In a wide-ranging defense of the liberal tradition broadly defined—that is, the various approaches to politics that see government as the protector of freedom and that are associated with such thinkers as John Locke, James Madison, and Edmund Burke—Peter Berkowitz addresses a few of the recent attacks on this tradition. Among these is the claim by some religious conservatives that liberalism is inherently corrosive to religion and even to virtue itself. To the contrary, argues Berkowitz: while freedom and virtue are always in tension, the best of liberal thought has always recognized the importance, if not the necessity, of religion for the wellbeing of a democratic polity. (Interview by William Kristol. Video, 25 minutes.)

Reviewing Stranger Than Fiction, a new history of the 20th-century novel, Joseph Epstein draws attention to what’s missing:

A novelist and short-story writer who gets no mention whatsoever in Stranger Than Fiction is Isaac Bashevis Singer. When from time to time I am asked who among the writers of the past half century is likely to be read 50 years from now, Singer’s is the first name that comes to mind. His novels and stories can be sexy, but sex, unlike in many of the novels of Norman Mailer, William Styron, or Philip Roth, is never chiefly about sex. His stories are about that much larger subject, the argument of human beings with God. What Willa Cather and Isaac Bashevis Singer have that too few of the other novelists discussed in Stranger Than Fiction possess are central, important, great subjects.