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
Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, once a slaveholder, was the sole defender of black civil rights on the Court during the Jim Crow era. Peter Canellos’s book, The Great Dissenter, explains how Harlan’s relationship with his African-American half-brother shaped his views on racial equality.
A new critical commentary on Lewis’s classic 1943 work provides a treasure trove of interpretation and supplementary material. Lewis’s warnings about the consequences of jettisoning natural law—what he referred to as the Tao—remain as trenchant today as they were when delivered during the Second World War.
Andrew Walker’s new book provides biblical-theological resources for navigating an increasingly anti-Christian culture in the West, especially the United States. Baptists have been here before, prior to the Act of Toleration in England and the First Amendment to the US Constitution. They flourished in the midst of hostility as a countercultural force for the common good. We can too.
A new book pushing back against fundamentalism and advocating open conversation should make readers rethink their positions. What is the proper relationship between abstract reason and personal knowledge in the academic arena? Perhaps it is a sign of admirable intellectual resilience rather than feebleness to have traits of both the hedgehog and the fox.
To believe that we cannot both enjoy the work of a disreputable artist and condemn the artist is to underestimate our own capacity for ethical discernment and to deprive ourselves needlessly of sources of wisdom.
Policy can tax vice and remunerate virtue. But policy cannot do what churches, fathers, mothers, friends, and coworkers can do, which is to invite individuals into fruitful, sacrificial communities.
Sohrab Ahmari’s new book enlightens in many respects, while falling short before the tribunal of moral and political prudence. Still, it succeeds admirably in making the case for “the wisdom of tradition” as the one thing most needful today.
In Andrew Walker’s new book, religious liberty is presented less as a political doctrine than as a description of reality itself. In this view, religious liberty is the logical consequence of an orthodox view of God as the transcendent horizon of all human effort and a view of human beings as agents with consciences not subject to direct political coercion.
Even as a woman shapes the child growing within her, the joys and trials of pregnancy are shaping her, sanctifying her, and teaching her how to depend on others during this season of peculiar service.
