Dear Friends, What you read on firstthings.com makes a difference. Today we face an increasingly hostile intellectual culture, one that presumes that faith undermines reason, and that religion creates conflict and hostility in society. Our goal is to demonstrate how wrong this prejudice is. We . . . . Continue Reading »
Wow. The oral argument defense of Obamacare’s constitutionality so far has not just been bad, as has been reported, but has been stunningly bad. And the incompetence displayed goes beyond that of Solicitor General Verrilli, but extends to several of the meaning-to-help-his-case comments . . . . Continue Reading »
Readers who are fans, as I am, of Ronald Knox’s writing will want to know about the Ronald Knox Societ y of North America. It’s a small society now with a useful website (offering a complete list and helpful summaries of his many books, for one thing) and an enjoyable occasional mailing . . . . Continue Reading »
A California woman has been arrested for assisting the suicide of an elderly man. From the Sacramento Bee story:The motive for Koency’s suicide was not immediately released, but prosecutors said he was not terminally ill, bedridden or immobile. ”People are to some degree . . . . Continue Reading »
Brian Sudlow, author of a new book examining the rise of the so-called “Catholic literary revival” in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, has given an interview to Emily Stimpson in which he discusses the circumstances that launched an entire generation of authors on both . . . . Continue Reading »
The above embedded political ad accuses Rep. Paul Ryan of wanting to “throw grandma off a cliff,” for proposing needed Medicare reforms, none of which would impact current recipients. (Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden has now joined with Ryan in a compromise proposal. More on that . . . . Continue Reading »
Russell E. Saltzman on chickens coming home to roost : Ms. Hansen, a farm kid from Iowa and now a lecturer and artist in residence at the University of Kansas, had the idea to display chickens in their coops at various spots around Lawrence. She planned to recruit volunteers to tend them and at the . . . . Continue Reading »
It’s a pleasant sign of aging when people you knew as children grow up and start offering the world their gifts. Here is a chant of Psalm 132 written by a young man whose birth I remember and who I still remember as a little boy (not having seen him since we moved away, though his parents . . . . Continue Reading »
A friend sends The Code of Honor , subtitled “or Rules for the government of principals and seconds in duelling,” published in 1837 by the former governor of South Carolina. It’s a fascinating document of a world long gone, and though the sense of honor is mostly admirable, if . . . . Continue Reading »
George Walden, writing for Standpoint , has written a probing critique of the precocious widening influence of neuroscience. Who knew advances made with the fMRI, technology only twenty-two years old, could affect literary criticism? Marilynne Robinson warns against the reductionism all this can . . . . Continue Reading »
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