Fifty Shades of Grey’s reputation precedes it, and passionate critics and defenders rush to add their voices to the chatter whenever the topic surfaces. We defame the books as pornographic and dismiss them as horrendous literature that wreaks havoc on the intellectual welfare of the general population. I too originally dismissed the series as a plotless joke, and it was not until I actually read … Continue reading Fifty Shades of Grey: Not Everything I Thought It Would Be

“The Catholic faith is, I believe, a right faith in essentials but it must grow up inside one. Evolve through suffering to have values.”  -Malcolm Muggeridge to Alec Vidler (43) Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography by Gregory Wolfe (1995) ISI Books: Irvington, Delaware. When one asks the average modern person their thoughts on Malcolm Muggeridge, their response will likely be mild bewilderment. For all intents and purposes, … Continue reading The Pilgrim Found: A Review of Gregory Wolfe’s Biography, Malcolm Muggeridge

Letter from the Editor In 2003, Hans Zeiger founded a small newspaper at Hillsdale College “To facilitate a forum for Conservative issues in order to stimulate thinking on various aspects of political life.” That newspaper, the Hillsdale Conservative, hoped to combat liberalism across America, and worked with the Hillsdale College Republicans to pursue that goal. When that relationship proved rocky, Zeiger ceded the role of … Continue reading Letter From the Editor, April 2015

“Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair,” Annie Dillard says of writing; reading often has a similar self-propelling precarity to it. Page 271 of the Phenomenology of Perception was one of those diminutive daily passions. Two hundred and seventy pages in, my eyes were crossing as, ironically, they tried to follow a description of … Continue reading Courageous Specialization