Book Review

In We the Fallen People, Tracy McKenzie takes on the conviction that the moral intuition of the American electorate is the basis for our democratic flourishing. This belief is summarized in the phrase, “America is great because she is good.”

Yet what does Nelson mean by Pelagianism? A close reading of the book’s early pages shows that he offers three distinct formulations of the concept. Should we accept them? I argue that we should not.

“The Afghanistan Papers” by Craig Whitlock is modeled on the Pentagon Papers, which charged that the Johnson administration systematically lied to Congress and the public about the Vietnam War. This book makes the same charge against the Bush and Obama administrations.

Till We Have Built Jerusalem is a challenging book for daring to discuss the connection between ethics and aesthetic theories of architecture and urban design, what Bess calls our “built environment.”

Michael Sandel’s “The Tyranny of Merit” is an invitation to rethink a seemingly self-evident thought, that our social and economic position should be dictated solely by whether we deserve to have that position.

While most histories of the Civil War naturally focus on the drama in America, Don H. Doyle’s “The Cause of All Nations” explains how the conflict fits into broader world history and how events abroad affected the war.

In “Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War,” Samuel Moyn forces readers to ask whether America’s shift toward “humane” war has a dark side.

John Wilsey’s new book “God’s Cold Warrior” is the only full-life biography of John Foster Dulles that thoroughly investigates his religious life and the ways his faith influenced his professional and personal lives.

George Yancey and Ashlee Quosigk argue in “One Faith No Longer: The Transformation of Christianity in Red and Blue America” that the gulf between progressive and conservative Christianity is so great they are no longer the same faith.