In 2003, the ban on partial-birth abortion was signed by President Bush”and promptly challenged in court, leading to the 2007 Supreme Court decision upholding its constitutionality, Gonzales v. Carhart… . Continue Reading »
I want to start our conversation in an unlikely place. The scene is Mainz, Germany, April 1964. Just a few months earlier, in December 1963, Vatican II had published its groundbreaking document on the liturgy… . Continue Reading »
William Faulkner once said, “The past is not dead. It is not even past.” Antietam Ridge, Bloody Lane, Little Round Top, Seminary Ridge: the scenes of carnage are now quiet parks overseen by mounted commanders frozen in bronze, but they remain alive with memory. One can almost hear the final fading echoes of the soldiers’ yells as men marched into battle as canister torn across open fields… . Continue Reading »
The Supreme Court convened on Monday in its final session of the term and released its judgments on a number of cases that have drawn deep interest”and stirred high anxiety. One of the judgments was the case of the Christian Legal Society at the Hastings Law School in California (Christian Legal Society v. Martinez). I wrote on this case in our issue of June/July (“Vast Dangers in a Small Place”), and I regret to report that the outcome turned out to be quite as grievous as the one I anticipated in that piece… . Continue Reading »
It’s a small thing, really”the shift of a word, the coining of a new phrase. But the consequences are going to be bad, and the signal it sends of American retreat on human rights comes at a terrible moment… . Continue Reading »
“Are fathers necessary?” asks Pamela Paul in the latest issue of The Atlantic. That she considers the question worth asking is a clue to how the article will conclude: “there’s nothing objectively essential about his contribution.” Published just before Father’s Day, it would be easy to dismiss such cheap contrarianism as an attention-getting stunt… . Continue Reading »
Whether Gen. David Petraeus fainted upon receiving travel orders to Afghanistan”as he did in last week’s Senate hearings”is not clear from the news reports, but President Obama managed a double-whammy by replacing Gen. Stanley McChrystal with the “king of the conservative lecture circuit,” as the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg dubbed the ambitious general… . Continue Reading »
The predominant Western approach to preventing the spread of AIDS in Africa has failed. Though in theory the risk reduction strategies favored by Western governments and aid agencies”handing out condoms, promoting counseling and testing, and treating othersexually transmitted infections (STIs) to block HIV transmission”can “work” in theory, they have not done so in practice… . Continue Reading »
An estimable poet in his own right, C.K. Williams has written an accessible, short study of Walt Whitman’s poetry. Part of a writers-on-writers series recently launched by Princeton University Press, On Whitman is a slight book, an appreciative meditation rather than a critical study… . . Continue Reading »
The cost of even a small state university’s embarrassment, of its hunger to be just like everywhere else, is paid by abortions and the knocked-up, messed-up young women who were thrown to the wolfish boys, unconstrained by either manners or morals… . Continue Reading »
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