Both left- and right-wing intellectuals agree that metaphysical convictions (our ideas about the fundamentals of reality) have social and political implications. The former's reasons for believing this tend to be unintelligible (or at least incommunicable), whereas... Read More

BOOK BY LEIGH ERIC SCHMIDT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016 360 PP.; $35.00 WHAT INITIALLY DREW ME to read Village Atheists was curiosity about life and challenges for secularists living in the United States more than... Read More

BOOK EDITED BY KAREN L GARST PRITCHSTONE PUBLISHING, 2016 272 PP.; $16.95 IN 2014 THE ARTS and crafts chain Hobby Lobby fought to exclude certain types of birth control coverage for its female employees based... Read More

BOOKS EDITED BY ART A. AYRIS KINGSTONE COMICS, 2016 2,053 PP. IN THREE VOLUMES, $74.99 ONE OF MY CHILDHOOD memories of United Presbyterian Sunday school is the fun I had reading full-color comics telling Bible... Read More

It's become a stock refrain of intellectual history to say that George Orwell answered all three of the big questions of the twentieth century correctly: that the master-slave relationship of colonialism degraded both master and... Read More

BOOK BY IAN MCEWAN NAN A. TALESE / DOUBLEDAY 2016 197 PP.; $24.95 THE PROTAGONIST and first-person chronicler of the British writer Ian McEwan’s new novel Nutshell is quite the worldly fellow: eloquent, erudite, cultured,... Read More

BY MARTY KLEIN PRAEGER, 2016 208 PP.; $24.00 I WAS ONE of those teenagers who really did read the articles in Playboy, though not before carefully exploring and sometimes masturbating with the centerfold in full... Read More