Freedom Undone in the Court

There I sat, blinking under the fluorescent lights in the auditorium style classroom during my constitutional law class. I had gone to law school because I wanted to learn how to be a lawyer. I wanted to learn how to “think like a lawyer.” That's what all the marketing brochures from the admissions offices in law schools all over the country promise incoming students. I didn't know exactly what it meant to think like a lawyer. I assumed I would be asked to use reason and logic to apply the facts of a particular occurrence to the law that governed such an occurrence.

by Stephen J. Wolma

After Ideology

The book asserts that modernity has reached a dead end that is the inevitable result of its own inner logic. That logic is best described as revolt against God. Here, Walsh’s debt to Eric Voeglin is evident. The modern revolt, Walsh argues, has its origins in the Gnostic claim that humans can, through a secret gnosis and an act of their own, transform themselves into the Divine. That Gnostic quest has lived on in various forms in the West, which include Comte’s positivism and Marx’s communism.

by John Farina

Adam Smith in His Time and Ours

Let me resolve this paradox by stating that Jerry Muller is a Professor of History at the Catholic University of America. He has written a book which economists and libertarians ought to read. It is also written in such a style that the general reader can derive great benefit from it. The book deftly summarizes a mass of scholarship from many different areas–political philosophy, ethics, psychology, history, and literature–without trivializing it into bland encyclopedic entries.

by William F. Campbell

John Courtney Murray and the American Civil Conversation

In John Courtney Murray and the American Civil Conversation, many different viewpoints converge and, with only a few exceptions, further Fr. Murray’s understanding of the essential need for civilized, rational discussion. All but perhaps three of the thirteen essays proceed in the spirit of Murray. The book is divided into three main sections. In the first section, essays by Richard John Neuhaus and William R. Luckey stand out. Neuhaus’ essay, from a purely stylistic point of view, is a joy to read.

by Neal Fuller

The Church and the Revolution

What Weigel calls the “Standard Account” gives primary credit for the Revolution of 1989 to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Advocates of this interpretation argue that two tenets of Gorbachev’s policy proved to be the conditions sine qua non for the eventual success of the Revolution: the Soviet army would no longer intervene when its allies chose to go their own way and the Soviet party would no longer demand exclusive communist control of central and eastern Europe.

by John-Peter Pham

With Liberty and Justice for Whom?

Gay identifies three distinct positions on capitalism among evangelicals: those held by the evangelical left, right, and center. Each of their positions are treated with utmost fairness, a feat which by itself makes the book, and Gay himself, worthy of high praise.

by Bruce G. Webb

The Social Crisis of Our Time

Those who, like the Swiss economist Wilhelm Röepke, dislike both a laissez faire economy and a planned or state-manipulated one usually hope for a “Third Way” skirting both. Originally published in 1942, this thoughtful, richly textured work is Röepke’s first formulation of the “Third Way.”

by John Attarian

Public Education: An Autopsy

Market based schooling sounds like a contradiction in terms to public school teachers' unions; it sounds like a non sequitur to hard-pressed denominational schools; it's Greek to the average taxpayer; but it's the next step to education critic Myron Lieberman.

by William B. Allen

Beyond the New Right

Starting roughly from the mess we all admit we are in, John Gray, fellow in politics at Jesus College, Oxford University, subtly, valiantly, and sometimes brilliantly addresses all of the major problems facing liberal democratic society in this collection of four essays written during the past decade. Avowedly conservative in a lineage that links him with Michael Oakeshott (the greatest conservative theorist of our time, he thinks), F.A.

by Ellis Sandoz

A Jewish Conservative Looks at Pagan America

Don Feder reminds me of Paul Caplan, a Reform rabbi in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and of Peter Himmelman, perhaps the only practicing Orthodox Jew to carve out a career for himself in rock and roll. Like Rabbi Caplan and Peter Himmelman, Feder exhibits a palpable joy about his faith–and a passion strong enough to attract people in search of God. Feder, who writes editorials for the brassy tabloid The Boston Herald, writes about one experience at the office:

by Doug LeBlanc

The Churching of America

The award winning book The Churching of America is a dramatic rewriting of American religious history with a free-market bent.

by Julie Ingersoll

When Austrians Came to America

Economists of the Austrian school in recent years, writes Karen Vaughn, “present no less than a fundamental challenge” to how members of their field view their work and the world around them. “At the very least,” she says, “Austrian economics is a complete reinterpretation of the methods, substance, and limitations of contemporary economics. At most, it is a radical, perhaps even revolutionary restructuring of economics.”

by David L. Prychitko