R. R. Reno

“Hey, what are you doing here?” a friend asked when I showed up on Tuesday night to watch the election coverage. “Didn’t you write last Thursday, pronouncing politics unimportant?” Not exactly, I said. Politics is important. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines human beings as political animals… . Continue Reading »

Decades ago I spent a month or two of a summer in Boston. I still remember the inward cringe when I first traversed the sterile brick plaza at Government Center. It features one of those busy concrete buildings with jutting, thrusting, and vaguely functional slabs that vaguely reminds you of a . . . . Continue Reading »

It’s not easy to answer, the simple question of where to study theology. Interests, backgrounds, convictions, and levels of academic preparation combine in complicated ways when choosing a graduate program in theology. Still, certain qualities always matter: intellectual climate, commitment to . . . . Continue Reading »

Since the middle ages and the rise of the universities as distinct institution, the academic life has been a ripe target for satire. I can’t say this video is as artful as send up of scholastic logic and disputation in The Battle of the Seven Arts by Henri d’Andeli, but has some funny . . . . Continue Reading »

Ours is the age of misplaced priorities. Instead of art and culture, we focus on politics and punditry. Chatting over lunch, we talk about the upcoming elections or Sarah Palin’s significance for the conservative movement or the effects of the Chinese trade surplus. Imitating news analysts, we speculate about what it will mean for the future… . Continue Reading »

A friend recently wrote, expressing a worry that his parish priest sometimes takes up political issues too quickly and too freely. My friend is by no means a quietist. He’s a First Things sort of fellow, very committed to the significance of faith in the public square. One can’t read . . . . Continue Reading »

The decision by NPR to fire Juan Williams continues to churn the waters, and I find myself thinking more about the trajectory of American liberalism (and conservatism too). On the Guardian website, Michael Tomasky has a blog, and he steps up to defend the folks at NPR . As was the case in my . . . . Continue Reading »

Some of the comments made on my last posting have caused me to think further about the larger dynamics suggested by the circumstances surrounding Juan Williams’ dismissal. Here is the dynamic I see at work. When I was born, the idea-driven world (academic, media, and so forth) was dominated . . . . Continue Reading »

I gasped when I read the story in The New York Times . The folks at National Public Radio fired Juan Williams, ostensibly because of his comments on “The O’Reilly Factor,” which were judged by NPR to be “inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined . . . . Continue Reading »

Lucian Freud’s painting merits attention, but his artistic reputation has as much to do with his “bohemian mystique” as with his canvases. So writes Maureen Mullarkey, an exacting observer of contemporary art and diagnostician of its many self-deceptions in her review of Martin Gaylord’s Man with a Blue Scarf… Continue Reading »