First Links — 4.18.12

Death by Treacle Pamela Haag,  The American Scholar In an Apocalyptic Daze Pascal Bruckner,  City Journal Social Issues Sink to the Bottom Pew Research Center The 20-Year Nostalgia Cycle Forrest Wickham,  Browbeat Heroic Catholicism, Not Casual Catholicism Bishop Daniel R. Jenky, . . . . Continue Reading »

Students and Parents as Consumers

This morning, my wife was recounting a conversation she’d had with another parent at a local homeschooling co-op where she teaches and our children take classes.  Her friend—speaking parent to parent, not parent to teacher—stated quite emphatically that we parents are . . . . Continue Reading »

On the Square Today

Elizabeth Scalia on Ross Douthat’s new book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics : Douthat’s book is a neatly laid-out dissertation on the people of faith and their place in American society. It is a deft chronicle of where faith communities went right—spanning a . . . . Continue Reading »

Occupy Pulitzer?

The Pulitzer granted to Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve caused me to revisit R.R. Reno’s prescient First Things review , which suggests the book offers “a justifying mythology for America’s ruling elite.” The Swerve [blusters] again and again about the beauty-loathing, . . . . Continue Reading »

If Vice Is Wrong, There Is An Afterlife?

Alexander Pruss, a philosophy professor at Baylor, often posts wonderful things like this on his own blog and the more medieval-minded Prosblogion : The following argument is valid, and is sound if we take the conditional in (2) to be material. 1.    (Premise) In despairing, one . . . . Continue Reading »

Understatement of the Day

Comes in a  New York Times   piece aimed are reviving the reputation of campus “sex weeks,” in which the writer acknowledge there has been “some opposition” to these events: Sex weeks have faced some opposition from colleges, alumni and students nearly everywhere . . . . Continue Reading »