Charlotte Allen

I like Commonweal Catholics, even though I don’t always agree with them. They’re smart, they’re often very funny, and several have been very good friends to me. At the top of my list is Luke Timothy Johnson. He’s liberal enough in the Commonweal fashion: a laicized priest now . . . . Continue Reading »

Back in early July, right after the Episcopal Church USA finished its general convention, declining to “repent”—as requested by the Archbishop of Canterbury—of its confirmation of the openly gay, openly cohabitating V. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire, I wrote an . . . . Continue Reading »

Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade by Donald T. Critchlow Princeton University Press, 438 pages, $29.95 Phyllis Schlafly never registered much with me. I knew her mostly as the woman who managed to stop the Equal Rights Amendment dead in its tracks in 1982. That was . . . . Continue Reading »

Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands by W. Bradford Wilcox University of Chicago Press, 328 pp. $20 paper In the imaginations of feminists and their admirers in the media and intelligentsia, there lurks a kind of bogeyman”the conservative Christian . . . . Continue Reading »

Nicholas Orme, a professor of history at Exeter University in Great Britain, has published more than a dozen books about ordinary life in the Middle Ages. His latest one, Medieval Children, is a delightfully encyclopedic survey of everything imaginable concerning young people from birth to . . . . Continue Reading »

Those who think that today’s Catholic Church has problems reining in its errant clergy should read Craig Harline and Eddy Put’s summary of the new code of conduct that Mathias Hovius, Archbishop of Mechelin (not far from Brussels in today’s Belgium) from 1596 to 1620, laid down for . . . . Continue Reading »

Next to Julius Caesar, Pontius Pilate”the governor of Judea who sent Jesus to the cross”is probably the best-known Roman citizen who ever lived. His name is etched into the Christian creeds, prompting some fallen-away Christians to quip that “crucified under Pontius Pilate” is the only . . . . Continue Reading »

Most people know St. Teresa of Ávila (1515“1582), the Spanish mystic, prolific spiritual writer, and indomitable Carmelite reformer, largely through the High Mannerist statue that Gian Lorenzo Bernini carved of her in Rome about seventy years after her death: a marble“pale woman of astonishing . . . . Continue Reading »

What to do about the female saints? Arriving at an acceptable consensus regarding the holy women of Christianity has been a persistent problem for feminist theologians. The first wave of the women’s movement tended to take a disparaging stance toward the nuns, lay spinsters, wives, mothers, . . . . Continue Reading »

Goddess Unmasked: The Rise of Neopagan Feminist Spirituality by Philip G. Davis Spence, 418 pages, $29.95 It is a dogma of feminist mythology that before there was God, there was Goddess. A very long time ago (so goes the story), when war, agriculture, and patriarchy were just glints in male . . . . Continue Reading »