Make up your own

Ross Douthat points out the absurdity of the quest for the historical Jesus.

Moving backwards

John Allen writes from Ukraine.

Original identity

An interview with Dana Gioia.

Myths

An interview with Rodney Stark

Smart idiots

Intelligence (at least in the narrow sense in which our culture understands it) is very overrated.

A matter of love

A reasonably good story on a group of seminarians in the Washington Post.

Life is a market

Mary Ann Glendon attended the plenary session of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. The point here is that contemporary capitalism has fully converged with classical Marxism in reducing people to purely economic (actually, worse: purely financial) agents.

Unsurpassed

Fukuyama on a new biography of Nietzsche.

Desolation

An interview with Camille Paglia. When people think that education is an "industry" things are bad indeed.

The limits of technocracy

What distinguishes David Brooks from most run-of-the-mill American liberals is that he understands that human and cultural factors matter vey much.

Taken for a ride

Somebody at the Weekly Standard woke up and realized that the moneyed elite in the US has no sympathy for ideological conservatism.