Dan Hitchens

Our age of irony has its dangers—irony can be useful for stripping away nonsense, but not for making sense of things.  Continue Reading »

In reality, Fr. James Martin does not preach directly against the Church’s teachings—but neither will he affirm them as true. Continue Reading »

John Bradburne—the saintly ascetic murdered in 1979 while caring for lepers in Rhodesia—was also the most prolific poet in the English language.  Continue Reading »

Even if robots aren't stealing our jobs, they may be stealing our humanity. Continue Reading »

Christians, it has been said, “worry about what people are doing in bed much more than making sure everybody has a bed to begin with.” That pithy statement of conventional wisdom can be usefully tested against the life and writings of Dorothy Day. Through the Catholic Worker houses she founded, . . . . Continue Reading »

If Crosby’s reform were enacted, priests would have to judge the souls of their flock. The remarried would be divided into those whose lives have a Dostoevskian tragic resonance, and those who are merely “common adulteresses.” This cruel charade would collapse before it began. Continue Reading »

Communion discipline, Rocco Buttiglione says, should be changed to incorporate the difference between objective and subjective guilt. This is wrong. Continue Reading »

I n 1954, four years after George Orwell’s premature death from tuberculosis, his friend Christopher Hollis recalled: “One of the most interesting and deepest of Orwell’s beliefs was his belief in the profound evil of contraception.” Near the end of his life, Orwell expressed the view that . . . . Continue Reading »

Believing in absolutely nothing is harder than it looks. The ultra-skeptical ­Arcesilaus, head of the Platonic Academy in the third century b.c., tried his best: When confronted with the saying “I only know that I know nothing,” which was attributed to Socrates, he is supposed to have replied . . . . Continue Reading »