Our Kids, by Robert D. Putnam
Balancing biography and quantitative research, Robert Putnam paints a sobering picture of the state of the American dream.
Caught, by Marie Gottschalk
Marie Gottschalk describes an American penal system that has all but abandoned any real attempt to rehabilitate its inmates.
Deeply Divided, by Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos
Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos argue that contemporary American politics have taken an extreme turn that has all but eliminated bipartisanship and compromise.
American gulag
To Robert Ferguson, Calvinist roots lead European-Americans to see all punishments meted out to humans as righteous. Yet ultimate blame for our prisons is our own.
Belief without Borders, by Linda A. Mercadante
Linda A. Mercadante’s study counters those who suggest that the rise of the religiously unaffiliated is tantamount to secularization.
Breach of Trust, by Andrew J. Bacevich
Every year, hundreds of thousands of freshly minted high school graduates enter college across the United States....
Should We Live Forever? by Gilbert Meilaender
By book 10 of his Confessions, Augustine has completed the narration of his long, often tortuous spiritual journey from paganism to Christianity....
Just and Unjust Peace, by Daniel Philpott
Almost a decade after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, many Americans have become numb to the reports of continued violence in Iraq that are buried in the back pages of newspapers and are barely me...
The Deaths of Others, by John Tirman
Friedrich Nietzsche observed that the human capacity to forget is not solely the result of inertia: "It is rather an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression." According to ...
Past progressives
According to Gary Dorrien, the influence of Walter Rauschenbusch, Washington Gladden and the Social Gospel on the United States was mixed--but it was very real.
Pursuing happiness
Unlike justice or courage, happiness is perceived as subjective, even inscrutable. So what does it mean to say that a person who claims to be happy is not?
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A review of God’s Battalions and Fighting for the Cross
There clearly has been a marked rise of interest in the Crusades since the start of the present war in Iraq--an interest spurred at least in part by President George W. Bush's talk of an American crusade against terror in the days following the 9/11 attacks. Up to this point, the renaissance in publications about the Crusades largely has been limited to works that fit squarely within traditional historical scholarship. Stark and Housley, on the other hand, provide Crusades volumes for an age in which information is targeted to distinct and splintered interest groups.
Be Very Afraid: The Cultural Responses to Terror, Pandemics, Environmental Devastation, Nuclear Annihilation, and Other Threats
A funeral is a curious phenomenon....
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Global influence
There is a story told about the alleged waning of Christianity that has been popular among secularists since the late 19...
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Liberal path
Imagine that a stranger had walked up to you a few years ago and presented the following scenario about a ma...