Various

At its General Convention this summer, The Episcopal Church (TEC) will consider a resolution to amend the church’s canons to allow same-sex couples to marry. The denomination’s official Task Force on the Study of Marriage has proposed replacing language in its canons drawn from the famed “Dearly beloved” opening exhortation of the marriage service in The Book of Common Prayer, which asserts that “the union of husband and wife” is intended, when it is God’s will, “for the procreation of children.” By excising the requirement that Christian marriage be a “a lifelong union between a man and a woman,” along with the Augustinian tradition’s second good of marriage, offspring,from the list of “purposes for which it was instituted by God,” marriage would be defined as open to same-sex couples whose sexual unions are not biologically fruitful. Continue Reading »

Love Is Our Mission: The Family Fully Alive 
prepared by the archdiocese of philadelphia and 
the pontifical council for the family
 our sunday visitor, 128 pages, $9.95 Love Is Our Mission, a preparatory catechesis on family tied to the Catholic Church’s upcoming World Meeting of Families . . . . Continue Reading »

BARTH'S LEGACY I am grateful to Phillip Cary for his admirable review of my book Reading Barth with Charity (April). I have only one demurral. I would simply like to enter a plea for greater historical consciousness. After all, it has not yet been fifty years since Barth’s death. It seems . . . . Continue Reading »

On March 7, 2015, Randy Boyagoda of Ryerson College, R. R. Reno of First Things, and Raymond de Souza and Peter Stockland of Convivium, discussed the legacy of Richard John Neuhaus and the life of magazines in a panel discussion hosted at St-Jean-Baptiste parish of Dominican University College in Ottawa, Ontario. What follows is a selected transcript of their remarks. Continue Reading »

MARRIAGE “The Two Shall Become One Flesh: Reclaiming Marriage” (March) is a clear articulation of the importance of marriage in Christian theology and the need for churches to remain faithful to Christian teaching. But for all that it gets right, the piece contains one line of argument that . . . . Continue Reading »

The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom by michael shermer  henry holt, 560 pages, $32 The world was a dark and gloomy place until the Enlightenment came along, after which people began to think for themselves and break free from the shackles of . . . . Continue Reading »

FREUD While “The Back Page” is usually my favorite part of First Things, I must object to David Bentley Hart’s characterization of Freudian psychotherapy as deterministic in “­Roland on Free Will” (February). As a psy­chiatrist who has practiced and taught psychodynamic psycho­therapy . . . . Continue Reading »

Aquinas at Prayer: The Bible, Mysticism and Poetry? by paul murray, o.p. ?bloomsbury, 288 pages, $27.95 How did Thomas Aquinas pray? In Aquinas at Prayer, Paul Murray, O.P., sheds light on Thomas’s more mystical side by commenting on the prayers and liturgical poetry that he wrote as well as . . . . Continue Reading »

perplexing pope In “Between Two Synods” (January), George Weigel thoroughly summarizes the 2014 Extraordinary Synod on the Family and the issues at hand for the coming Ordinary Synod of 2015, except for one pressing question: Where is the Holy Father in all the controversy? Reading . . . . Continue Reading »

The Father’s Will: Christ’s Crucifixion and the Goodness of God ?by nicholas e. lombardo, o.p. ?oxford, 288 pages, $99 Sound Christian theology,” writes Nicholas Lombardo, “must keep a clear distance between God’s will and the moral evil of Christ’s . . . . Continue Reading »