Is there a way to balance economic growth and sound environmental stewardship? If only Pope Francis would take his own advice. Read More… If there is anything we have learned about Pope mentaries on issues ranging from economics to the environment, it is that they invariably add up to a by-now predictable mixture. Parts of this mélange consist of often profound insights and wisdom. But it also reflects straw man arguments, the random assembling of pieces of data plucked out...

Did conservatives betray their ideals? Or were they never ideal to begin with? Read More… “To be conservative,” wrote Michael Oakeshott, “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery.” His definition of conservatism, not as a set of policy aspirations but as a deeper sensibility, explains the conservative respect for tradition and view of history as a source of norms—that’s the positive side. The negative side is that there are...

A new anthology of economists mentators pushing back against the New Deal in the 1930s sheds fresh light not only on what was going wrong then but what’s still wrong with our economic policy now. Read More… The American Institute of Economic Research has published an anthology of critics of the New Deal, New Deal plete with more than 50 mentaries and excerpts. The book is edited by contemporary economic historian Amity Shlaes, herself a prominent New Deal critic, whose...

If our liberal arts colleges are to survive, they should try to instill an appreciation for rather than attempt the destruction of our cultural heritage. Read More… We have interesting classifications of our institutions of higher learning. The Carnegie classification of major research universities distinguishes between R1 and R2 schools. The well-known U.S. News & World Report Rankings separate national universities from regional ones, and also from national liberal arts colleges. Alongside the state university system, the Selective Liberal Arts...

David Berlinski has been provoking debate on a variety of subjects for decades. His new book is a sampler of his challenges to Darwinism, materialism, and the hubris of scientism. Read More… I can find no better way to summarize David Berlinski’s book Science After Babel than to say that it is classic Berlinski. The man himself defies a simple summary. He is a polymath and raconteur, as even his bio at the panying website explains. His Ph.D. in philosophy...

Are we predestined to debate the free will vs. determinism question forever? Or can we shed light on the nature of the human person such that this vexing question of why we do what we can finally be answered? Read More… Does God exist, or are we the mere by-products of evolution, simple accidents of the Big Bang? Do we have free will, or is everything predetermined, robbing us of true moral agency? A recent book by philosopher Paul Herrick,...

Early in puting revolution, a Roman Catholic nun trudged away to make information retrieval available to all, proving that one hidden life can have many extraordinary public effects. Read More… Emerging from the vibrant and innovative postwar years, the nascent discipline puter science in America was attracting top talent in mathematics, engineering, putational linguistics. Several schools were creating puter science” programs by the 1950s and early ’60s. In fact, the first ever doctoral degrees in this emerging discipline were awarded...

Have the tensions between individual freedom of conscience and the principle of laïcité finally reached the breaking point? Read More… Nearly 20 people were killed in Paris during and immediately following the Islamist attack on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. Then, in November of that same year, terrorists killed 130 and injured hundreds more in a series of coordinated attacks across Paris that included suicide bombers detonating explosives outside the Stade de France, indiscriminate shootings at crowded restaurants,...

The highly successful series of fantasy novels is slowly being adapted into TV entertainment. Is it heroic fantasy intended to instill moral courage in the face of evil, or merely more streaming content? Read More… The Wheel of Time is a series of 14 novels by Robert Jordan, which debuted in 1990. You may never have heard of them, but they’ve sold 100 million copies and add up to more than 4 million words. (The Bible is well short of...

When we think of cultural invention, human flourishing, and technological innovation, we tend also to think of great cities. A look at 40 of them proves instructive as to what makes true progress possible. Read More… What is progress? How and where does it occur? Such questions are not easy to answer. Debates about the nature of progress have given rise to entire theories of historical development. “Whig history,” for example, relates the story of humanity as one of a...