Mary Ann Glendon

Given the close relation between a country’s law and its culture, it is only to be expected that there will be considerable variation in the way legal systems conceptualize human personhood. Like a nation’s art, literature, songs, and poetry, law both reflects and helps to shape the stories we . . . . Continue Reading »

Not for the first time, the world finds itself in an age of great movements of peoples. And once again, the United States is confronted with the challenge of absorbing large numbers of newcomers. There are approximately 200 million migrants and refugees worldwide, triple the number estimated by the . . . . Continue Reading »

I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 646 pp. $28.95 When the heroine of I Am Charlotte Simmons ”a smart, beautiful, small-town girl”sits down to write her mother a letter about freshman life in “Dupont University,” it takes her hours to produce a . . . . Continue Reading »

Discovering Our Dependenceby Mary Ann GlendonWhen Otto von Bismarck established the world’s first social security system, he never dreamed that a large proportion of the populace would live long enough to draw pensions. With a tight grip on the public purse, the Iron Chancellor set age sixty-five . . . . Continue Reading »

To understand fully the incalculable effects of Roe v. Wade it is necessary (though of course not sufficient) to understand the historical and legal context in which it occurred. When the decision came down in February 1973, the nation was embroiled in the Vietnam War and President Nixon had just . . . . Continue Reading »

Throughout the twentieth century, leaders of the Catholic Church implored lay men and women with increasing urgency to be more active as Catholics in society, and—since Vatican II—to become more involved in the internal affairs of the Church. The earlier call found a warm response among . . . . Continue Reading »

In 1749 the Academy of Dijon offered a prize for the best essay on the question, “Has the restoration of the sciences and the arts contributed to the improvement of mores?” Most of the contestants must have vied in counting the ways “enlightenment” had raised the level of culture. By the . . . . Continue Reading »

Why does Tom Wolfe’s latest book make the mandarins of taste so uncomfortable? John Updike took a good deal of space in the New Yorker to declare that A Man in Full was “entertainment, not literature.” Norman Mailer in the New York Review of Books dismissed the novel as an “adroit . . . . Continue Reading »

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1948 and widely recognized as the “constitution” of the modern human rights movement, approaches its fiftieth anniversary amidst considerable turmoil. The prevailing approach to the rights it contains is . . . . Continue Reading »

It can hardly have escaped the notice of persons interested in religion and public life that there has been a good deal of public sorrow expressed lately concerning errors or misdeeds committed by representatives or members of the Catholic Church at various times in history. Recently, a diligent . . . . Continue Reading »