Matthew J. Franck

When did the New Yorker become a magazine written by and for people who are deeply ignorant but imagine they are terribly bright? I can remember, as a boy in the 1970s, reading the magazine occasionally and thinking it was very clever. Yes, I mostly admired the cartoons, and yes, I was, well, just . . . . Continue Reading »

I’m resurfacing after a couple of months of submersion in the work of the Witherspoon Institute , including our summer seminars , preparation for the American Political Science Association (canceled due to Hurricane Isaac!), and some September weeks on tour to various colleges and other . . . . Continue Reading »

The highly successful Atlanta-based restaurant chain Chick-fil-A has been much in the news these days, because president and chief operating officer Dan Cathy (whose father founded the family-owned business) apparently came out in opposition to same-sex marriage.  Or did he? Terry Mattingly of . . . . Continue Reading »

Yesterday I blogged here about an ABC report of a same-sex “wedding” at a military base in New Jersey.  The story didn’t seem quite right to me, since there is no such thing as same-sex marriage in New Jersey—only civil unions—and we usually mean to say someone . . . . Continue Reading »

Every observer of the American political scene could predict that in the hours after yesterday senseless massacre in Aurora, Colorado, two topics would surface.  Some would call attention to the failures in our approach to mental illness in recent decades—the assumption being that only a . . . . Continue Reading »

Last week I blogged here about a group of former catechists in northern Virginia whom I dubbed the “Arlington Five,” who had been written up in a front-page Washington Post story for their refusal to continue teaching Sunday school if they were to be required by the bishop of Arlington . . . . Continue Reading »

Courtesy of the aggregator RealClearReligion , I chanced upon this story at the ABC News website by Erin McLaughlin, titled ” First Military Base Same-Sex Wedding Held .”  It concerns a male couple, one of them an Air Force noncom, the other a civilian, who were . . . . Continue Reading »

On the front page of yesterday’s Washington Post (and already online the night before) appeared a story about five—count ‘em, five—catechists in the Catholic diocese of Arlington, Virginia who will no longer be catechists in the next school year because they declined to make . . . . Continue Reading »

Is the “individual mandate” in the Affordable Care Act (“ObamaCare”) a penalty, or a tax?  Over at NRO ‘s Bench Memos, I’ve been offering a defense of Chief Justice Roberts’ decision to read it as an exercise of the taxing power, not of the commerce . . . . Continue Reading »

The Washington Post runs a weekly feature in its Sunday “Outlook” section, examining “Five Myths About” something new each week.  Of course the whole point about such a feature is to have a guest writer debunk some notions that are widely believed to be true but . . . . Continue Reading »