These are mainly review essays — academic book reviews are not listed here and can be found on my CV.

“We’re Not Asking the Right Questions About Age.” New York Times (March 2024).

“Putting Security First.” Commonweal (January 2024).

“The Rock and the Peregrine.” Commonweal (November 2022).

“Inside the Post-Liberal Mind,” The Bias Magazine (April 2022).

“They Saved the Church, but at What Cost?” Tocqueville 21 (January 2022).

“End the Generation Wars.” The New Republic (December 2021).

“Nudging toward Theocracy: Adrian Vermeule’s War on Liberalism.” Dissent (Spring 2020).

“The Promise of a Feminist Midlife Crisis.” Review of Susanne Schmidt, Midlife Crisis: The Feminist Origins of a Chauvinist Cliché (Chicago, 2020), The New Republic (March 2020).

“Confessions of a White Moderate.” Thoughts on the renaming of the Carr Building at Duke, The Abusable Past (October 2019).

“Bad Romance.” Review of Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (Harvard, 2019), Boston Review (October 2019).

“Out of Touch.” Review of George Weigel, The Irony of Modern Catholic History (Basic Books, 2019), Commonweal (September 2019).

“What Are We Fighting For?” Review of Petra Goedde, The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 2019), Sojourners (August 2019).

“No One is Too Old to be President.” With Sari Edelstein. Op-ed in Washington Post, April 2019.

“Europe’s Ghosts: The Bloody History of a Myth.” Review of Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Harvard University Press, 2018), The Nation (8 April 2019).

“Canon Fodder.” Reflections on the Church’s sex abuse crisis for a forum on ecclesiology and law at The Immanent Frame, a blog run by the Social Science Research Council.

“Democracy Without God.” Review of Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (Pantheon, 2019), Boston Review.

“The Enlightenment We Need.” Review of David Wootton, Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison (Belknap, 2018), Commonweal.

“Aging into Feminism.” Special issue of Boston Review, Summer 2018.

“The Divine Comity: On Partnership in Postwar Germany.” Contribution to a forum on Noah Strote, Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany (Yale University Press, 2017), H-Diplo.

“A Serious House.” The Point (Winter 2018) [a reflection on the origins of my first book project]

“The Uses of History for Life.” Contribution to a forum on Hugo Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics (Princeton University Press, 2016), Journal of Politics, Religion, & Ideology 19 (2018).

“Locating French Liberalism.” Contribution to a forum on In Search of the Liberal Moment, ed. Stephen Sawyer and Iain Stewart (Palgrave, 2016), Journal of Politics, Religion, & Ideology 18 (2017).

“Modern Family” [review of Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2017)], Dissent Summer 2017.

“Holy Wars: Secularism and the Invention of Religion.” Boston Review May/June 2016.

“A Servant Heart: How Neoliberalism Came to Be.” Boston Review October/November 2015.

“The Weimar Century and the Transnational History of Ideas.” Review of Udi Greenberg, The Weimar Century (Princeton University Press, 2014), H-Diplo, September 2015.

“All Churches Have Heretics: Catholicism, Human Rights, and the Uses of History for Life.” Review of Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) on “The Immanent Frame.”

“Beyond Tocquville: A Plea to Stop ‘Taking Religion Seriously’.” Modern Intellectual History 10, 3 (October 2013), 697-708.

“An Intended Absence? Democracy and the Unintended Reformation.” Review essay on Brad Gregory, Unintended Reformation (Harvard University Press, 2012), on “The Immanent Frame.”

“The Heretical Imperative.” Review of Benjamin Lazier, God, Interrupted (Princeton University Press, 2008), on “Killing the Buddha.”