“Academics repeatedly declare the natural law to be dead,” observed former Notre Dame law professor Anton-Hermann Chroust. “But every twenty-five years or so it comes in again by the back door when some crisis shows the failure of utilitarian

Northwestern Europe’s early development owes much to the Carolingian dynasty, which led Germanic society into Christendom from the dead end of paganism. It set the stage for the lush flowering of knightly culture, with its ideals of chivalry, courtesy, and

Homeland Elegies: A Novel, by Ayad Akhtar (Little, Brown & Co.; 368 pp., $28.00).

Mark Twain wrote in his 1897 travel book, Following the Equator: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick