Ross Douthat - Essays

Essays

Against the Atheists

Claremont Review of Books, Spring 2008

Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great About Christianity is a fitting rebuke to the neo-atheists. But the book's strength as a rejoinder to atheism often feels like its weakness as an apology for Christianity.

Is This Man a Conservative?

Slate, November 2007

The tension between conservatism and evangelicalism has been in evidence throughout the presidency of George W. Bush, and it's nowhere more apparent than in the divided soul of Michael Gerson.

Right Minds

Intercollegiate Review, Fall/Winter 2007

American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, which attempts to do for the American Right what the 1911 Britannica does for the rest of God’s creation, sometimes feels like a compendium of cranks, an almanac of oddballs, a parade of “beautiful losers."

Blue Period

The Atlantic, September 2007

For the first time in a generation, the Democrats have the makings of a durable majority within their grasp. What’s more, they have the outlines of a message that might allow them to seize it.

Lord Have Mercy

Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2007

"I have been writing this book all my life," Christopher Hitchens declares in God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, "and intend to keep on writing it." One hopes that someone will have the courage to firmly suggest that he stop.

Crises of Faith

The Atlantic, July/August 2007

The aftermath of 9/11 has thrown the contrast between a religious America and a secular Europe into sharp relief. But our era may be remembered as the moment when the religious gulf between the continents began to slowly close.

Portrait of a Young Climber

The New York Times, July 2007

Say what you will about Samantha Joyce, the 20-something health policy adviser who rides again in Sammy’s House — the second installment in what threatens to become a long-running D.C. chick-lit saga — but she’s certainly an authentic Washington type.

Lost and Saved on Television

First Things, May 2007

For all its profanity and blasphemy, American popular culture arguably takes religious issues and debates more seriously than it used to in a more decent, less decadent era.

It's His Party

The Atlantic, February 2007

Bush is finished, but Bushism isn't - and while historians debate where this President went wrong, Republican politicians are likely to spend the next decade trying to emulate his successes.

Stephen King's American Apocalypse

First Things, February 2007

Stephen King occupies a peculiar position in American letters, a gray zone between the pulpy authors who can match his sales figures and the literary writers whose company he obviously craves.

The God of Small Things

The Atlantic, January/February 2007

Craig Venter's quest to map the human genome, in its headier moments, promised cures for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, cancer. Now his current undertaking promises something no less ambitious: a cure for our dependence on oil.

What Is The Matter With Kansas?

The Weekly Standard, November 20, 2006

As seat after seat flipped to the Democrats on Election Night, no one must have been more pleased with the results than Thomas Frank. His thesis, after all, had been vindicated. Or had it?

The Buck Starts Here

The Weekly Standard, October 9, 2006

The blame for the GOP's plight lies largely with President Bush, but it also lies with a conservative movement that seems unwilling to tailor its thinking to the scope of the challenges ahead.

Theocracy, Theocracy, Theocracy

First Things, August/September 2006

This is a paranoid moment in American politics: A host of conspiracies haunt our national imagination. And perhaps the strangest of these strange stories is the notion that twenty-first-century America is slouching toward theocracy.

Teacher Man

The New York Times, April 2006

Not every man deserves a biographer. In "The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost," Molly Worthen's biography of her former teacher, Charles Hill comes across as colorless and commonplace, a legend in his students' minds but no one else's.

The Conservative Cocoon

The Claremont Review of Books, Winter 2006

Having spent a generation complaining about liberalism's less-than-intimate relationship with reality, conservatives need to think hard about whether they're in danger of spinning themselves a similar cocoon.

Gingrich's Long Game

The Atlantic, March 2006

You can't always reach out and seize your second act; sometimes you have to be summoned. Which is why Newt's new game is a waiting game—waiting for a second chance, and a call that may not come.

The North, the South, and God

Policy Review, February and March 2006

The Civil War was Christendom’s last religious war - the last conflict in which so many people on both sides believed themselves to be dying not only for blood and soil or treaty obligations, but for a point of Christian principle.

The Party of Sam's Club

The Weekly Standard, November 2005

The Bush Presidency has three years yet to run, but this season of scandal and disillusionment is an opportune moment for conservatives to start thinking seriously about how to fashion a domestic policy from the wreckage of Bush-style, big-government conservatism.