Nathaniel Peters

In today’s Wall Street Journal Jonathan Last reviews Judith Walzer Leavitt’s Make Room for Daddy , a history of how men went from being unwelcome to expected in the delivery room. But Last notes that as men became more involved in childbirth, they became less involved in what came . . . . Continue Reading »

The New York Times has a story on the Cistercian monks of Our Lady of Spring Bank and the women who run their online business, LaserMonks: The Rev. Bernard McCoy, the monastery’s superior, had the idea for LaserMonks.com. But the enterprise really took off when the monks turned it over to two . . . . Continue Reading »

The thing about gay marriage, Sam Schulman says in the Weekly Standard , is not that it’s wrong, but that it just won’t work. Most people who object to it, he says, aren’t caught up with religious objections about what the Bible says or sexual acts being “open to . . . . Continue Reading »

At Roll Call, Mort Kondracke argues that we need to shift the focus of federal spending from the old to the young so that the young can better pay for the babyboomers’ retirement. But Kondracke overlooks one problem: More government spending on kids can’t solve the problem if there . . . . Continue Reading »

In honor of the feast of the Ascension, here is Gerald Finzi’s “God Is Gone Up,” sung by the Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge. The words are taken from Edward Taylor’s Sacramental Meditations The piece begins around 3:20 into the video. God is gone up with a . . . . Continue Reading »

Five years ago same-sex marriages were recognized by Massachusetts state courts after such recognition was voted down by citizens in a referendum. In March the National Organization for Marriage and the Massachusetts Family Initiative joined forces to poll the state’s residents on their . . . . Continue Reading »

John Dickerson at Slate has an entire article comparing President Obama to Commander Spock. Spock is famously logical and not prone to emotional outbursts, but he could also enter the minds of others and was therefore more empathetic than his human colleagues. These traits reminds Dickerson and . . . . Continue Reading »

“Nothing to be done,” Estragon says, struggling with his boot as he sits on a rock in a barren waste. Two and a half hours later, not much has changed. “Let’s go,” he says to his friend Vladimir. They do not move, except to clasp hands, grasping for each other in an empty . . . . Continue Reading »

According to Gallup , 51 percent of Americans are calling themselves pro-life compared to 42 percent who identify as pro-choice— the first time Gallup has found a pro-life majority since it started asking the question in 1995. Why the change? Their hypothesis is a rallying among Republicans . . . . Continue Reading »

At Public Discourse Mary Graw Leary provides a guide for responding to “sexting,” when children take and send sexually explicit pictures of themselves. A sample: Before there can be any intelligent discussion about self-produced child pornography, there must be a common understanding of . . . . Continue Reading »