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RJN: On St. John and Mormons

With stunning abruptness we’re jostled from the Christmas Mass (the Christ Mass) to the feast of St. Stephen, proto-martyr. And then on to the slaughter of the Holy Innocents. It is an antidote to the sentimentality that inevitably attends devotion to the baby Jesus. A sentimentality, let it . . . . Continue Reading »

Bottum: Lawyers and the Life of the Mind

Are lawyers intellectuals? They’re smart, certainly, as a class, and they work primarily with their minds. But, then, engineers are also smart, and engineers aren’t intellectuals¯at least, according to the old two-cultures distinction that C.P. Snow bemoaned back in the 1950s .For . . . . Continue Reading »

JB: Duke University Rape Case

In response to last week’s news that the Durham prosecutor has finally dropped the rape charges against the college lacrosse players, Duke University president Richard Brodhead issued a statement that expressed relief, labeled the remaining charges questionable, and called for the replacement . . . . Continue Reading »

RJN: O Come Let Us Adore Him

"I don’t know why he has to spoil the season by bringing that up. For him every day is Good Friday." Her complaint was against Father’s homily, which underscored that the baby Jesus was born to die. Yes, Good Friday, but Easter, too. Although Father insisted that we should not . . . . Continue Reading »

Linton: Messiahs for This Christmas

Which Messiah ? It’s not a theological question; it’s a question about what to listen to when hanging the tinsel. No piece of music is so linked with Christmas as Handel’s great oratorio, and there are lots of choices (I stopped counting the Amazon list at one hundred). There are . . . . Continue Reading »

RJN: A Few Items …

Herewith a few items, definitely not in order of importance: "Group invites world to come together for Orgasm Day ." That’s the headline in the Princetonian . "This year’s winter solstice will be hotter than usual, if a Princeton-inspired movement has its way. The antiwar . . . . Continue Reading »

Anderson: Peter Singer’s Animals

Animal-rights activists are up in arms about a recent statement by Peter Singer¯a bioethics professor at Princeton’s Center for Human Values who was, once upon a time, beloved by those activists for his 1975 book Animal Liberation . The problem seems to be this: A neurosurgeon Tipu Aziz . . . . Continue Reading »

Bottum: Housekeeping

If you look over at the top of the lefthand column, here at the First Things website, you’ll see that we’ve begun advertising for next year’s junior fellows .Two years ago, we brought onboard John Rose and Mary Angelita Ruiz, and this year we’ve had Ryan T. Anderson and . . . . Continue Reading »

Bottum: Christmas in New York

Another Christmas Rerun ¯this one from the new December issue of First Things . Shouldn’t you be subscribing ? Christmas in New York There was a woman screaming on Park Avenue, flecks of saliva spraying from her mouth as she raged into her cell phone, "It’s not my fault." . . . . Continue Reading »

JB: A Christmas Carol Revisited

Another in our series of Christmas Reruns ¯writings on the season from our authors through the years. Here’s an essay I did back in 2001 for the Weekly Standard , an attempt to figure out why the mess of A Christmas Carol remains the greatest Christmas fiction ever written. The Ghost of . . . . Continue Reading »

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