Last week at First Things we were very happy to host Michael Novak and Paul Adams as they discussed their new book on social justice. One of the themes Novak and Adams touched on in their presentations was how poorly Americans today seem to understand the concept of social justice. On both left and . . . . Continue Reading »
Interceding Discreetly
Br. Barnabas McHenry, O. P. , Dominicana
Take a Look at the Mental Junk Food Colleges Assign Students
Peter W. Wood, Federalist
Persisting in Prayer with the Caritas Podcast
Leah Libresco, Patheos
On the Right to the Most Ideal Life Possible
Melinda Selmys, Aleteia
My Secret Life as a Forbidden Second Child in China
Karoline Kan, Foreign Policy
The Little Sisters of the Poor on Why They Can't “Just Sign the Form”
Sister Constance Veit, L. S. P., Catholic Review
We Are Hopelessly Hooked
Jacob Weisberg, New York Review of Books
Nicholas Sparks and the Evils of Banality
Heather Havrilesky, Book Forum
Francesca Murphy On the night after the actor Alan Rickman died, I watched the version of Sense and Sensibility in which he plays Colonel Brandon. What a beautiful movie, and what a wonderful performance he gives. Since then I have been reading Sense and Senibility on my kindle. Jane Austen was . . . . Continue Reading »
Rod Dreher recently posted excerpts of a letter from one of his readers. It was an extended, largely negative assessment of my analysis of our political moment, “An Abandoned White Middle Class.” There I argued that the changing nature of our leadership class explains the populist rebellion, at . . . . Continue Reading »
Did you hear the one where . . . ?
Paul Menzer has heard it. He’s heard the one with the drunk Richard III, the one with the fat Ghost of Hamlet’s Father stuck in the trapdoor, the one with the father–daughter pair playing Romeo and Juliet, the one where Othello’s makeup rubs off on Desdemona’s face to give her a beard. In fact, he’s probably heard several variations on any given Shakespearean anecdote, a handful verifiable, but most patently recycled, exaggerated, or apocryphal—yet in a different sense, in Menzer’s paradoxical view, no less true. Continue Reading »
Whatever it Takes to Make Lent Hardcore
Melinda Selmys, Patheos
Cover Story: The Headscarf, Modern Turkey, and Me
Elif Batuman, New Yorker
A Conversation with Rowan Williams
John F. Deane, Image
A Pope, a Patriarch, and Great Expectations in Cuba
Ivan Plis, National Interest
Debased Coynage
Edward Feser, Edward Feser
The Psychologists Take Power
Tamsin Shaw, New York Review of Books
To Hell With Hope
Fr. Chase Pepper, C.S.C., Holy Cross Vocations
Chess is not a Sport but a Game. So What's the Difference?
David Papineau, Aeon
For a class on Catholic Social Teaching this past fall, I assigned my college students Robert Hugh Benson's dystopian novel Lord of the World. I thought the book would pair well with our extensive studies of the thought of Pope Francis, in part because Francis has conspicuously mentioned Benson’s . . . . Continue Reading »
The world that Reich built does not simply want to revise concepts of sexual decorum; It wants to eradicate them.
Continue Reading »
One of Canada’s prisoners of conscience, Mary Wagner, in a moving letter from her Vanier Centre cell, writes of her concern that many members of our Christian medical associations, “despite their earnest desire to resist doctor-abetted suicide, have succumbed to defeatism.”She points to . . . . Continue Reading »
Recently, I came across an essay by Professor Cathleen Kaveny, published in Commonweal magazine, criticizing Fr. Richard John Neuhaus for sowing division among members of the Body of Christ. Her charge is that—for political reasons—Neuhaus was more interested in forging alliances with . . . . Continue Reading »
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