One of the intelligent people who seemed to share Scalia’s view of the Devil was Whittaker Chambers, the brilliant writer, ex-Soviet espionage agent, and Time magazine editor, who in February 1948 wrote an essay in Life magazine about a New Year’s Eve conversation between a pessimist and Satan. Continue Reading »
Incestuous relationships between adults should push the issue of consent and its many complexities and weaknesses to the fore in debates about sexual morality and marriage. Continue Reading »
It is a common thesis that the social/sexual changes of recent years are the flowering of the Sixties. This makes the best commentators and essayists of that era worth rereading. Continue Reading »
The First Things Podcast, Episode 9. Anti-feminist icons remembered (the late Phyllis Schlafly) and welcomed (special guest Midge Decter). PC campus culture debated. Continue Reading »
In this regime that probes people’s minds for hidden assumptions, for biases concealed even from their holders, the custodians have an impossible task. Continue Reading »
But if you looked at the map closely you would notice towns with names like Hohokus, and Buttzville, and Ong’s Hat, and clearly those were goof names, which made you suspect that there was actually no such thing as New Jersey, that New Jersey was an idea, an illusion, a conspiracy, a deft jest perpetrated by cartographers in their cups and now accepted as wholly real by all sorts of people. Continue Reading »
Those of us who aspire to transform the public square with some fraction of St. Teresa’s success would do well to imitate first her unyielding attention to divine communion and spiritual discernment of the signs of the times. Continue Reading »
Phyllis Schlafly, who died on September 5, was the bane of feminists: a one-woman powerhouse of articulate conservative political positions, who relentlessly defended faith-and-family issues from liberal onslaughts. Continue Reading »