Ross Gregory Douthat

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About Ross Gregory Douthat

Ross Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times op-ed page. He is the author of To Change The Church, Privilege, and Grand New Party. Before joining the Times he was a senior editor for The Atlantic. He is the film critic for National Review, and he has appeared regularly on television, including Charlie Rose, PBS Newshour, and Real Time with Bill Maher.

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Books By Ross Gregory Douthat

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The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success Feb 25, 2020

by Ross Gregory Douthat

( 219 )

$12.99

From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a powerful portrait of how our turbulent age is defined by dark forces seemingly beyond our control

Today the Western world seems to be in crisis. But beneath our social media frenzy and reality television politics, the deeper reality is one of drift, repetition, and dead ends. The Decadent Society explains what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of “sustainable decadence,” a civilizational languor that could endure for longer than we think.

Ranging from our grounded space shuttles to our Silicon Valley villains, from our blandly recycled film and television—a new Star Wars saga, another Star Trek series, the fifth Terminator sequel—to the escapism we’re furiously chasing through drug use and virtual reality, Ross Douthat argues that many of today’s discontents and derangements reflect a sense of futility and disappointment—a feeling that the future was not what was promised, that the frontiers have all been closed, and that the paths forward lead only to the grave.

In this environment we fear catastrophe, but in a certain way we also pine for it—because the alternative is to accept that we are permanently decadent: aging, comfortable and stuck, cut off from the past and no longer confident in the future, spurning both memory and ambition while we wait for some saving innovation or revelations, growing old unhappily together in the glowing light of tiny screens.

Correcting both optimists who insist that we’re just growing richer and happier with every passing year and pessimists who expect collapse any moment, Douthat provides an enlightening diagnosis of the modern condition—how we got here, how long our age of frustration might last, and how, whether in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end.

Other Formats: Audible Audiobook , Hardcover , Paperback , Audio CD

To Kill a Mockingbird SparkNotes Literature Guide (SparkNotes Literature Guide Series Book 62) Apr 9, 2014

by SparkNotes

( 316 )

$2.99

To Kill a Mockingbird SparkNotes Literature Guide by Harper Lee
Making the reading experience fun!

When a paper is due, and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis; explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols; a review quiz; and essay topics. Lively and accessible, SparkNotes is perfect for late-night studying and paper writing.

Includes:

An A+ Essay—an actual literary essay written about the Spark-ed book—to show students how a paper should be written.
16 pages devoted to writing a literary essay including: a glossary of literary terms
Step-by-step tutoring on how to write a literary essay
A feature on how not to plagiarize

Other Formats: Paperback

Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream Jun 24, 2008

by Ross Douthat , Reihan Salam

( 42 )

$12.99

In a provocative challenge to Republican conventional wisdom, two of the Right's rising young thinkers call upon the GOP to focus on the interests and needs of working-class voters.Grand New Party lays bare the failures of the conservative revolution and presents a detailed blueprint for building the next Republican majority. Blending history, analysis, and fresh, often controversial recommendations, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam argue that it is time to move beyond the Reagan legacy and the current Republican power structure. With specific proposals covering such hot-button topics as immigration, health care, and taxes, Grand New Party shakes up the Right, challenges the Left, and confronts the changing political landscape.

Other Formats: Hardcover , Paperback

Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics Apr 17, 2012

by Ross Gregory Douthat

( 373 )

$12.99

As the youngest-ever op-ed columnist for the New York Times, Ross Douthat has emerged as one of the most provocative and influential voices of his generation. In Bad Religion he offers a masterful and hard-hitting account of how American Christianity has gone off the rails—and why it threatens to take American society with it.

Writing for an era dominated by recession, gridlock, and fears of American decline, Douthat exposes the spiritual roots of the nation’s political and economic crises. He argues that America’s problem isn’t too much religion, as a growing chorus of atheists have argued; nor is it an intolerant secularism, as many on the Christian right believe. Rather, it’s bad religion: the slow-motion collapse of traditional faith and the rise of a variety of pseudo-Christianities that stroke our egos, indulge our follies, and encourage our worst impulses.

These faiths speak from many pulpits—conservative and liberal, political and pop cultural, traditionally religious and fashionably “spiritual”—and many of their preachers claim a Christian warrant. But they are increasingly offering distortions of traditional Christianity—not the real thing. Christianity’s place in American life has increasingly been taken over, not by atheism, Douthat argues, but by heresy: debased versions of Christian faith that breed hubris, greed, and self-absorption.

In a story that moves from the 1950s to the age of Obama, he brilliantly charts institutional Christianity’s decline from a vigorous, mainstream, and bipartisan faith—which acted as a “vital center” and the moral force behind the civil rights movement—through the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s to the polarizing debates of the present day. Ranging from Glenn Beck to Barack Obama, Eat Pray Love to Joel Osteen, and Oprah Winfrey to The Da Vinci Code, Douthat explores how the prosperity gospel’s mantra of “pray and grow rich,” a cult of self-esteem that reduces God to a life coach, and the warring political religions of left and right have crippled the country’s ability to confront our most pressing challenges and accelerated American decline.

His urgent call for a revival of traditional Christianity is sure to generate controversy, and it will be vital reading for all those concerned about the imperiled American future.

Other Formats: Audible Audiobook , Hardcover , Paperback , Audio CD

To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism Mar 27, 2018

by Ross Gregory Douthat

( 85 )

$12.99

A New York Times columnist and one of America’s leading conservative thinkers considers Pope Francis’s efforts to change the church he governs in a book that is “must reading for every Christian who cares about the fate of the West and the future of global Christianity” (Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option).

Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1936, today Pope Francis is the 266th pope of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Francis’s stewardship of the Church, while perceived as a revelation by many, has provoked division throughout the world. “If a conclave were to be held today,” one Roman source told The New Yorker, “Francis would be lucky to get ten votes.”

In his “concise, rhetorically agile…adroit, perceptive, gripping account (The New York Times Book Review), Ross Douthat explains why the particular debate Francis has opened—over communion for the divorced and the remarried—is so dangerous: How it cuts to the heart of the larger argument over how Christianity should respond to the sexual revolution and modernity itself, how it promises or threatens to separate the church from its own deep past, and how it divides Catholicism along geographical and cultural lines. Douthat argues that the Francis era is a crucial experiment for all of Western civilization, which is facing resurgent external enemies (from ISIS to Putin) even as it struggles with its own internal divisions, its decadence, and self-doubt. Whether Francis or his critics are right won’t just determine whether he ends up as a hero or a tragic figure for Catholics. It will determine whether he’s a hero, or a gambler who’s betraying both his church and his civilization into the hands of its enemies.

“A balanced look at the struggle for the future of Catholicism…To Change the Church is a fascinating look at the church under Pope Francis” (Kirkus Reviews). Engaging and provocative, this is “a pot-boiler of a history that examines a growing ecclesial crisis” (Washington Independent Review of Books).

Other Formats: Audible Audiobook , Hardcover , Paperback

Dracula (SparkNotes Literature Guide) (SparkNotes Literature Guide Series) Aug 12, 2014

by SparkNotes

( 14 )

$4.99

Dracula (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Bram Stoker
Making the reading experience fun!

Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes is a new breed of study guide: smarter, better, faster.

Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides:

chapter-by-chapter analysis
explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols
a review quiz and essay topics
Lively and accessible, these guides are perfect for late-night studying and writing papers.

Other Formats: Paperback

The Picture of Dorian Gray (SparkNotes Literature Guide) (SparkNotes Literature Guide Series) Aug 12, 2014

by SparkNotes

( 3 )

$4.99

The Picture of Dorian Gray (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Oscar Wilde
Making the reading experience fun!
Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes is a new breed of study guide: smarter, better, faster. Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides: *Chapter-by-chapter analysis
*Explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols
*A review quiz and essay topicsLively and accessible, these guides are perfect for late-night studying and writing papers

Other Formats: Paperback

Farewell to Manzanar (SparkNotes Literature Guide) (SparkNotes Literature Guide Series) Aug 12, 2014

by SparkNotes

( 2 )

$4.99

Farewell to Manzanar (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
Making the reading experience fun!

Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes is a new breed of study guide: smarter, better, faster.Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides:chapter-by-chapter analysis
explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols
a review quiz and essay topics
Lively and accessible, these guides are perfect for late-night studying and writing papers.

Other Formats: Paperback

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (SparkNotes Literature Guide) (SparkNotes Literature Guide Series) Aug 12, 2014

by SparkNotes

( 7 )

$4.99

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Robert Louis Stevenson
Making the reading experience fun!

Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes is a new breed of study guide: smarter, better, faster.

Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides:

chapter-by-chapter analysis
explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols
a review quiz and essay topics
Lively and accessible, these guides are perfect for late-night studying and writing papers.

Other Formats: Paperback

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