Richard John Neuhaus

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. I have over the years discussed it with numerous people, including priests and bishops, and nobody can explain why in New York City people are so determined to “get their ashes.” At the Ash Wednesday Masses, my parish and hundreds of others . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square During those younger years as the pastor of a poor, black, inner-city parish in Brooklyn, including the years of working with Martin Luther King, Jr., I was an unapologetic romantic about the critical, even redemptive, part that blacks were to play in the unfolding of the American . . . . Continue Reading »

Michael Joyce has died at age 63. He was a dear friend and, during his fifteen years with the Bradley Foundation, was of enormous help in launching the Institute on Religion and Public Life, the publisher of F IRST T HINGS . A more adequate tribute will appear in a forthcoming issue of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Adam Kirsch is books editor of The New York Sun , a paper that has in its first few years (actually it’s a revival of a long-ago paper by the same name) made itself nearly indispensable for New Yorkers. Kirsch is a literary critic of some distinction. His recent book, The Wounded Surgeon , a . . . . Continue Reading »

The leftist media in this country and organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League are not the only ones given to inciting alarm about the dangers posed by evangelical Christians. Steven Stalinsky of the Middle East Media Research Institute reports that the Arab press routinely claims that . . . . Continue Reading »

Around the turn of the first millennium, Danish pirates were successfully demanding protection money from the British. Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem about it, and Walter Lacqueur, the distinguished foreign policy writer, was reminded of it when reviewing Bruce Bawer’s new book, While Europe . . . . Continue Reading »

Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Communion, has been in alcohol rehab since February 1. There is this in his letter to his diocese: Brothers and Sisters in Christ, I am writing to you from an alcohol treatment center where on February 1, with the . . . . Continue Reading »

As one has too many occasions to note, history has many ironies in the fire. In the context of those Danish cartoons and the violent reaction of some Muslims, a reader takes the occasion to quote back to me what I wrote in “Our American Babylon” in the December 2005 issue of F IRST T . . . . Continue Reading »

Yesterday in this space my colleague Joseph Bottum reflected on the large number of scholarly books in recent years that underscore the powerful and pervasive role of religion in the American founding. He acknowledges that all this is for the good, and then he asks, “But where does that leave . . . . Continue Reading »

On the New York Times op-ed page and in his regular box at Slate , William Saletan has been urging supporters of Roe ‘s abortion license to make clear that they are also friends of life and abhor abortion, as necessary as he thinks it may sometimes be. Katha Pollitt of The Nation , on the far . . . . Continue Reading »