First Things RSS Feed - Christopher Shannon https://www.firstthings.com/author/christopher-shannon en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:53:33 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/christopher-shannon 60 Catholicism as the Other https://www.firstthings.com/article/2004/01/catholicism-as-the-other https://www.firstthings.com/article/2004/01/catholicism-as-the-other Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0500 Martin Scorsese’s recent film The Gangs of New York takes us back to a time when religion, not race, set the terms for ethno-cultural conflict in America. The film begins in the 1840s with a battle between rival gangs of native (Anglo) Americans and immigrants (largely Irish, even more largely Catholic); it ends with the Civil War draft riots of 1863. Following the received historical wisdom of our day, reviewers generally acknowledged the latter event, which featured Irish Americans assaulting African Americans, as a pivotal turning point in American history; the film’s main story of the conflict between Irish Catholic immigrants and Anglo-Protestant nativists appears as something of a historical oddity, incidental to the “broader” story of the birth of the modern city. The religious story simply has no meaning in our current political and cultural landscape. Perhaps this accounts for the film’s astonishing shutout at last year’s Academy Awards ceremony.

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]]> Rising from the Ashes https://www.firstthings.com/article/1997/08/rising-from-the-ashes https://www.firstthings.com/article/1997/08/rising-from-the-ashes Fri, 01 Aug 1997 00:00:00 -0400 Angela’s Ashes
by Frank McCourt
Scribner, 364 pages, $25

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