Charles Rosen, an influential music critic, reviews Robert Philip’s new book, Performing Music in the Age of Recording in The New York Review of Books. The article raises a number of important questions and issues. [Read Rosen's article, "Playing Music: The Lost Freedom."]

William F. Buckley, Jr., perhaps the single most influential conservative thinker in America today, turned 80 on November 24. National Review,
the magazine he founded in 1955, became the engine for an intellectual
awakening among American conservatives. From the time I was
a teenager, I tuned in regularly to his television program, Firing Line, and watched Buckley at his best in intellectual combat and exchange.

The Walt Disney Company and Walden Media are set to release The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe on December 9 — so get ready for a major cultural event. I’ll provide much more material about the series, the movie, C. S. Lewis, and the cultural impact of this film in coming days. For now, I want to draw attention to two excellent articles published in the new edition of Reformation 21, the online journal of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

Sex and romance remain big issues in popular culture–and for good reason. In a fallen world, issues of sexuality and romantic love are prime candidates for corruption and confusion. HBO’s Emmy-winning Sex and the City may serve as the most potent symbol of the secular distortion of romance and the postmodern confusion of sexuality that is now taken for granted in many sectors of American society.

Bookstore shelves abound with titles offering advice for parents. Various psychologists, self-appointed “experts,” and medical doctors offer advice on a range of topics, reflecting an ever broader array of worldviews. Books on parenting adolescents have been a special growth industry for some time, with puzzled and harried parents often trying to figure out what is going on in the minds of their teenagers. A new offering in this field, The Teen Code, now offers advice on parenting teens with a unique twist–the book was written by a 17-year-old boy.

Former President Jimmy Carter has responded to my commentary on his book, Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis. I stand by my review, but out of respect for Mr. Carter, I will gladly publish his response in full:

CNN founder Ted Turner once remarked, “If I only had a little humility, I would be perfect.” In a strange and almost perfectly ironic sense, this statement encapsulates the spirit of our age–an attitude that gives lip service to humility while celebrating self-promotion. C. J. Mahaney seeks to set the record straight in his new book, Humility: True Greatness.

Former president Jimmy Carter has written yet another book — his twentieth — and he has hit the media circuit in order to promote his latest project. Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis represents the former president’s return to familiar themes, even as it will add new layers of confusion concerning his actual beliefs and values.

The issues of dating, courtship, and marriage have become hot-button concerns among American evangelicals–and especially among young people, their parents, and those who would minister among them. This much is clear: The model of dating, “hooking up,” and romantic involvement that prevails in the larger culture is incompatible with the Christian understanding of marriage, love, sex, and romance.

Our moral imagination is haunted by monsters–and the greatest aspect of this horror is the fact that so many monsters are real. Is the world ready to face the reality of Mao Zedong?

Does a boy need a dad? Peggy Drexler argues that a new generation of boys is being raised by a corps of “maverick moms” who are redefining parenthood, reshaping masculinity, and proving themselves to be superior to fathers in the raising of sons.

The Swedish Academy announced Thursday that the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature had been awarded to British playwright Harold Pinter. The Academy released a statement explaining that “Harold Pinter is generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century,” adding: “That he occupies a position as a modern classic is illustrated by his name entering the language as an adjective used to describe a particular atmosphere and environment in drama: ‘Pinteresque.’”