Fred Siegel’s new book, Revolt Against the Masses, presents the story of a group of liberal elites who felt marginalized, bored, and under-appreciated by the broad run of America’s business groups, civic organizations, and religious traditions. Continue Reading »
Lumping together the recently attempted Arizona religious freedom law with new criminal laws against homosexuality in Nigeria and Uganda, the United Methodist Church’s Capitol Hill lobby lamented that “legislation that denies the human rights of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and . . . . Continue Reading »
Three white leopards open the second movement of T. S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday. What they are supposed to represent is anyone’s guess: the Holy Trinity; the three sins of avarice, gluttony, and lust; the divine agents of destruction that occasionally appear in the Old . . . . Continue Reading »
The Victorian poet Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) is most celebrated for her popular Christmas carols, but her most prolific liturgical season was Lent. A fervent Anglican, Rossetti expressed in her poems a deeper understanding of suffering than pieces like “Love Came Down At Christmas” might lead you to suspect. In her Lenten poetry, she focuses not only on her own sins, but highlights how her intense brokenness united her to God. Continue Reading »
Half an hour before sunrise on Ash Wednesday, hundreds of English-speakers from all over Rome will begin walking to the ancient basilica of St. Sabina on the Aventine Hill. They’ll start from student residences, from embassies to Italy and the Holy See, and from the Vatican. The Schwerpunkt, . . . . Continue Reading »
At the urging of a couple of friends who had recently read it for the first time, I reread (after about thirty years) Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s modern classic A Canticle for Leibowitz. It was far better than I appreciated its being in my younger days (oh, for a nickel every time I realize how . . . . Continue Reading »
Rock and roll has a rebellious sound. I write that hesitantly, because there is really no such thing as rock and roll, in terms of having a permanent nature or ongoing essence. Speed, loudness, and distorted acoustical effects do not a musical genre make. Rock is a mishmash of various musical . . . . Continue Reading »
Remarks delivered at Princeton University’s 2014 Annual Latke-Hamentaschen Debate. Our semi-official second national motto is e pluribus unum, famously mistranslated by Sarah Palin as “out of one, many,” but correctly translated as precisely the reverse: “out of many, . . . . Continue Reading »
When Pope John XXIII is canonized this April, the honor will be long-awaited—and richly deserved. After serving as a model priest and prelate, he became an equally beloved pontiff, convening Vatican II and articulating the timelessness of the Church’s teachings. Among his most important . . . . Continue Reading »
Early in my ministry as a pastor, my mother told me she’d had an abortion. It was for medical reasons, but it had haunted her down the corridors of her mind. She knew better than most people what was involved back then because she had taught obstetrical nursing at Vanderbilt University. . . . . Continue Reading »
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