The Christian Century

Emily Wilson offers a carefully balanced narrative of Seneca's life that is derived, as it must be, from partial and often contradictory sources.

The Deepest Human Life is an elegantly written, impassioned, and sometimes disjointed plea on behalf of philosophy. Scott Samuelson invokes poets, novelists, and theologians to defend the dialectical process that Socrates imparted.

Peter Watson sketches in the lives and thoughts of an array of scientists, artists, and philosophers who offer ways to cope with the death of God.

Most moral arguments against suicide are built on premises of faith. But Jennifer Hecht, a poet and first-rate historian of ideas, is intent on providing secular reasons for refraining from it.