Matthew Schmitz

Hadley Arkes has an interesting piece up at the Right Reason  site wondering if Justice Scalia and Anthony Kennedy aren’t finally converging on a shared standard of decency: Close to ninety per cent of the households in America have access to cable, and viewers may readily switch back . . . . Continue Reading »

St. Patrick’s Day is America’s favorite ethnic holiday. It is also the strangest. In a calendar crowded with Cinco de Mayo, Kwanzaa, and gay pride parades, St. Paddy’s is a “minority” holiday for for the white, middle-class majority. Many white Americans really are Irish, . . . . Continue Reading »

An Italian human rights group has decided that the world would be bettered if we all would study and celebrate Dante’s Divine Comedy  just a little less, reports the Guardian : Abandon all hope, ye who enter here: Dante’s medieval classic the Divine Comedy has been . . . . Continue Reading »

For a month we have been hearing about the moral unnaturalness—-the incomprehensibility and perversity—-of the traditional Christian opposition to birth control. But occasionally someone forgets about the party line and admits, sotto voce, that there is something to the traditional . . . . Continue Reading »

A profile of our editor R.R. Reno has just been posted on the site of the Christian Union, an organization that seeks to bring the light of the gospel to students attending Ivy League schools. Both the profile and the organization are worth a look . . . . . Continue Reading »

Via Matt Milliner comes this delightful story of a young boy who asked Frank Lloyd Wright to design a house for his dog: Wright designed Berger’s family’s California home in the Marin County town of San Anselmo, prompting the then-12-year-old Jim Berger to ask his dad if Wright would . . . . Continue Reading »

Charles Murray’s Coming Apart  has reminded us yet again that fewer and fewer Americans are getting married, and that those who do marry are waiting longer than ever to approach the altar. (Though it should be pointed out that the average age of first domestic union has remained . . . . Continue Reading »

One thing that has gone little remarked in the remembrance of James Q. Wilson, is the fact that he was a trenchant and sophisticated critic of the idea of same-sex marriage. Now, after his passing, at a time when polemicists try to label all opponents of same-sex marriage as bigots or yahoos, . . . . Continue Reading »

Via Joe Carter : In order to make sure gays and lesbians are adequately represented on the judicial bench, the state of California is requiring all judges and justices to reveal their sexual orientation, reports  The Weekly Standard . This is of course astoundingly invasive and rather . . . . Continue Reading »

Christine Baumgarthuber of the delightful Austerity Kitchen blog has a column on how people slept in pre-industrial societies. Instead of a single eight-hour interval, most people had a “first” and “second” sleep: The idea of first and second sleep derives from a form of . . . . Continue Reading »