Richard John Neuhaus

On August 24, Bob Herbert of the New York Times addressed the debilitating popular culture embraced by many black Americans, and especially by young blacks. He now returns to the subject, prompted by the appearance of black "felon" magazines that exult in the self-denigration of blacks as . . . . Continue Reading »

Robert Royal, who runs the Washington-based Faith & Reason Institute, has a new book out from Encounter, The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West . The argument of the title and subtitle is persuasively set out, and we will be giving the book more attention in the pages of . . . . Continue Reading »

It is not exactly wilderness, although the word applies if by wilderness one means, as no doubt some today would mean, any place that does not have access to the Internet. While I was at the family cottage in Quebec for several weeks I was serenely unaware of what was happening on this website, . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square Talk about revolutions and semi-revolutionary changes in the Catholic Church has been a commonplace since the Second Vatican Council. Such agitations have, not to put too fine a point on it, become something of a bore.There is another movement afoot, however, that could portend a . . . . Continue Reading »

I started reading it when it came out a couple of years ago, and I would like to say it is the kind of book you can’t put down but, distracted by something or the other, I did put it aside until the trip to Poland a couple of weeks ago. Gilead , like the town by that name, is fictional, or so . . . . Continue Reading »

"Government Will Defend Polish ‘Morals.’" The story in the Herald Tribune underscores the sneer quotes around morals . As it happens, the prime minister had told the parliament in Warsaw that "the government will defend Polish culture and morals." One imagines an . . . . Continue Reading »

Philip Rieff has died at age 83, in Philadelphia. We never met, but he would write from time to time, usually a brief note on something or the other that appeared in First Things . I forget what it was that I had written some years ago, but he responded, if memory serves, "I almost wish I . . . . Continue Reading »

"We liberals, er, I mean progressives, are patriots, too." That is the gist of E.J. Dionne’s touchingly defensive Fourth of July column in the Washington Post . He deeply resents the fact that it is widely assumed that patriotism is the default position of conservatives, while it is . . . . Continue Reading »

More people should know about University Faculty for Life. The proceedings of the fifteenth annual conference is now out, and it is packed with some of the sharpest thinking about the theory, practice, and prospects of the pro-life cause. There are articles on abortion and international law, on why . . . . Continue Reading »

Where did the storm over immigration come from? In conversations with folks who are in the thick of the battle, I am struck that everybody seems rather taken by surprise. A year ago, they say, they knew the issue was there, along with many other issues, but nobody anticipated that it would become . . . . Continue Reading »