In the June edition of First Things, the good doctor returns with a Red Chinese pandemic related essay that covers two of his recent reads while quarantined in Paris.

COVID-19 will no doubt be mastered in time; there will be a vaccine, perhaps a treatment. But it will have dented mankind’s belief, or illusion, that it has everything under control, give or take a blip on the upward ascent to a life without suffering, the unpleasantly untoward or the unforeseen. For us after the epidemic, science will have strengthened its grasp but shortened its reach.