R. R. Reno

Spenser’s Faerie Queene and James’ Golden Bowl as summer reading? I can hear my wife groaning and commenting that these recommendations amount to the intellectual equivalent of my usual vacation plans, which often involve climbing remote mountains and going on hundred mile bike rides. Continue Reading »

One often hears about how the Muslim world needs to “undergo the Enlightenment” and “engage modernity,” learning the virtues of supposedly modern tolerance. It’s an understandable but naïve sentiment. Democracy and the modern nation state are hell on minorities… . Continue Reading »

The U.K. is gearing up to legalize reproductive technology that manipulates genes. It’s the beginning of a technological revolution that will have a transformative influence over culture ten times greater than the invention of the Pill. This revolution will begin as a therapeutic imperative . . . . Continue Reading »

Father’s Day is the perfect American invention: equal parts moralism and money-making. Early in the twentieth century the dominant forms of Protestantism urged temperance and campaigned, successfully, for Prohibition. This famous episode in American history was part of a larger moral project, one very concerned with reinforcing what we now call family values… . Continue Reading »

Some months ago Fathers Thomas Joseph White and Austin Litke, O.P., played  bluegrass music at the World Youth Alliance headquarters here in New York. They’re good, and to be frank they also look kinda out-there. It’s not often that you see two guys in white habits playing guitar . . . . Continue Reading »

For a number of years I’ve been checking Jewish Ideas Daily, a site that featured writers I’d like to publish in First Things (and in fact often have). It’s now morphed into something new: Mosaic Magazine . This new web offering is the ultimate anti-Twitter. It’s goal is to . . . . Continue Reading »

Every culture thrills to its favored words or concepts. In The Ethics of Rhetoric, Richard Weaver dubbed them “god terms.” They’re the argument-ending, conclusive words that we find intrinsically persuasive because they express our deep prejudices about what’s good and true and beautiful. Weaver wrote The Ethics of Rhetoric after World War II. The god terms in his day were “progressive,” “democratic,” “scientific,” and so forth… . Continue Reading »

Money matters, but not as much as we’ve come to think. Even if everybody in America enjoyed excellent health care, decent housing, educational opportunities, and lots of consumer goodies, but the wealthy and powerful lived in gated communities and held the rest of us in disdain, we’d think our . . . . Continue Reading »

Rudolf Bultmann: A Biography by Konrad Hammann Polebridge, 624 pages, $60 In his recently translated biography of Rudolf Bultmann (originally published in German in 2009), Konrad Hammann largely accepts and presumes the modern Protestant theological story. It’s the German version of our “up . . . . Continue Reading »

In December 2012, more than twenty scholars gathered in New York for a seminar to discuss the eminent sociologist Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution. A big, remarkable book, its two main arguments are for the most part congenial to First Things readers. First, biological evolution shows . . . . Continue Reading »