Joseph Bottum

A reader writes in with this: I read the blog posting by Michael Novak of the “Beer Blessing,” which inspired me to write this blessing of peanut butter crackers (admittedly basing it upon the formula used in most blessings). It is as follows: All-powerful Father, bless these peanut . . . . Continue Reading »

Despite having grown up in a family of endless lawyering, I don’t have a lawyer. Do people even still have lawyers? I mean, in the old-fashioned sense in which ordinary, everyday people used to have their family doctor and their family lawyer? The United States has more lawyers than ever, of . . . . Continue Reading »

Thanks for all the help finding those churches¯brick, modern, disappointing; too empty of ideas even to be awful¯that seem to mark too much of Catholic architecture in the United States. The emails have come pouring in, and it’s going to take me a day or so to sort them out before I . . . . Continue Reading »

What does a typical American Catholic church look like? In something I was working on last night, I wrote about a set of (usually suburban) churches: “Not even distinguished enough to be bad examples of their kind, they just are —each one vaguely modern, vaguely brick, vaguely . . . . Continue Reading »

OK, now we’re cooking with Crisco. I posted this morning about my quest for the definitive American Catholic churches—those buildings that aren’t even distinguished enough to be bad examples of their kind. They’re just vaguely modern, vaguely brick, vaguely . . . . Continue Reading »

"The path to prison starts at conception," explains Kaye McLaren , a researcher helping New Zealand investigate its crime problem. And so, she—along with the nation’s top Youth Court judge and its Children’s Commissioner—propose setting up national databases of (1) . . . . Continue Reading »

Frederica, you write , "One way that war is hell, and something that may be a clue to some mysterious spiritual truth, is that soldiers who kill are much more traumatized by that than by any injuries they sustain." That’s certainly been the conventional wisdom since Vietnam, and I . . . . Continue Reading »

In his posting on First Things earlier today, Ross Douthat writes "justice is rarely served by folly"¯a phrase that gives nice shape to an appealing notion: Israel’s decision to attack Hezbollah, like the U.S. decision to invade Iraq, was morally justifiable, but these wars have . . . . Continue Reading »

It strikes me, Ross, that you’re digging yourself into terminological difficulties here , primarily because you’re trying to make the justice of the war match the chronology of your thinking about the war. A person might have thought Israel’s attack on Hezbollah was just when it . . . . Continue Reading »

After the tremendous response to Rome Diary , Richard John Neuhaus’ daily reports from Italy on the papal funeral and election in the spring of 2005, we kicked around the idea, here at the magazine, of continuing to post regular items on the First Things website. Blogging, you might . . . . Continue Reading »