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
Radical, by Maajid Nawaz, brings the reader inside the individual human dynamics of one young man’s transition into extremist Islamism and his eventual departure from it.
A young Muslim author learns to seek the truth about God through questioning instead of blind faith.
In his new book on Abraham Lincoln, Rich Lowry depicts our famous president as a lover of freedom, commerce, and progress whom we revere on the same plane as the founders because he, like them, articulated enduring principles that we still value.
Gabriel Schoenfeld’s new book, A Bad Day on the Romney Campaign, offers an insider’s account of how misguided campaign tactics led to Mitt Romney’s defeat in the 2012 presidential election.
In The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Rod Dreher eulogizes his little sister with a hagiography worthy of St. Therese herself, while also evaluating his own relationships—to people and to place—according to the virtue of stability proposed by St. Benedict.
As Stephen Krason’s new book argues, America has departed from the founders’ design, and the founders may be partially responsible. But this claim is only as strong as the interpretation of the founding behind it.
Jonathan Last’s new book attributes population decline and the birth dearth to two trends that started in the Enlightenment era—first, an effort to limit death; second, an effort to control birth. Both trends are guided by a desire to control nature.
Calvin Coolidge is an exemplar for conservative leaders because he was the very opposite of an ideological dreamer; he saw his vocation as a duty to provide the country that elected him with honest and frugal government that respected limits.
Michael Klarman’s history of the push for same-sex marriage shows just how recently it’s developed and how its leaders lack substantive arguments for the nature and purpose of marriage itself.
