Gilbert Meilaender

Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem, By David Blankenhorn Basic Books, 328 pages, $23 . Suppose we accept for the moment a widespread depiction of how our society has systematically oppressed women. It has connected the biological fact that women give birth with the . . . . Continue Reading »

In February of 1994, in what was its March issue, First Things published a statement on the homosexual movement signed by twenty-one people, of whom I was one. An excerpt from that statement was published in the Wall Street Journal on February 24. I do not intend here to rehearse the argument of . . . . Continue Reading »

The political theorist J. G. A. Pocock once enunciated his First Law of interdisciplinary communication: “Nearly all methodological debate is useless, because nearly all methodological debate is reducible to the formula: You should not be doing your job; you should be doing mine.” It is . . . . Continue Reading »

Daniel Callahan Two important social forces lie behind the potentially disastrous turn of public opinion toward euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide in recent years. The necessary condition is the excessive emphasis in our culture on choice and self-determination. The sufficient condition, the . . . . Continue Reading »

The Moral Sense by james q. wilson free press, 300 pages, $22.95 We read books and recommend them for many different reasons. Some are tightly constructed, theoretically persuasive works; others may be conceptually more confusing, yet very rich in their individual parts. James Wilson has, it seems . . . . Continue Reading »

In Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, Socrates and Critobulus are discussing household management, in which the wife plays a major role. The exchange goes this way: “Anyhow, Critobulus, you should tell us the truth, for we are all friends here. Is there anyone to whom you commit more affairs of importance . . . . Continue Reading »

Of late I have been reading John B. Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus . I have enjoyed it, not least because the book is clearly and carefully written, even if the Jesus who emerges from these pages is not exactly the “startling” figure promised by the dust jacket. But I . . . . Continue Reading »

If one were to seek a connecting thread that runs through the biblical witness, a good candidate would be “faithfulness.” Robert Jenson has written that faithfulness is “the theological heart of the Bible,” and that, in turn, marriage is “the paradigm case of an ethic of faithfulness.” . . . . Continue Reading »

It may just have been a throwaway line, a presumed witticism, to which he gave little thought; in which case he is convicted merely of intellectual sloppiness. But it may also have been seriously meant, a revelation of his considered judgment; in which case he offers us a window into the blindness . . . . Continue Reading »

The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideasby Isaiah BerlinAlfred A. Knopf, 277 pages, $22 Henry Hardy, the editor of this hook, describes it as “in effect the fifth of four volumes” of Isaiah Berlin’s collected essays. Like one of its predecessor volumes (Against the . . . . Continue Reading »