In 1961, Richard John Neuhaus was installed as pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Brooklyn. Several days later he wrote me. “Installed Misericordias Domini”much pomp, ceremony, and incense.” It was the last word I heard from him for almost six months. It was as though he had been swallowed up by the city and his new congregation. For Fr. Richard as well as for the people of St. John’s the day of installation was a glorious occasion… . Continue Reading »
Two stories were front-page news last week, the President’s speech on Afghanistan and the spectacle of Tiger Woods smashing his Cadillac Escalade into his neighbor’s tree at 2:30 a.m. But two other items caught my attention, the one from Italy and the other from Switzerland… . Continue Reading »
Douthat Flirting With Dhimmitude?
12.07.2009
David P. Goldman
Sad that the dumbest thing I’ve read in the New York Times for years came from the blog of Ross Douthat, the Catholic conservative voice at the Gray Lady… . Continue Reading »
The Richard I knew and loved was a man of prayer and of liturgy. He knew that the greatest gift we could offer to God was not our words, not our ideas, not our projects, but a heart ablaze with the fire of love. “Honor and glory belong to God alone,” said St. Bernard, “but God will . . . . Continue Reading »
Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism by Paula Fredriksen Doubleday, 512 pages, $35 At the time of the Second Crusade, Bernard of Clairvaux wrote: “It is good to go against the Ishmaelites [Muslims]. But whoever touches a Jew to take his life is like one who harms . . . . Continue Reading »
No event during the first millennium was more unexpected, more calamitous, and more consequential for Christianity than the rise of Islam. Few irruptions in history have transformed societies so completely and irrevocably as did the conquest and expansion of the Arabs in the seventh century. And . . . . Continue Reading »
Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire by Judith Herrin Princeton University Press, 440 pages, $29.95 In Handel’s opera Tamerlano , the principal characters are Tamerlane; the brutal Mongol chieftain Bajazet; an Ottoman Sultan and his daughter Asteria; and Andronico, the . . . . Continue Reading »
Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations by Martin Goodman Knopf, 624 pages, $35 When I first saw the title of this book, I thought of Tertullian’s famous question: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? But Goodman did not have Tertullian in mind when he chose his title. . . . . Continue Reading »
Allegory fell on hard times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the charm of beloved works of English literature such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress lies in the imaginative use of allegory, biblical scholars banished the term from their . . . . Continue Reading »
At Fordham University, while I was teaching there in the late 1960s, it was said that most students were sons and daughters of firemen, policemen, or sanitation workers. That was probably an exaggeration, but not by much. Few parents were themselves college graduates, and the typical student was . . . . Continue Reading »
The Mysticism of Saint Augustine: Rereading the Confessions by John Peter Kenney Routledge, 160 pages, $115. FOR MANY, AUGUSTINE’S City of God seems a more difficult book than the Confessions . It is very long, and its architectonic structure demands that one hold in mind ideas from earlier . . . . Continue Reading »
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