David P. Goldman

Diabolical! I hadn’t thought of this.Now that we have a viable hypothesis as to the nature of the problem, the question becomes: who invented this monster in the first place? Round up the usual suspects, say . . . . Continue Reading »

Rusty, I don’t think it is quite accurate to explain German anti-Semitism as a localist reaction to Jewish assimilation. You commented yesterday that Germans didn’t think assimilation “was possible, not because they denied that a stranger’s children and grand-children could . . . . Continue Reading »

An Asia Times dispatch today from Francesco Sisci, author of the essay “China’s Catholic Moment” in the June-June issue of First Things, observes that Chinese premiere Hu Jintao next week embarks on a state visit to Italy, the first for a Chinese leader in a decade. The visit, . . . . Continue Reading »

Writing this morning in Asia Times Online, I draw out the implications of the power vacuum left by the collapse of American foreign policy with the Iranian elections. The editors’ summary is:President Barack Obama has not betrayed the interests of the United States to any foreign power, but he . . . . Continue Reading »

Full disclosure: I never watched a Michael Jackson video all the way through until today, after reading in The New York Times that “in the Philippines, a dance tribute was planned for a prison in Cebu, where Byron Garcia, a security consultant, had 1,500 inmates join in a synchronized dance to . . . . Continue Reading »

I posted a longer essay on the Public Square blog, the front window of the First Things site. Marriage, I contend is not a “right,” but a condition, an “estate,” as the Book of Common Prayer says it is: a human mating pair attains the condition of marriage by entering a holy . . . . Continue Reading »

Contrary to what we hear incessantly, marriage is not a right; it is an estate, a condition. There are conditions of life that have nothing to do with rights. One doesn’t have a right to go through puberty. One either does or doesn’t. What is the condition of being married, and what makes it possible to attain it? Franz Rosenzweig’s anthropology”in which religion is a response to man’s sentience of death, and the sentience of death is not only an individual but also an communal characteristic”may help answer that question. Humankind fights mortality in two ways. The first is to raise children who will remember us, and the second is to seek eternal life through divine grace. The estate of marriage involves both.

“Why do men chase women?” asks Rose Castorini in Moonstruck. “Because they want to live forever.” Continue Reading »

The Iranian exile journalist Amir Taheri, the dean of regime critics writing in the English language press, says that civil war is unlikely in Iran.  In the most convincing analysis I have seen to date, Taheri points out that Ahmadinejad has his back to the wall, while regime critics have the . . . . Continue Reading »

What can one say about such things?From BBC last week:One in four South African men questioned in a survey said they had raped someone, and nearly half of them admitted more than one attack.The study, by the country’s Medical Research Council, also found three out of four who admitted rape had . . . . Continue Reading »

Now that it is obvious that engaging Iran was a delusional misstep, President Obama should denounce the Iranian regime as a rogue state that employs terrorism against its own people as well as overseas. It is time for a Reaganesque statement. The administration should say, in so many . . . . Continue Reading »