Witherspoon Institute
2026 Summer Seminars
Held in Princeton, NJ
For rising high school juniors and seniors, undergraduates, and graduate students.
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Book Reviews
Before modern economists claimed a monopoly on the topic of scarcity, philosophers, artists, and theologians spent centuries arguing over the nature and limits of our desires.
A timely book on the thought of Harry Jaffa and Walter Berns reminds us that patriotism needs to be about ideas and principles, but it cannot only be about ideas and principles. To win—and deserve to win—elections, conservatism must also inspire love of country and serve the immediate interests of the ordinary man.
In her 2022 book The Ideology of Democratism, Emily Finley contends that democracy, or democratism, has become “perhaps the dominant political belief system in modern Western society.” In other words, democracy has become more than a regime type; it has become a secular religion, complete with its own dogmas, practices, clerics, and eschatology.
Like the Bible, Russian literature came to be perceived “not as a series of separate books but as a single ongoing work composed over many generations.” It is a conversation with both the present and the past simultaneously.
In our cultural moment, an embodied, relational feminism—one that does not see sexual difference as a threat—has to be reactionary; it is counter-cultural by default. Those hoping to realize that vision need to be against progress, but also for something more stable and enduring: a feminist movement that recognizes and embraces the limits of our nature, as well as norms that steward that nature; that guard it from pathological excess and enervation.
In Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent, Emily Dumler-Winckler looks beyond the moderns to show Wollstonecraft’s kinship with ancient and medieval thinkers, especially Aristotle and Aquinas. It’s in the rich Christian tradition especially that Wollstonecraft finds the dynamic resources to treat her “modern” subjects (abolition and women’s education, in particular).
Any talk about masculinity today can easily veer into predictable patterns: a left that paints with uncritically broad brushes, and a right that gets defensive and in the process dumbs down its beliefs. But Richard Reeves’s book Of Boys and Men avoids predictability, blending statistical insight and easygoing wit to craft a fruitful exploration of male malaise.
Cormac McCarthy, who passed away today, gives readers reason to suspect that he did not shut the door on God before his life ended. His last two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, offer more than just an artistic representation of reality’s inescapable brutality. They forcefully struggle with the greatest questions of human existence. Like any good work of art, these books don’t allow any reader—religious, atheist, materialist, Christian—to walk away feeling perfectly comfortable in their understanding of the world.
The Soviet regime is formally gone, but the legacy of its formidable security apparatus lives on. There was never a “decommunization” process in the wake of the USSR’s collapse. The vast majority of those who had participated in its structures and atrocities escaped punishment, and many of them created political careers in the post-communist era. People like Vladimir Putin were deeply marked by their socialization within that apparatus.
Newsletters
A properly ordered life builds strength of mind, soul, and body. This collection offers reflections on the state of sports in our society.
Can we trust our senses? Are theology and scientific inquiry at odds? How has our world developed into what we experience today? Public Discourse authors thoughtfully consider these questions, among others, about the evolutionary theory of reality.
Scholars Robert George and Jameson Doig posit alternate perspectives on the nature of marriage. Through this exchange, they offer compelling arguments and insights on both sides of the issue and ultimately demonstrate that although they disagree, they are "united in the conviction that it is an issue on which reasonable people of goodwill can and do reach divergent conclusions."
Why do settled principles such as prior restraint or ex post facto laws exist in our jurisprudence? Hadley Arke's Constitutional Illusions and Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law examines landmark cases in law in order to sketch both the mystery and natural law based necessity of key facets of American Constitutionalism. With Arkes' book as the impetus, Arkes and O'Brien further deliberate about the nature of natural law.
