Matthew Schmitz is senior editor of First Things. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Spectator, the Catholic Herald, and other publications. He holds an A.B. in English from Princeton University. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
A pope who speaks with singular eloquence of our need to resist the technocratic logic of the “throwaway culture” seems bent on leading his Church to surrender to it. Continue Reading »
Exodusby thomas joseph white, o.p.brazos, 336 pages, $32.99 In days past, to study Scripture was to study the tradition of its reception. The sacred text was read with the Fathers of the Church, accompanied by commentaries and catenae, with frequent glosses explaining the meaning of difficult . . . . Continue Reading »
During my time at Princeton, there was no more popular insult than “tool,” an epithet hurled at anyone who tried too hard. Of course, the term was unavoidably classist. An Amazon executive’s daughter who had attended Lakeside or a banker’s son who’d gone to St. Ann’s didn’t have to . . . . Continue Reading »
Will Catholics uphold the Church's teaching that the divorced and remarried cannot be admitted to communion, or will they reject it? Pope Francis has brought this question before the Church, though he refuses to formulate it so starkly. Continue Reading »
Red, White, Blue, and Catholicby stephen p. whiteliguori, 101 pages, $12.99 In this primer on Catholic citizenship, the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Stephen White reminds us that faithful citizenship is about love—“love for the people and institutions to which we are bound by birth and by . . . . Continue Reading »
If the sincere exchange of vows doesn’t make their marriage valid, what does? Must all sacramentally valid marriages resemble my friends', beginning only after a few years of theological study, during a Mass set to music by Mozart? Continue Reading »
There are two groups of people who say that religious people are obliged to hate and kill gays: salafists and secular liberals. Neither recognizes the possibility of a faith premised on the love of sinners. Continue Reading »