“The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.” —George Santayana When The Restoration of Christian Culture was first published in 1983, the Integrated Humanities Program, founded by John Senior and his fellow University of Kansas professors Dennis B. Quinn and Franklyn C. Nelick, had just had its...
One of the unfortunate after-effects of the so-called “Red Scare” of the early 50’s was the triumph of the “no limits” interpretation of the First Amendment, which has poisoned American political thought ever since. It goes something like this: the McCarthyite “reign of terror” permanently discredited the idea that you can suppress speech in a...
“Fox populi.” —Anonymous No public figure in American history is more inscrutable than Abraham Lincoln. While this is in some measure due to his extraordinary deftness as a politician, it is primarily the result of his astounding success in refounding the Republic in his own image. So thoroughly did Lincoln reform our collective historical and...
Paul Johnson has done it again: he has written a book so huge in scope that it fairly begs to be challenged by academics as a cursory treatment of history. In the course of one thousand pages, The Birth of the Modern: World Society covers subjects as diverse as the treatment of animals by human...
“It is risky to write about an ongoing series of events, in this case the Catholic church’s history in the second half of the twentieth century,” writes Thomas Molnar in the introduction to The Church, Pilgrim of Centuries. After finishing Professor Molnar’s iconoclastic and often penetrating analysis of the Church’s position in the modern world...