Edward T. Oakes

Midterm congressional elections in the United States are barely two weeks away, and all the polls I’ve read (as here ) predict a severe rout for the Republicans, largely because of the chaos in Iraq. In the lead-up to the U.S.-led invasion, I recall two columns by the New York Times columnist . . . . Continue Reading »

OK, this announcement probably won’t end up in your "News You Can Use" file, but Richard Wolin has recently reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education that Michel Foucault died a humanist! (Who knew?) Perhaps I am only dating myself by attaching any significance to such news. So . . . . Continue Reading »

In my last posting , I wrapped up some very general reflections on the relation between faith and reason with this aside: "Western civilization¯having put Christianity on the defensive for so long, and then seeing its Enlightened sons of reason turn on their own mother¯now finds . . . . Continue Reading »

"Philosophy asks unanswerable questions; theology gives unquestionable answers." According to John Caputo, author of the astonishingly lucid book Philosophy and Theology , the anonymous wag who first coined that sardonic witticism can only have been born in the twentieth century. We know . . . . Continue Reading »

One of the great delusional fictions that bloggers operate under¯something I have discovered only when I started contributing to this page¯is that there are people out there who actually care what a blogger has to say! Speaking personally, I am not so naive as to think that, if I had the . . . . Continue Reading »

Devoted readers of this page already know that in hot weather I have energy only for aphorisms , not novels or larger works. Admittedly, when the weather cooled off, I managed to dip into a few weightier tomes¯novels, biographies and the like . But now, a mere week before school starts, the . . . . Continue Reading »

In a recent posting on this site , Ross Douthat alerted us to an editorial in one of England’s most liberal papers, The Guardian, and pointed to a dangerous logic in part of its argument. The editorial decried the use of torture by Pakistani counterterrorism police. If reports are accurate, . . . . Continue Reading »

I don’t have the computer skills, let alone the patience, to set up my own blogsite. So I am especially grateful to the editors of First Things for their ecumenical hospitality in opening their cyber-pages to voices other than their own during this month of August. In my first foray into this . . . . Continue Reading »

I spoke last week of the fictions of relativism and concluded with one of E.M. Cioran’s typically laconic aphorisms about the East’s greater honesty toward the absolute. Well, maybe. But maybe not. I once read a marvelous book by Dava Sobel called Longitude: The True Story of a Lone . . . . Continue Reading »

Ever since he coined the term “the dictatorship of relativism” shortly before his election as Pope Benedict XVI, the phrase has continued to haunt me. At first glance it sounds like an oxymoron: How can a relativist seek to impose a dictatorship? Aren’t dictators called absolutists . . . . Continue Reading »