Jean Bethke Elshtain, on Democracy on Trial

Barry Alan Shain, on communalism in early American Protestantism

Christopher Wolfe, on the moral basis for strong local government

A. G. Mojtabai, on how contemporary novelists ignore religion

Robert Pinsky, on the challenges of translating Dante's Inferno

Suzanne Wolfe, on choosing books for children

Amy Waldman, on the ersatz community of TV shopping networks

Mark Crispin Miller, on the dehumanized feeling so common in modern advertising

Ted Prescott, on the Whitney Biennial, Bruce Nauman, and the "Mutant Materials" exhibit

Edward Rothstein, on the inner meaning of music and mathematics