Ross Douthat

Let’s begin with a story. It’s one I’ve heard many times; it’s one I’ve told more than a few times myself. It’s a story about the Catholic Church in the second half of the twentieth century, and it goes something like this. Once, fifty years ago, there was an ecumenical council of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Freedom By Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 576 pages, $28 What if Jane Austen’s Bennet sisters had been bright young graduates of Bowdoin or Colgate or Dartmouth, with protective parents, impressive résumés, and no pressure to wed for anything save love? What if Theodore . . . . Continue Reading »

There was a time in American life, not so very long ago, when the only significant relation between religion and popular culture seemed to be the tedious symbiosis enjoyed by such envelope-pushing television producers as Steven Bochco and David E. Kelley and the conservative Christians who loved to . . . . Continue Reading »

In November 2003, Stephen King received a lifetime achievement medal from the National Book Foundation for his “distinguished contribution to American letters.” The foundation’s notion of “distinguished contribution” is a fairly broad one: The medal has been awarded to . . . . Continue Reading »

In his post on the midterm elections and their discontents, Jody Bottum argues that conservatives haven’t made support for the Iraq War a defining test of one’s conservatism, in the way that opposition to the war¯and indeed, war of almost any kind¯has become an abortion-style . . . . Continue Reading »

Jody already remarked on the new Pew survey showing that while Americans are less inclined to call the GOP “friendly” to religion than they were two years ago (down from 55 to 47 percent), they’re much less likely to call the Democrats religion-friendly, with just 26 percent . . . . Continue Reading »

In Sunday’s Times , Judith Shulevitz reviews Kristin Luker’s new book on the sex-ed wars, When Sex Goes to School , which argues . . . well, here’s how Shulevitz puts it: Only toward the end of a 300-odd page book about sex education in America does Kristin Luker permit herself a . . . . Continue Reading »

It hasn’t received that much coverage over here, but a recent Guardian editorial raised the possibility that the intelligence used to break up the terror plot in London was obtained, at least in part, by Pakistani torturers. This has already led some anti-torture voices to call into question . . . . Continue Reading »

Over at his Crunchy Con blog, Rod Dreher links to an interesting investigative piece on the world of Ole Anthony, the ascetic Texan who runs a Christian commune called the Trinity Foundation in Dallas and serves as a self-appointed watchdog for the excesses of televangelists. Journalists tend to . . . . Continue Reading »

For anyone who isn’t sick of the debate over Mel Gibson, anti-Semitism, and whether people who liked The Passion should repent in sackcloth and ashes now that its creator’s sheets-to-the-wind sentiments about the Jews have been revealed, I’d recommend dipping into Mark . . . . Continue Reading »