Joseph Bottum

In 1981, on the campus of Cornell University, Michael Ross murdered a young woman named Dzung Ngoc Tu. Over the next year, he raped and killed Tammy Williams, Paula Perrera, and Debra Smith Taylor. In 1983, he added Robin Stavinsky. On Easter Sunday in 1984, he abducted, sexually assaulted, and . . . . Continue Reading »

Social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, libertarians, agrarians, communitarians, foreign-policy hawks”who can figure them out? Neocons and theocons and paleocons, to say nothing of soccer-mom Republicans, country-club Republicans, and just plain, garden-variety Republicans: If you read . . . . Continue Reading »

Quick as dawn, the dogwoods have raised improbable awnings, christened with rain. Thrusts of witch-hazel, stands of rue, and there- there , across the stream, in the shade of those dark-lichened rocks- white phlox and geranium strain to reach the angled light. One bright morning, a clean April day, . . . . Continue Reading »

We never exactly mean to dawdle or let the day slip by. I stopped at the pond for just a moment to see if the mallards would try the corn I’d found for them last evening. I didn’t stay too long. But times moves slower near to water, the lazy current strong. And there are fish to watch . . . . Continue Reading »

A Family of His Own: A Life of Edwin O’Connor By Charles F. Duffy Catholic University of America Press. 464 pp. $49.95 Somewhere between 1945 and 1963”somewhere, in fact, around the publication of Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah in 1956”a certain kind of Catholic culture . . . . Continue Reading »

The Poetry of John Paul II-Roman Triptych: Meditations Translated by Jerzy Peterkiewicz United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. 40 pp. $19.95 Poland went through something of a golden age of poets in the second half of the twentieth century, and I’ve always suspected that Zbigniew . . . . Continue Reading »

Who, even among scholars in the field, could keep up with the flood of attacks on Pius XII that began in the late 1990s? John Cornwell gave us Hitler’s Pope , and Michael Phayer followed with The Catholic Church and the Holocaust . David Kertzer brought charges against Pius XII in The Popes . . . . Continue Reading »

The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia By Richard Pipes Yale University Press. 153 pp. $22.95 Once upon a time”well, actually, it was in 1897, on the campus of the public university that the citizens of South Dakota had just built in the town of Vermillion to express their . . . . Continue Reading »

I burn for all good heresy in this ungodly town. If I had any hope to raise I’d tear cathedrals down. I’d show the bishop priestly crimes except that he is blind. I’d damn the Protestants to hell if only they would mind. George Fox rebuked our dainty tread by kicking off his . . . . Continue Reading »

There is little in my life I regret as much as that I would not stay for just one cookie, just one cup of tea. . . . . . . Continue Reading »