Matthew Schmitz

Robert P. George looks at Jewish opposition to David Weprin, the pro-SSM Democrat who lost the race to replace Anthony Weiner, and finds a parallel with Catholic controversies over denying communion: As a member of the New York state legislature, Weprin, despite his Orthodox Jewish beliefs, voted . . . . Continue Reading »

Via Matt Yglesias , David Brooks argues in favor of the communal and slightly chaotic over the comfortable and over-refined. He describes this kind of joyous messiness with the Yiddish word “haimish”: Often, as we spend more on something, what we gain in privacy and elegance we lose in . . . . Continue Reading »

Writing in Public Discourse  today, Yuval Levin argues that it is both possible and necessary to curb entitlement spending and broaden the provision of healthcare in a manner that respects the equality and dignity of all. His piece covers a good deal of ground, but one of its most . . . . Continue Reading »

One of today’s On the Square pieces features remarks by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput from a session on religious freedom at World Youth Day in Madrid. In her World Youth Day diary entry for today, Anna Halpine describes the young attendees’ enthusiastic response to the call to . . . . Continue Reading »

Founder of the World Youth Alliance and friend of First Things  Anna Halpine is chronicling events in Madrid in a “World Youth Day Diary” for Standpoint that you can find on that magazine’s weblog . In her first entry , Halpine suggests that the event is an outgrowth of the . . . . Continue Reading »

In her December 2009 essay ” How Pedophilia Lost Its Cool ,” Mary Eberstadt explained how the sometimes gleeful attacks on the Catholic Church during the sexual abuse crisis had made it more difficult for the Church’s critics to wink at pederasty and pedophilia: After all, one . . . . Continue Reading »

Via Mark DeGirolami at Mirror of Justice, I see that Italy is contemplating a ban of veils worn by Muslim women: An Italian parliamentary commission on Tuesday approved a draft law banning women from wearing veils that cover their faces in public. The draft passed by the constitutional affairs . . . . Continue Reading »

As Rusty Reno recently observed  in these pages, the poorest have been hit the hardest by the rise of out-of-wedlock birth, cohabitation, divorce, and remarriage. But Harold James , an economic historian at Princeton University and senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, notes in his . . . . Continue Reading »

New on the site today is an article by Charles J. Chaput, the newly designated leader of Philadelphia’s Catholics. If you haven’t seen it already, you can read it here . It’s a follow-up to an article last week on the same topic, which you can find here . I’ve . . . . Continue Reading »

David Brooks’ column today on life and death is thought-provoking but ambiguous at several important points. It’s not clear whether, along with Dudley Clendinen , Brooks denies the value of life with diminished capacities or whether he simply thinks patients should sometimes choose to . . . . Continue Reading »