Francesca Aran Murphy

Tomorrow, the Fairest Isle has to choose between forfeiting her soul to the European Empire and retaining the sovereign freedom of her Parliamentary democracy. Continue Reading »

The only viable vehicle of conservatism in modernity is a market-oriented liberalism that regards freedom within law as the means to the common good. Some religiously engaged conservative intellectuals cannot accept this. What drives their animus against the only workable form of conservatism in . . . . Continue Reading »

The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer by louis bouyer translated by john pepino angelico, 272 pages, $19.95 T his memoir is a joy to read. Louis Bouyer (1913–2004) writes so beautifully about his childhood in fin-de-­siècle Paris it almost makes up for not having lived in that time and place oneself. The . . . . Continue Reading »

Following on from my article about the Curriculum Review at the University of Notre Dame, I can report that the draft recommendations of the Curriculum Committee call for the retention of the current two theology course requirements. It recommends adding a core course called “Catholicism . . . . Continue Reading »

Blaise Pascal spoke of the contradiction in every human heart. Man is an animal at once godlike and depraved. It is not that our dreams are great and our behavior base, but that our dreams are simultaneously wonderful and vile. Perhaps nowhere is this more obvious than in our treatment of other . . . . Continue Reading »

Faculty often quarrel over curricula. That’s as it should be. A curriculum, especially its core courses required of all students, is an educational institution’s constitution. To tell a young person he must take this or that course announces a university’s highest priorities. This makes a . . . . Continue Reading »

Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faithby eve tushnetave maria, 224 pages, $15.95 I have almost no conscious interest in the possibilities of being gay and Catholic, so I find it hard to explain why I was first drawn to Eve Tushnet’s writing over a decade . . . . Continue Reading »

David Bentley Hart has written a classic of Christian apologetics. Works of apologetics are defenses of the Christian faith. A defense is different both tactically and strategically from an attack. It doesn’t intend to dismantle the opponent’s position, except insofar as the . . . . Continue Reading »

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant contended that struggle is the motive force of human civilization. Through his successors, especially Hegel, the somewhat oxymoronic idea of armed combat as the motor of civilization came to permeate German high culture and soon Western . . . . Continue Reading »

In my fifteen years in Aberdeen, the Old Aberdeen mosque went from a tiny to a flourishing enterprise, with Muslim men overflowing the building onto the surrounding streets. Between 1995 and 2010 in northeast Scotland, the sight of women in burqas and niqabs went from rare to commonplace. The . . . . Continue Reading »