For many, Pope Francis is still a puzzlement, to use the words of the song from that great musical The King and I.  If you are among those puzzled, this is the book you’ve been waiting for. The Great Reformer presents the man, the experiences that shaped him, and his responses to those experiences with...

There are many reasons why one might conclude that the United States is in a spiral of self-destruction and is in fact no longer a Christian country.  One of the most obvious—apart from 40-plus years of legalized abortion—is the current effort to redefine marriage to include homosexual couples.  But this is just the latest in...

Over 30 years ago, when I was a seminarian in Rome, one of my professors exclaimed, “John Ford is the Thomas Aquinas of the 20th century.” Fortunately, at Columbia University I had studied under Andrew Sarris, the famed “auteur” film critic, so I knew the context.  In any case, Ford’s reputation as certainly one of...

Jeffrey Bell is perhaps the most experienced conservative political advisor in Washington, D.C.  Once a key Reagan campaign advisor, Bell later became a political candidate himself, scoring a stunning primary upset against a seated Republican senator in New Jersey only to lose in the general election to Democrat Bill Bradley.  Bell, a graduate of Columbia...

What was once known as the West—Western Europe and North America—has largely abandoned its Christian roots and fallen into apostasy.  In fact, it has succumbed to neopaganism—a practical atheism that, similar to 18th-century Deism, relegates God (if He exists) to a peripheral role in one’s life.  People in increasing numbers do not believe it is...

Rarely have I read in so few pages a book as thought-provoking and compelling as J. Budziszewski’s On the Meaning of Sex.  Budziszewski, a Yale Ph.D. and professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas, has grappled for years with the sad effects of our era’s shallow understanding of sex on the lives...

If you are tired of being exposed to lousy movies full of sex, violence, ear-blasting noise, and floods of gratuitous special effects, 40-something actors who dress (and act) like teenagers, and predictable story lines, turn to William Park’s definitive book What Is Film Noir? for a reminder of what artful and truly adult entertainment films...

Dr. Bernard Nathanson has written an important book that in time will rank with Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain and Malcolm Muggeridge’s Chronicles of Wasted Time as books which our descendants, familial and spiritual, will examine closely in the 21st and 22nd centuries in order to understand both man’s inhumanity to humanity and to his personal...