Kevin Staley-Joyce

As a read through the First Things archive can attest, the intersection of religion, culture, and public life is usually complex enough to require analysis, not mere observation as a spectator. New York City, the ” prolepsis of the New Jerusalem ,” has been a venue for quite a bit of . . . . Continue Reading »

Jennifer Fulwiler, atheist-turned Catholic apologist, runs Conversion Diary , a beautifully executed and winsome blog chronicling “what it’s like to be part of an orthodox faith after a life of nonbelief.” Several weeks back, she posted an audio file of her riveting yet refreshingly . . . . Continue Reading »

One recent addition to the same-sex marriage debate is the claim that by advancing arguments that civil marriage ought not to become gender-neutral, conservatives have “blood on their hands,” having committed the polemical equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theater, especially given . . . . Continue Reading »

Back in our December 2009 issue, we published a While We’re At It needling Conservapedia , the curious online home of the Conservative Bible Project . The underpinnings of that project, it seemed, stressed conservatism first and Christianity second. Sneering leftist hermeneuts, it’s . . . . Continue Reading »

If a politician stood before us and proclaimed, polemically, that his campaign would be entirely without polemics, would we believe him? Or, worse, if he said his campaign would try to avoid politics? Tyranny over language either works or backfires spectacularly in political movements, and each . . . . Continue Reading »

Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant by Alan Jacobs Eerdmans, 154 Pages, $18 Wayfaring , Jacobs’ new collection of essays, puts on display both his wide reading and the Christian worldview that animates his intellectual life. The best way to taste Wayfaring ’s varied collection of . . . . Continue Reading »

Popular in requiems and funereal music, 1 Corinthians 15:55 can rouse tear-sodden lids, but sees only the rarest treatment in music’s popular genres. To dispatch with this dilemma, poet David Musgrave has infused the verse with new musical nuance in a poem titled “On the Inevitable . . . . Continue Reading »

Google’s expanding empire has of late met with harsh criticism on the fronts of privacy and censorship, but has so far retained a magisterial air—making few concessions and continuing to push acceptance of its new technological paradigms. Amidst criticism that the company has done little . . . . Continue Reading »

An odd article appeared in today’s Ottawa Citizen , giving account of the research of Dr. Georg Northoff, a neuroscientist at Ottawa’s Institute of Mental Health Research. After a recent period of investigation, Northoff proclaimed that while God may well exist, the theistic domain will . . . . Continue Reading »

There’s always been a sense of dueling antithesis between the Catholic media’s two NCRs—the National Catholic Reporter and the National Catholic Register . But readers’ gripes normally center on questions of orthodoxy rather than good faith. Trust in good faith, however, can . . . . Continue Reading »