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
Fr. James Martin, SJ, has attempted to build a bridge between the Catholic Church and the LGBT community, but by shirking the difficulty of confrontation, he has traded genuine encounter for a thin and generic substitute.
John Stuart Mill foreshadows the deeply intolerant faith and agenda of contemporary liberalism.
It is often alleged that the American founders lacked a unified and coherent political theory. To the contrary, a recent book by Thomas West shows that the founders broadly agreed on a philosophy of natural rights, calling for both the protection of liberty and the promotion of virtue.
Nick Spencer’s recent collection of essays reminds us to appreciate the complex relationship between Christianity and modernity.
The authors in this symposium have offered insightful analyses of Bloom’s book and the contemporary university it describes. Can what has been lost be recovered? If so, this will come through restoration of the imagination.
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.
