Pope Francis’ Plea for Migrants and Acton’s Core Principles

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The What Ifs and What Was of American History

Professor Walter A. McDougall’s new book, Gems of American History, is subtitled The Lecturer’s Art, an apt phrase for a collection of lectures delivered to audiences ranging from the Museum of the American Revolution to the Agnes Irwin School. Continue Reading...

Ross Douthat Wants You to Believe

In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Ross Douthat relates a story from a couple of decades ago, in which he had a late-night conversation with the famously combative atheist Christopher Hitchens. Continue Reading...

Are You Free?

The early Protestant Reformers famously disbelieved in the freedom of the will. And yet they gave us a legacy of freedom. This paradox is at the heart of Brad Littlejohn’s Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License. Continue Reading...

We Are All Makers

There’s a particular pleasure in reading books about making. Business books are “maker” books, in a sense. So are self-help books. The best of these “maker” books are the ones with lots of anecdotes, where we get to see the principles at work. Continue Reading...

French Laïcité vs. American Secularism

On August 31, 2023, the French Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports issued a statement titled “Respect of Republican Values” (Respect des Valeurs de la République), forbidding pupils to wear the abaya in public schools throughout the national territory. Continue Reading...

Winston Churchill Continues to Inspire

In 1930, Winston Churchill was heading into the worst part of his political career, doomed to criticize his party’s leadership on foreign affairs only to be ignored, marginalized, disdained. At the same time, he was fast approaching his greatest achievement as a writer, the biography of the ancestor who founded his family, John Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, which would occupy him throughout the decade we call “the wilderness years.” Continue Reading...