Leaving Kansas City

There were three things I wanted to get done before I left Kansas City for twelve weeks in New York for work at First Things . I wanted my sixteen-year-old daughter, Joanie, to get her driver’s license. That would be a help to her mother in my absence and insure getting the younger girl . . . . Continue Reading »

Alligators and Drinking

As we clean up formatting errors in the archives, occasionally we find amusing tidbits. Here’s another one, this time from the August/September 2006 Public Square : This is, I suppose, a Louisiana turn on Hilaire Belloc’s little rhyme: “Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, / . . . . Continue Reading »

Designer Baby Doctor Decides to Wait

What do you know. Dr. Steinberg has changed his mind: “Though well intended, we remain sensitive to public perception and feel that any benefit the diagnostic studies may offer are far outweighed by the apparent negative societal impacts involved.” In other words, he’s nixing the . . . . Continue Reading »

Norma-tive Judaism

Win some, lose some: The Daily Mail today reports that Lindsay Lohan proposes to convert to Judaism. According to Ha’aretz this morning, Actress Lindsay Lohan is planning to convert to Judaism to show her committment to her Jewish girlfriend D.J. Samantha Ronson, according to the British . . . . Continue Reading »

Refusing to Prevent IVF Moral Anarchy

In his recent book, Imagining the Future, Yuval Levin succinctly identified the source of so many of our cultural problems today. It was a real “Bingo!” moment for me: Society has ceased to be primarily about promoting virtue. Rather, our primary drive as a culture today is to prevent . . . . Continue Reading »