Ed Simon

Tales of the city and beyond.

Samuel Roth was the sort of bookseller whose wares came wrapped in brown paper.

On the porous, ever-shifting boundaries between science and speculation.

Forged in the cauldron of Chicago’s streets and factories, born from the experience of workers in the mills and plants of Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland.

A reconsideration of Robert Frost at 150.

Jonathan Edwards’s sermon reflects the complicated religious culture of eighteenth-century America, influenced not just by Calvinism, but Newtonian physics as well.

In a covenantal nation like the United States, words are the very ligaments that hold the body together, and what words we choose become everything.

Is Jefferson's Bible evidence that the Founding Fathers engaged with scripture to birth a Christian nation? Or that they sought to foster a new secular order?

The US Supreme Court's most recent decisions undermine centuries of established secularism within American government.

The captivity narrative as creation myth.

Coming to love Puritan poetry is an odd aesthetic journey. It's the sort of thing you expect people partial to bowties and gin gimlets to get involved with.