R.R. Reno is editor of First Things.
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R. R. Reno
Yesterday I posted some thoughts about a recently published history of the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. A friend chided me for ending my analysis with what he took to be a dismissive parting shot that does to progressive Catholic theology what the progressives tend to do to the . . . . Continue Reading »
Nearly fifty years have past, but the legacy of the Second Vatican Council (it ended in November 1965) still remains a matter of debate. Not surprisingly, studies of the history often become advocacy. The American Catholic Revolution: How the Sixties Changed the Church Forever, by Mark S. Massa, S. J., is no exception. Dean of the School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College, Fr. Massa hangs his history on the old caricatures that have dominated liberal interpretations of modern Catholic history for decades… . Continue Reading »
William Carroll, one of the most subtle Thomists currently thinking about science, metaphysics, and faith, has put up a characteristically clear and lucid analysis of Stephen Hawking’s claim that modern physics has shown that we don’t need God to get the universe going. As Carroll . . . . Continue Reading »
In a long posting at Public Discourse, ” The Mosque’s Lesson in Loyalty ,” Carson Holloway provides helpful analysis of the legitimate human impulse to love one’s own. Beginning with family and clan, radiating outward to neighborhood, community, and nation, we have a native impulse toward . . . . Continue Reading »
What’s next? An animal rights suicide bomber at the Bronx Zoo? Our tendency is to try to read some larger meaning into the bizarre story of James Lee, the paradoxically anti-human humanistsaving us from ourselves by making sure there aren’t any more selveswho held . . . . Continue Reading »
Labor Day is upon us, the long weekend that puts an exclamation point on summers end. Im planning, if thats the right word, to do nothing in particular. Rest, however, is never simple and often ambiguous. We sometimes speak of those who have died as finally at rest, or as resting in peace. Its not a negative image, but then again its not positive either… Continue Reading »
Alex Knepper is an undergraduate at American University, and he’s not gonna take it any more. In a forcefully written denunciation of what he diagnoses as a mindless anti-conservatism at the root of the Leftist mentality, ” The roots of the left’s love affair with Islam ,” . . . . Continue Reading »
Unfortunately, the United States government and the development agencies it funds seem determined to export our culture of contraception. As a story in the Philippine Daily Inquirer reports , American agencies have been intimately involved in the design of a big push to “normalize” . . . . Continue Reading »
Ive long enjoyed reading Camille Paglia, surely one of the most interesting voices in academia, full of piss and vinegar, and capable of original thought. I remember reading her insightful and very funny essay, The Joy of Presbyterian Sex, in the 1980s and marking her down as . . . . Continue Reading »
A number of friends have pushed and probed, wondering if I’m not being overly simplistic when I say that Islam is largely irrelevant to the future of America. First of all, I am being overly simplistic. Islam and Americathese are extraordinarily complex cultural realities. When I wrote . . . . Continue Reading »
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