Is life worth living? Are the forms of Western life conducive to happiness? These questions are best asked in the form of a novel, and raising such questions is Michel Houellebecq’s strength. Continue Reading...
The best part of Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson is Genesis.
I make this observation sincerely, intending no disparagement of Robinson’s insightful reading of the first book of the Bible. But it was a surprise and delight to pick up Reading Genesis, thumb through it for the first time, and discover that the last third of its 344 pages consists of the book of Genesis itself. Continue Reading...
Who is Brady Corbet? In the avalanche of press coverage that has accompanied the release of The Brutalist, which he co-wrote and directed, Corbet has been generally spoken of as an auteur—a filmmaker’s filmmaker, a man with unusual seriousness, ambition, and purpose. Continue Reading...
TikTok was developed as a Chinese-government digital product marketed to Western youth and operated under a secretive algorithm. It promoted anti-American narratives—from lavishing praise on Osama bin Laden to pushing transgender hype—but its chief purpose was probably data-mining. Continue Reading...
I was a day shy of my eighth birthday when the reassuring words of President Reagan crackled over my family’s radio. Like all Americans, we were traumatized by the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, which carried, among her passengers, 38-year-old social studies teacher Christy McAuliffe. Continue Reading...
On January 16, we lost David Lynch, at age 78, just shy of his January 20 birthday. That would be January 20, 1946. Lynch was a Baby Boomer. A child of ’50s America. Continue Reading...
As we look toward an inauguration on January 20, I think of Robert Altman’s movie Nashville (1975) and its leadoff song: “We must be doing something right to last 200 years.” Continue Reading...
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...
Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election was undoubtably a referendum on the current political trajectory of the United States. He won both the popular vote, the first Republican since 2004 to do so, and a significant Electoral College majority, securing the largest electoral margin for a Republican since George H.W. Continue Reading...
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...