In anticipation of a film adaptation by Martin Scorsese (due this fall), I read Shusaku Endo’s Silence. It’s the story of a Jesuit priest, the most polished product of the counter-reformation Church, sailing to Japan and there encountering brutal persecution.
I just sent the John Kasich presidential campaign another $100 contribution today. A grain of sand from me to weigh on the side of Kasich staying in the presidential race through the convention.No, I don’t think that Kasich has anything but a vanishingly low probability of winning the GOP . . . . Continue Reading »
In a Web Exclusive article today, I elaborate problems that I see in Amoris Laetitia. Here on First Thoughts, I want to discuss the parts of Amoris Laetitia that are especially helpful for an engaged couple. The document offers an excellent diagnosis of why marriage can be difficult in our time: . . . . Continue Reading »
Give Us This Day Our Daily Hedgehog
Leah Libresco, Aleteia
The Librarian Who Saved Timbuktu's Treasures from Al-Quaeda
Joshua Hammer, Wall Street Journal
Corporeality Bites
Rachel Lu, National Review
China may be Readying New Crackdown on Religion
Associated Press, Crux
A Conversation with Camile Paglia
Tyler Cowen, Medium
Shakespeare Not Our Contemporary
James Bowman, New Criterion
The Smug Style in American Liberalism
Emmett Rensin, Vox
How I Discovered True Masculinity
Matt Moore, Gospel Coalition
My Unexpected Pregnancy Turned Out Better Than Everyone Expected
Heather Scott, Verily
Ray Russell enjoys the distinction and curse of being a horror writer’s horror writer. Though he helped rescue baroque gothic tales from Lovecraftian tendrils with his more Hemingwayesque renderings, he achieved nothing higher than cult status. Better-known figures such as Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro tout him, and his short story “Sardonicus,” a minor classic, received a film adaptation for which he wrote the screenplay. Continue Reading »
Ascension Day 2016 is one week away, on Thursday, 5 May. That, in case you don't know, is a public holiday in Indonesia, followed on 6 May by a holiday in honor of Muhammad’s Isra and Mi'raj. In North America, however, it not only is not a public holiday, most churches won’t celebrate it (if . . . . Continue Reading »
In the first pages of We Have Been Friends Together, Raïssa Maritain recounts one of her earliest memories. She is five, and her parents have rented a room in their house to a woman who holds classes for young children. She remembers watching this strange woman from afar with hushed reverence: “I heard the multiplication table being repeated . . . and I was overwhelmed with the feeling that here was instruction and knowledge and a truth to be known; and my heart almost burst with the desire to know.” . . . . Continue Reading »
If there’s any good reason to distrust the self-awareness of contemporary progressives, it's the cultural epidemic of pornography. Of all the Sexual Revolution’s fruits, porn is arguably the one that has rotted fastest. It has defied the categorical wisdom of libertines by growing in users and . . . . Continue Reading »
Something is afoot. “Porn and the Threat to Virility” recently hit the stands not in the form of a religious tractate, but on the cover of Time. Just days prior to that, in Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis decried the “flood of pornography” and its pernicious spread which deform sexuality. If . . . . Continue Reading »
The significance of the joint visit to the island of Lesbos, Greece, on Saturday, April 16, 2016, by the leaders of the Christian Churches of the East and West cannot be understated. And its impact on the refugee crisis—in addition to its spiritual and symbolical dimensions, as well as its . . . . Continue Reading »
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