First Things RSS Feed - Dermot Quinn

A New Saint on St. Stephen's Green

Thu, 10 Oct 2019 06:00:00 -0400

Ireland has produced many saints, and John Henry Newman is the latest. Newman was not Irish, of course, but his canonization is as much an Irish as an English event, an opportunity to reflect on the state of Catholicism in a country where he intermittently spent several years between 1851 and 1858.

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Imagining Narnia

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

CS. Lewis is hard to like and easy to love. As a solitary, clever, and bookish child he was a study in precocity, a model prig. “I have a prejudice against the French,” he announced, a four year old, to his father. Why? “If I knew why it wouldn’t be a prejudice.” At the age of nine he was reading Paradise Lost and (he told his diary) making “reflections there-on.” At the age of fourteen, he had written an entire novel. As a schoolboy classicist, brightest of his peers, he graded ancient authors as if competitors with him for academic prizes: Thucydides “desperately dull and tedious,” Plato and Horace “charming,” Homer a “giant.”

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Pym Wins

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 00:00:00 -0500

The Book Against God
by James Wood
Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. 257 pp. $24.

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What's So Funny

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 00:00:00 -0400

The Morality of Laughter
by f. h. buckley
university of michigan press. 239 pp. $29.95

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