline. When I was a teenager, the biggest books about faith were New Atheist titles like Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great. Continue Reading...

January 14, 2025

Thinking Critically about Critical Theory

Hope College required all seniors to take a “senior seminar,” the ostensible purpose of which was to help each student refine his or her “worldview.” Not liking, for a variety of reasons, the word worldview with its implicit relativism, I could nonetheless use the course to get students to struggle through competing “worldviews.” Continue Reading...

January 09, 2025

The Historian as Priestly Gardener

Contemporary Western culture is profoundly ahistorical, Sarah Irving-Stonebraker reasons in her latest book, Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age. The Australian professor devotes the first quarter of the book to making the case that, around 2010, the occidental world entered this “phase of late modernity,” to which she assigns the moniker “the Ahistoric Age.” Continue Reading...

January 08, 2025

Jordan Peterson’s Bible Study

If there’s one thing Jordan B. Peterson has proved in his almost-decade run as an internationally known public intellectual, it’s that he can fight. Since his 2016 criticism of a Canadian law for effectively compelling speech related to the use of certain gender pronouns, the professional psychologist and academic has taken on a host of rhetorical sparring partners on Canadian, British, and Australian television; he’s also argued with prominent politicians, scientists, academics, and bloggers. Continue Reading...

December 26, 2024

Temptation and Corruption in The Rings of Power

At nearly $60 million per episode, the first season of Amazon’s The Rings of Power was a historic investment in bringing a famed literary universe to the small screen. Reviewers and audiences were initially ambivalent about the series. Continue Reading...

December 23, 2024

Christmas and the Joy of Extravagance

Joseph Bottum’s name is likely familiar to many readers of Religion and Liberty: From his tenure as editor-in-chief at First Things to his lovely poetry to his essays at premier venues like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, andThe Times of London, Bottum has been a leading figure of conservative American letters for decades. Continue Reading...

December 19, 2024

Homestead Is Not the Refuge It Wants to Be

It’s getting harder and harder to have a movie that isn’t caught up in the culture wars. Franchises like the MCU, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars sagas, and Disney’s Pixar animations, which once united a broad spectrum of viewers, now get yelled at by both sides, either for not being progressive enough on the one hand or being too “woke” on the other. Continue Reading...