Book Review

Mark Tooley speaks with Joel Looper, author of Bonhoeffer’s America: A Land without Reformation, which comes out in August.

Even though some on the right have argued that the United States needs to return to a strong common national identity to survive, Goldman argues in “After Nationalism” that America has normally not had this type of cohesion for most of its history.

“The Good American” is the story of how Robert Gersony, a high school dropout, affected governmental actions to reduce human misery and advance human rights. Because of his success in promoting humanitarian values, Kaplan calls him the US government’s “greatest humanitarian.”

John McWhorter’s new serially published book on antiracism is a self-described extended editorial in which the avowed atheist seeks to make sense of a political ideology by characterizing it as a religion that is bad for the world in the exact manner in which he understands all religions to be bad.

Goldman responds to commentators who believe that Americans must return to some overarching identity and purpose. He argues that this task is difficult when the conditions that allowed previous unity no longer exist. Moreover, nationalists do not reasonably explain programs that could reignite a meaningful shared identity.

“The Unbroken Thread” by Sohrab Ahmari shows us that our human capacities and loves are not and cannot be strictly contained within the horizons of philosophic liberalism.

Robert Draper’s book To Start a War details why the Bush administration made a gravely mistaken decision, despite having clearly met the jus ad bellum criteria of “right intention.”

The Color of Compromise ostensibly promotes a radical new way of approaching politics that rethinks everything about evangelicals and political engagement. But if you can look past Tisby’s critique of conservatism, all of the fundamentals of popular evangelical political thinking in the post-war era are still at work.

Christians must advocate religious liberty not just for themselves, Walker argues, but “with the conviction that true freedom means allowing fellow citizens… to freely exercise their beliefs with dignity.”