The Unintended Reformation is an unusual work of history in deliberately focusing as much on the present as on the…
Contents and discontents of (post)modernity
Book blog
Scholars from varying disciplines engage in critical discussions of recent books. Additionally, scholars introduce their books with an original essay or, occasionally, an original essay reviews an important new book, connecting it to other threads of conversation in the academy and beyond.
You can read our very first book forum, on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and the continued discussion around Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age here.
Comparing China and India
The Modern Spirit of Asia is a book about India and China and the ways in which they have been…
Looking back while hurtling forward
At a time when the late twentieth century giants of comparative social science—like S.N. Eisenstadt and Robert Bellah—have recently passed away…
Modern spirits
The Modern Spirit of Asia is like a brilliant pencil sketch for an uncompleted oil painting. Something inspiring appears in…
In defense of the fragment
Richard Madsen has done me the favor of reading my book carefully and sympathetically. He points out that the complexity…
Mindful love: On Thomas Pfau’s critical appropriation of Thomist moral theory
Thomas Pfau’s book Minding the Modern is a book of immense scope. About half the work (parts II and III) consists…
Losing sight of reason
Thomas Pfau has created a brand new narrative, not a scholarly book. In the best Christian traditio renovanda (renewing tradition),…
Stacking the deck: Thomas Pfau’s strange history of the West
Imagine that you’ve been invited to play a game of cards with Thomas Pfau and his cards are called Justice,…
Ancient questions for modern answers
The central contrast in Thomas Pfau’s rich and rewarding book, Minding the Modern, is between two radically opposed views of…
Minding the other modernities
Let me start with a confession. I am not particularly keen on stories of modernity in which “modernity” figures as…