This week your professor continues a very brief introduction into the early rivals of Christianity. We know of a great many religious cults which existed in ancient times, most of which have vanished ...

Yascha Mounk’s new book “The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time” arrives at a crucial juncture for American liberalism. In this timely and incisive work, Mounk confronts the rising ...

The discovery at Nag Hammadi began with an Arab villager whose name was Mohammed Ali going with his brothers on an ordinary errand. They saddled up their camels and they rode out from their village, a ...

The book attempts a sort of archaeology of African gnosis as a system of knowledge in which major philosophical questions recently have arisen: first, concerning the form, the content, and the style ...

Just before Christmas, an article appeared in The Washington Post comparing the Star Wars prequel trilogy to the “Gnostic gospels,” such as the “Gospel of Thomas” and the “Gospel of Judas”: “Like the ...

Morpheus, a man with circular mirrored glasses, approaches Neo Anderson, a young man who feels something is wrong with the world. “You are a slave, Neo,” the man continues. “You, like everyone else, ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. It opens with an account of an Arab peasant’s accidental discovery, in 1945, of a cache of thirteen leather-bound ...