R. R. Reno

For all the weeping and crying and gnashing of teeth among conservatives, it’s important to recognize the positive opportunity in Obamacare. The expanded federal financing will almost certainly end up paying for abortions, an outcome that will require new battles on behalf of the sanctity of . . . . Continue Reading »

Two thousand years ago, at the dawn of the Imperial era, Livy wrote a history of Rome. He feared “the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them.” He was not optimistic… . Continue Reading »

I’m like most. The latest wave of revelations about clerical sexual abuse demoralizes me. I’m not wavering in my conviction that the one true and apostolic communion of the saints subsists in the Catholic Church. I think of what St Paul says: “We have this treasure in earthen . . . . Continue Reading »

In the mid-1980s, amidst the battleship grey study carrels on the lower level of the Yale Divinity School library, my graduate student friends at Yale began mentioning a strange, new, and exotic name: Michael Wyschogrod… . Continue Reading »

In the pages of his blog for World Affairs, David Reiff has been musing of late about the ways in which historical consciousness influences our political and social imaginations. His reflections on historical memory, especially the tendency for societies to carefully tend the fires of past . . . . Continue Reading »

Yesterday’s Jerusalem Pos t features an op-ed by Alon Goshen-Gottstei n that defends Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa’s Good Friday sermon last week at St. Peters in Rome. The sermon was in the news because Fr. Cantalamessa drew parallels between the recent media treatment of the pedophilia . . . . Continue Reading »

Among contemporary American philosophers, Martha Nussbaum has long represented the best and the worst of the urgent liberal conscience. One feels the moral seriousness of her work—and one worries (at least I do) that intellectual corners are being cut and complexities set aside so that her . . . . Continue Reading »

Kinship by Covenant: A Canonical Approach to the Fulfillment of God’s Saving Promises by Scott W. Hahn Yale, 589 pages, $50 Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the Anchor Bible was the flagship series for “scientific” biblical scholarship in the modern mode: . . . . Continue Reading »

For those interested in a detailed discussion of the flaws in Marc Thiessen’s use of double effect to justify “enhanced interrogation techniques,” as well as a sober overall judgment about the moral status of our interrogation policies after 9/11, see Christopher Tollefsen’s . . . . Continue Reading »

In a New York Times column today, Mark Oppenheimer reviews the controversy surrounding former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen’s efforts to square waterboarding with Catholic moral doctrine. Mr. Thiessen has some ill-informed views, and Mr. Oppenheimer seems to have failed to do his homework… . Continue Reading »