Various

No Authority As a practicing general pediatrician, I appreciated Dr. Leonard Sax’s article “Don’t Ask the Kids” in the October issue of First Things. Sax makes some very helpful suggestions for parents struggling to raise respectful children, but his emphasis is misplaced in advocating . . . . Continue Reading »

DeplorableIn his August/September column, “Bigot-Baiting,” R. R. Reno charges that the Democratic Party is largely a hodgepodge of various groups, tenuously allied, and that the precarious nature of these alliances requires a well-maintained persecution complex, lest those alliances dissolve. In . . . . Continue Reading »

Wages of Sin The controversy surrounding capitalism was well represented by David Bentley Hart (“Mammon Ascendant”) and Francesca Aran Murphy (“Is Liberalism a Heresy?”) in your June/July issue. Both their essays were immensely interesting, but it is Hart’s missteps in describing . . . . Continue Reading »

Human WrongsR. R. Reno, agreeing with Yuval Levin, believes we must rid ourselves of our nostalgia (“Public Square,” May). It is banal, of course, to suggest that we cannot live in the past. But is it nostalgic to yearn for a time when workers enjoyed a measure of security, families were intact, . . . . Continue Reading »

MARQUETTEMickey Mattox’s piece on Marquette University (“Marquette’s Gender Regime,” April) was welcome indeed. I taught at Marquette for thirty years, and am grateful for the many blessings I experienced there. It has consequently been difficult for me to watch from a distance as the . . . . Continue Reading »

Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movementby sue ellen browder ignatius, 232 pages, $22.95 Subverted recounts the untold history of how the feminist and pro-abortion movements became allied. Part exposé, part conversion memoir, Browder’s book defies easy . . . . Continue Reading »

Bad BuildingsJustin Shubow’s “Monument to Failure” (March) comes at a particularly critical time in our fight for America’s heritage. The past decades have been unkind to our nation’s identity, and our architectural estrangement is, fittingly, the most visible sign of this. The decades . . . . Continue Reading »

Culture I recently read Jonathan Price’s “Culture by Subtraction” (February) and thoroughly enjoyed it—not least because it grants the rather respectable name of “cultural habit” to what has so far been called my countrymen’s “arrogance”! When reading, I could not help wondering . . . . Continue Reading »

CATHOLICISMSA demographic question for Ross Douthat regarding his “A Crisis of Conservative Catholicism” (January): If liberal Catholicism is to be alive in twenty years, where will its members come from? Who will be not just self-identifying to pollsters but running its schools and its . . . . Continue Reading »

Saint Aldhelm’s Riddlestranslated by a. m. justertoronto, 173 pages, $29.95 The riddle of Samson’s strength, the riddle of the eagle’s way with the sky and the ship’s way with the sea, the riddles in royal dreams of Pharaoh or ­Nebuchadnezzar, the riddle of things hidden since the world . . . . Continue Reading »