This curious book is the latest in a series generated by an annual Symposium in Honor of Ronald Reagan sponsored by Regent University. Following the editor's introduction, seven authors offer essays (they are not designated as chapters) bearing on the theme of cultural change in the contemporary United States. As befits the project's origins, the first two essays discuss the legacy of Ronald Reagan, one exploring Reagan's goal to rehabilitate a conservative culture and equating modern liberalism with postmodernism (in which Barack Obama is implicated), and the other discoursing on Reagan's capacity to divine essential truths. Two essays focus largely on the role or obligations of Christians in modern America, and while this may be a legitimate subject for discussion, a reader who is neither Christian nor American has an uneasy sense of eavesdropping on a private debate. An expert on the family wonders whether the United States is evolving into a “postfamily” society, largely by considering the example of Sweden, and another author looks for hopeful signs of a “bottom-up” revolt against the smug intellectual meritocracy (again personified by Obama) said to be governing the country.

But there is one gem in this collection. Paul A. Cantor addresses the problem of predicting the future, and points out that most cultural prophets get it wrong, largely, he mischievously suggests, because the people who are invited to make predictions are the authorities in their field, and therefore old, while culture is made by the young. But then he identifies a remarkable exercise in cultural prophesy by the poet Vachel Lindsay, who at the age of thirty-six in 1915 published The Art of the Moving Picture, which certainly got some things wrong, but most striking was its depth of insight into the capacity of film to transform American culture, its anticipation of a kind of analysis later developed by Marshal McLuhan, and its premonition that Los Angeles would come to displace Boston at the heart of the nation's culture. Nowhere is Ronald Reagan mentioned. If this splendid essay had been submitted to this journal, the editors would surely have published it.