There is a sense that things are falling apart. America feels less united. Political rancor is part of it, but what is causing that rancor to deepen and spread?

One answer, as Joseph Bottum observes in the August issue of National Review, is that “there is no meaningful private life to which to retreat.” For so many, home, church, and community aren’t the bedrocks they once were. The collapse of the Mainline Protestant churches, once the “central denominations in American religious life,” is taking a toll on our entire culture. Across the land, it was these churches where “you’d go to look for America itself.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is troubled by “the decline of both religion and liberal education” in the West and our resulting alienation from our understanding of ourselves. Reviewing Sebastian Junger’s In My Time of Dying, in which the celebrated author writes of his near-death experience and what it taught him about “the idea of an afterlife,” Hirsi Ali calls the book “a meditation on life in the dark light of death,” a memoir that can guide us back toward understanding “what and whom we’re willing to live and die for.”

The August 2024 issue of National Review offers not only these profound meditations by Bottum and Hirsi Ali, two of today’s most penetrating writers, but an excursion to view “The Ghost Ships of the Great Lakes” with Luther Ray Abel. In the latest installment of Our Spacious Skies, Luther, NR’s very own “Midwestern mariner,” strikes out to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to pay homage to the “flesh, steel, and timber revenants of the Great Lakes.”

Of course, the new issue also offers helpings of politics and policy — it’s an election year, after all — along with pieces on books, art, film, and language. In this issue:

As with every issue, the August number treats you to comic musings from Rob Long (don’t miss this one — the humor is so dark it had us editors spitting out our coffee) and James Lileks (do you have “lawnbrain”?), and the moody aperçus of Richard Brookhiser.

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