Peter L. Berger

The following is a report filed by Albert Goodwill, an American journalist, after the 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg (an event depicted in the well-known film Triumph of the Will by Leni Riefenstahl ). Nuremberg, a rather sleepy town in Franconia, had never seen anything like it. Tens of . . . . Continue Reading »

One of the (regrettably few) benefits of growing old is the way in which incidents in one’s own biography intersect with phases of what passes for world history. I have visited Berlin several times, but three visits stick out in recollection. The first was in the late 1950s after the Airlift . . . . Continue Reading »

After a thirty-year hiatus, chain gangs are back. Alabama, fittingly enough, has been first to reinstitute this great Southern tradition. But this is no longer an exclusively Southern phenomenon. The next four states getting ready to adopt this penological practice are Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin, . . . . Continue Reading »

In a recent issue of the Spectator , the spunky British conservative magazine, there were two articles on aspects of the military culture of the United Kingdom. One, by Alasdair Palmer, dealt with attitudes toward homosexuals in the British army. The other, by Noel Malcolm, discussed the . . . . Continue Reading »

The other day a colleague of mine, who came to America from Russia via Israel, told me a story about her son who is in the eighth grade in a renowned progressive school in Cambridge, Massachusetts (than which no community could be more progressive). The boy was puzzled over how to complete an . . . . Continue Reading »

The readers of First Things , I know, are eagerly awaiting further reports by this writer from the wilder shores of American feminism and other battlefields of this country’s culture war. But I have just returned from visiting China, and at least for the moment, the shock has diverted my attention . . . . Continue Reading »

In recent decades, both among Roman Catholics and Protestants, there has been much talk about liturgical reform and a great amount of activity resulting from this talk. Some people have even described these developments as a liturgical revolution. There have been different theological and pastoral . . . . Continue Reading »

During the Cold War period the terms “West” and “East” had fairly clear connotations. These were geographical-this side and the other side of the Iron Curtain-but the geography itself was defined politically, Washington and its allies arrayed against Moscow and its allies, with a vaguely . . . . Continue Reading »

The current debate over immigration policy cuts across the conventional political and ideological divides. It is also multifaceted. Probably the most important facet has to do with disagreements over the economic impact of both legal and illegal immigration: Are immigrants, in the aggregate, an . . . . Continue Reading »

Some of us have hardly gotten over the shock of Harold Bloom’s discovery that a good portion of the Pentateuch was written by a woman (Ms. J., as I recall), and now we have to face yet another staggering blow to our phallocratic smugness. I’m referring to John Fuegi’s recent biography of . . . . Continue Reading »