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
Allan Bloom would not have been surprised by recent developments in American higher education, from trigger warnings and safe spaces to micro-aggressions and physical violence.
What would have happened if literature professors had continued to love literature, admire Shakespeare, and teach others to do the same? Perhaps if they had emulated Allan Bloom’s attention to words—if they’d taught writing and written well themselves—our colleges would not now be so enraged.
Souls without longing are the price to be paid for a free, comfortable, and secure life. Yet the unnatural state of radical isolation and apathetic “niceness” can only last so long.
All is not well in America—or in the University. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind offers a profound and compelling diagnosis of the common illness infecting them both and of the intimate connection between liberal education and liberty.
Willie Parker’s new memoir displays the characteristic ignorance, arrogance, and violence of the pro-choice worldview.
A new book highlights the shared anthropology and social thought of Abraham Kuyper and Pope Leo XIII without glossing over their differences.
Significant advances in evolutionary biology and the neurosciences have led many who are already committed to a materialist philosophy to offer sweeping accounts of the origin and development of life, from bacteria to the human mind and consciousness.
A culture that substitutes lawn signs and slogans for moral substance can only be renewed by the rigor of Christian thought and the actions that flow from it.
A newly published translation of “the Italian Russell Kirk” offers important insights into the philosophical roots of our culture’s nihilistic impulses—and how we might fix them.
