Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Philosophy & Religion

Peter E. Gordon

Max the Fatalist

June 11, 2020 issue

An icon of Christ from the Serbian Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity and St. Spyridon, Trieste, Italy, nineteenth century

Diarmaid MacCulloch

The Vitality of Orthodoxy

July 2, 2020 issue

Claude Lévi-Strauss in his office in Paris, 1969

Kwame Anthony Appiah

The Key to All Mythologies

February 13, 2020 issue

Elizabeth Bruenig

Jesus, Mary, and Mary

‘Virgin Whore’ by Emma Maggie Solberg and ‘The Magdalene in the Reformation’ by Margaret Arnold

November 21, 2019 issue

Cass R. Sunstein

The Siren of Selfishness

April 9, 2020 issue

Alexander Stille

The Sins of Celibacy

The modern Catholic Church has failed to grasp what its founders understood quite well.

November 22, 2018 issue

Marilynne Robinson

What Are We Doing Here?

Why teach the humanities? Why study them?

November 9, 2017 issue

Malise Ruthven

The Islamic Road to the Modern World

Christopher de Bellaigue’s ‘The Islamic Enlightenment’ and Wael Abu-‘Uksa’s ‘Freedom in the Arab World’

June 22, 2017 issue

The Latest

Tom Scocca

How the Awful Stuff Won

Andrew Marantz’s and Megan Phelps-Roper’s books explore the dark and far-reaching consequences of our dependence on the Internet.

November 5, 2020 issue

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola; portrait by Cristofano dell’Altissimo, 1560s

Anthony Grafton

Pico della Mirandola’s Mystical Thinking

A new book cuts through generations of misguided commentary on the most famous speech of the Renaissance.

November 5, 2020 issue

The writer Marie de France, who lived in England in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, pictured in a collection of poems in old French, from an illuminated manuscript copied in Paris circa 1285–1292

Mary Wellesley

Our Literary Foremothers

Diane Watt, a professor of medieval literature, shows that the earliest English women writers lived centuries before Julian of Norwich or Margery Kempe.

October 22, 2020 issue

President Donald Trump and President of Liberty University Jerry Falwell, Jr. at Liberty University's commencement ceremony in Lynchburg, Virginia, May 13, 2017

Elizabeth Spiers

The Fall of Jerry Falwell Jr.

Fortunately for Jerry Falwell Jr., evangelicalism has built-in insurance for reputational damage, should a wealthy white man make the mistake of public licentiousness widely shared on the Web.

August 20, 2020

The mesa at Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, 1991

David Treuer

Magic Mountains

It’s hard not to feel that we are all caught up, like Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain, in forces outside our control, despite the fact that real change seems to be one of the results of our unrest.

July 6, 2020

Trompe l'oeil with letters and notebooks, by Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts, 1665

Verlyn Klinkenborg

An English Clergyman’s Advice for Quarantine

Reverend Sydney Smith’s thoughts, in a letter to his wife, need almost no alteration for modern times and are still excellent advice, perhaps especially for a world in quarantine.

May 14, 2020

Detail from Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Portrait of Dr. Washington Epps, My Doctor, 1885

Jamieson Webster

End Notes: Palliative Care in a Pandemic

Many, in the early days, said the virus did not stop at borders, did not respect hierarchies, that it affected all equally. Covid-19 was democratic. We were deceived.

April 24, 2020

The first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society with founding members Friedrich Hayek (left, at desk) and Ludwig von Mises (front row, second from right), Mont Pèlerin, Switzerland, 1947

Edward Chancellor

The Long Shadow of the Austrian School

May 14, 2020 issue

David Fratkin

Easter 2020: The Eighth Sacrament

Happy Easter, in spite of the coronavirus pandemic, from the Review.

April 12, 2020

Marisa Mazria Katz

Passover 2020: A Virtual Seder

As Covid-19 took hold in New York City, I started receiving emails from the rabbi at my local shul. The barrage of newsletters cracked open my claustrophobic anxieties.

April 7, 2020