Keep in mind that this is intended as high laudation. Ken Johnson, art reviewer of the New York Times , is discussing a new exhibit at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan: “The Viennesse Expressionist Egon Schiele (1890-1918) had only two urgent interests: himself and his sexual fantasies. Out of . . . . Continue Reading »
It’s Columbus Day and Justice Antonin Scalia is the grand marshall of the parade down Fifth Avenue. He takes great satisfaction in being an Italian-American, and he knows how to strut with all the fun and none of the arrogance that goes into fine strutting. I confess he is among my favorite . . . . Continue Reading »
Young John Rose, one of our marvelous interns at FIRST THINGS, reminds me that a major lecture will be delivered here in New York on Tuesday, October 25, by Cardinal Avery Dulles¯although I guess Avery Cardinal Dulles is the right way to render that name, "cardinal" being a nobility . . . . Continue Reading »
You just can’t catch a break if you’re one of those people who wants to defend Pius XII against the flood of attacks in recent years. In his quiet but unrelenting way, Ronald Rychlak has been covering this beat for almost a decade, most notably in his 2000 book Hitler, the War, and the . . . . Continue Reading »
Every year, FIRST THINGS and the Institute on Religion & Public Life sponsor the Erasmus Lecture, a talk in New York City about¯well, yes¯the first things in religion and public life. Tickets are still available for this year’s event, the nineteenth annual lecture in the series, on . . . . Continue Reading »
A number of readers have asked whether I will be responding to Garry Wills’ long article in the New York Review of Books (October 6) claiming that a few friends and I are manipulating the Vatican and the White House to create what he calls government by "the fringes." When the pope . . . . Continue Reading »
I had lunch yesterday with Alan Jacobs, whose new book The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis will be published next week, just in time for Disney’s movie version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe . Alan once wrote a hilarious piece in the Weekly Standard that mentioned the . . . . Continue Reading »
And now for something completely different. Well, not completely different but different enough. For some time we’ve been discussing how to make this site even more useful. I assume it is already useful because it is used so much by so many. People more at home than I am in the ethereal worlds . . . . Continue Reading »
The trouble with blogging, RJN, is narrative structure. Or maybe voice. Or maybe diction. Or maybe syntax. Or maybe I just don’t have a clue about the deep configuration of the blog entry as a literary genre. Does anything go? Does nothing go? I’ve got this really nice little . . . . Continue Reading »
How strange beyond understanding, I thought, that as we were at the altar offering up, as Catholics believe, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, only a little to the south of us was rising, in flames and mountains of smoke, a holocaust of suffering and death. Continue Reading »
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