Nathaniel Peters

Yesterday I read G. K. Chesterton’s Heretics for the first time and came across a passage on progress: The case of the general talk of “progress” is, indeed, an extreme one. As enunciated today, “progress” is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the . . . . Continue Reading »

A reader writes to tell us that he will be moving within a month and cannot take along copies of First Things stretching back to August/September ‘94. If anyone in or near Passaic County, New Jersey would like to pick them up, please contact Fr. Ken Smith at 973-427-9007 or via e-mail . . . . . Continue Reading »

Burma has been in the news recently with the wake of Cyclone Nargis and the junta’s reluctance to admit foreign aid to the country’s suffering citizens. On The Weekly Standard’s website, Joseph Loconte points out the ways in which the UN has done nothing to fight the tyranny of . . . . Continue Reading »

I’d heard that someone had written a children’s story about the pope’s life as told from a cat’s perspective. I thought it was a novel idea, and when a publicist asked if I’d like a copy, I said I’d take a look. Joseph and Chico is by an Italian journalist living . . . . Continue Reading »

Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the ­Imagination of C.S. Lewis by Michael Ward Oxford University Press, 384 pages, $29.95 Late one night, a young scholar at Cambridge named Michael Ward reads “The Planets,” a minor poem by C.S. Lewis. In it he encounters a curious phrase about . . . . Continue Reading »

Today a friend pointed me toward The Hip Hop Prayerbook , designed by an Episcopal church in the South Bronx as “a powerful evangelism tool” designed to offer “a means to worship that will draw in the young and speak to those not generally spoken to by the Church.” I have no . . . . Continue Reading »

One of the groups that performed for Benedict XVI in DC sent us their promotional material and some free CDs, and I was intrigued the moment I saw their name. The Suspicious Cheese Lords is an all-male a cappella group from DC, where they sing and record early music, more specifically, Renaissance . . . . Continue Reading »

In today’s St. Louis Platform there’s an excellent article with interviews from two of the victims of clerical sexual abuse who met with the pope in Washington, DC. Here are some excerpts, but the whole thing is worth reading: Olan Horne, 48, a survivor of clerical sex abuse, believes . . . . Continue Reading »

The exciting news of the the day does not come from Pennsylvania, but from Rome, where it was announced that John Henry Cardinal Newman will be beatified. A leader of the Oxford Movement, a catholic reform movement in the Anglican Church, Newman later converted to Catholicism and founded the . . . . Continue Reading »

In October, I wrote about dying languages—languages whose use is declining—and why they are worth saving. In today’s New York Times , there was a small article on Syrian villages where Aramaic, the language probably spoken by Jesus, is still used, but by increasingly fewer people. . . . . Continue Reading »