Joseph Bottum

Down in Waco, Texas, there is a Baptist school called Baylor University. It was never a major player in American academics, and with the strained situation in which American colleges found themselves at the end of the baby boom, Baylor had problems figuring out what it should do. Certainly, the . . . . Continue Reading »

The curious thing is the lack of memory. It seems a fairly obvious fact that the influence of religion on politics and policy¯and the general tone of American life¯is at one of the low points in the nation’s history. There isn’t a religious leader left who has the kind of . . . . Continue Reading »

In spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. And why not? We’ve finally come around winter’s corner here in New York. The last bits of snow, hiding in the shadowed folds of the buildings, have finally melted. The girls are no longer wrapped up in parkas like . . . . Continue Reading »

On February 28, a congresswoman from Connecticut named Rosa L. DeLauro released a " Statement of Principles ." Signed by 55 members of Congress¯all of them Catholic Democrats, and together making up a majority of the Catholic Democrats in the House¯the statement urged . . . . . . . Continue Reading »

Euthanasia has been making a comeback in recent months, bubbling up again and again in little snippets in the news. There is a natural tide in certain issues that has them wash up to this high-water mark or that, before sliding back down, and the public agitation for physician-assisted suicide made . . . . Continue Reading »

The trouble is abortion, once again. After John Kerry’s defeat in 2004, you could hardly shake a stick without whacking some Democratic figure or another who was insisting that their party needed to”or was about to”get back into the religion business. The success of Jim . . . . Continue Reading »

So, a friend and I get talking yesterday. He’s a lefty, kind of. Actually, he insists he’s a middle, maybe even slightly right-shaded social democrat sort of person, and in any sensible country (like, say, Luxembourg or Denmark) he would be recognized as the moderate conservative . . . . Continue Reading »

The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling By Gertrude Himmelfarb Ivan R. Dee, 288 pages, $26 In the French Revolution’s “empire of light and reason,” Edmund Burke observed, “all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, . . . . Continue Reading »

Back in my home state of South Dakota, the state legislature voted on Friday to ban all abortions except those to prevent the death of the mother. The governor, Mike Rounds, hasn’t yet signed the bill, but said he was leaning toward doing so¯though two years ago, he vetoed similar . . . . Continue Reading »

Over the last several months, an enormous amount has been said about how the United States is falling behind the rest of the world in science: endless newspaper editorials, chin-pulling on television talk-shows, widely publicized demands for legislative action. After the scandals of faked science . . . . Continue Reading »