Jean Bethke Elshtain has been hailed as one of this country's most influential public intellectuals. Michael Walzer called her award-winning Democracy on Trial "the work of a truly independent, deeply serious, politically engaged, and wonderfully provocative political theorist." These rare qualities are once again vividly in force in Just War Against Terrorism. In this hard-hitting book, Elshtain advocates "just war" in times of crisis and mounts a reasoned attack against the defenses of t...

Habits of the High-Tech Heart addresses the major drawbacks to the network computerization of our society and the growing tendency to substitute technology and innovation for morality and virtue.The solution is not to dismantle our growing technologies but to pay more attention to the "habits of the heart." Schultze calls for a renewal of community and offers readers ways to live by habits of the heart in the information age.

In what we tell ourselves is an age of reason, we are behaving increasingly irrationally. An astonishing number of people subscribe to celebrity endorsed cults, Mayan armageddon prophecies, scientism, and other varieties of new age, anti-enlightenment philosophies. Millions more advance popular conspiracy theories: AIDS was created in a CIA laboratory, Princess Diana was assassinated, and the 9/11 attacks were an inside job.In The World Turned Upside Down, Melanie Phillips explains...

Thanks to collapsing birthrates, much of Europe is on a path of willed self-extinction. The untold story is that birthrates in Muslim nations are declining faster than anywhere elseâ??at a rate never before documented. Europe, even in its decline, may have the resources to support an aging population, if at a terrible economic and cultural cost. But in the impoverished Islamic world, an aging population means a civilization on the brink of total collapseâ?? something Islamic terrorists kno...

Scruton shows how the different religious and philosophical roots of Western and Islamic societies have resulted in those societies' profoundly divergent beliefs about the nature of political order. For one thing, the idea of the social contract, crucial to the self-conception of Western nations, is entirely absent in Islamic societies. Similarly, Scruton explains why the notions of territorial jurisdiction, citizenship, and the independent legitimacy of secular authority and law are both ...

**Edward Said has long been considered one of the world’s most compelling public intellectuals, taking on a remarkable array of topics with his many publications. But no single book has encompassed the vast scope of his stimulating erudition quite like Power, Politics, and Culture.“A fascinating, oblique entry into the mind of one whose own writings . . . are a brilliant questioning chronicle of contemporary culture and values.” --Nadine Gordimer**In these twenty-eight inte...

Drawing inspiration from philosophy, history, and literature, Martha C. Nussbaum takes us to task for our religious intolerance, identifies the fear behind it, and offers a way past fear toward a more equitable, imaginative, and free society, through the consistent application of universal principles of respect for conscience.

In 2004, the French government instituted a ban on the wearing of "conspicuous signs" of religious affiliation in public schools. Though the ban applies to everyone, it is aimed at Muslim girls wearing headscarves. Proponents of the law insist it upholds France's values of secular liberalism and regard the headscarf as symbolic of Islam's resistance to modernity. The Politics of the Veil is an explosive refutation of this view, one that bears important implications for us all....

**“Uncompromising and unconventional . . . Cornel West is an eloquent prophet with attitude.” — Newsweek“"A timely analysis about the current state of democratic systems in America." — The Boston Globe**In Democracy Matters, Cornel West argues that if America is to become a better steward of democratization around the world, we must first wake up to the long history of corruption that has plagued our own democracy: racism, free market fundamentali...

Bernard Lewis is recognized around the globe as one of the leading authorities on Islam. Hailed as "the world's foremost Islamic scholar" (Wall Street Journal ), as "a towering figure among experts on the culture and religion of the Muslim world" (Baltimore Sun ), and as "the doyen of Middle Eastern studies" (New York Times ), Lewis is nothing less than a national treasure, a trusted voice that politicians, journalists, historians, and the general public have all turned to for insight into...

Dawkins and Hitchens have convinced many western intellectuals that secularism is the way forward. But most people don't read their books before deciding whether to be religious. Instead, they inherit their faith from their parents, who often innoculate them against the elegant arguments of secularists. And what no one has noticed is that far from declining, the religious are expanding their share of the population: in fact, the more religious people are, the more children they have. The c...

Like many people in America and around the world, Talal Asad experienced the events of September 11, 2001, largely through the media and the emotional response of others. For many non-Muslims, "the suicide bomber" quickly became the icon of "an Islamic culture of death"-a conceptual leap that struck Asad as problematic. Is there a "religiously-motivated terrorism?" If so, how does it differ from other cruelties? What makes its motivation "religious"? Where does it stand in relation to othe...