First Things RSS Feed - Elizabeth Powers

How to Pray

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0400

As a Catholic growing up in the years before Vatican II, I knew very few Protestants, much less evangelicals, even though I lived in Kentucky and southern Indiana, heartland of Protestantism, and not the Episcopalian variety. As a matter of fact, until I went to college, there were no blacks and not a single person I would have been able to identify as Jewish among my acquaintances. Such was the status and class separation of the 1950s, an outcome of the hermeticism of middle-class life of that era.

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Thoroughly Modern Mommy

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Waiting for Daisy:
A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five
Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night,
and One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother
by Peggy Orenstein
Bloomsbury, 240 pages, $23.95

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Powers: The Party of Responsibility?

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500

The Republicans seem to have lost the values voters in the midterm elections. William Saletan, author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War and frequent contributor on the subject of abortion for Slate.com, sees this loss as a chance for the Democrats to capture these voters, if they take the advice he gave them in 2004 , namely, “Go back to being the party of responsibility.” “Go back”? you may ask. After the 2004 election, Saletan admonished the Democrats : "Be the party that rewards ordinary people who do what they’re supposed to do¯and protects them from those who don’t.”

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Powers: Boomers, War, and Sacrifice

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500

We were walking through Central Park in Manhattan, just south of the Naumburg Bandshell, when we came across what we thought were the remains of an ancient churchyard. Like an ancient churchyard, it was seemingly untended and abandoned. On closer examination, it turned out to be a grove across which were scattered fourteen memorial stones dedicated to the men of the 307th Infantry, 77th Division, who had died in action in World War I. A large boulder nearby was inscribed “To the Dead of the 307th Infantry AEF, 590 Officers and Men, 1917–1919.” Twelve of the fourteen stones still bear a brass plaque on which, in raised or sunk relief, are the words “Memorial Tree World War 1917–1918.” It was evident that the fourteen stones originally marked the spot at which a tree was planted in memory of the fallen, and ten trees remain standing. At the bottom of many of the plaques was the information “Registered/American Forestry Association/Washington, D.C.”

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Powers: Slavery and Abortion

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500

An academic colleague of mine has carved out considerable expertise for himself in the area of slavery. I roused his ire once by asking if, two centuries from now, people might regard abortion the way we now do slavery. This was at a meeting of Enlightenment-period scholars. There is in all of us a tendency to see the past through the eyes of the present, what is called “provincialism of the present,” and this tendency extends to academics, perhaps especially so. Still, it always surprises me when I encounter it among those in my own discipline of eighteenth-century studies.

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Powers: The Real Clinton Legacy

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0400

On the same day my husband applied for Social Security benefits, we watched the purple-faced Bill Clinton defending his record as terrorist hunter-in-chief in the infamous Fox-TV interview with Chris Wallace . All the obfuscations the former president brought to bear also brought to mind the irreconcilable contradictions of the American Liberal-Left. Here, after all, was the president who has sinned big time against the tenets of Liberal-Left orthodoxy. He levied the largest tax increase in the history of the United States, raising the tax rate on Social Security from 50 to 85 percent (thereby penalizing the manifestly non-rich). He cut welfare to the poor by 50 percent. And let’s not forget his transgressions in the area of sexual harassment.

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Powers: Mac Donald and the Moral Legacy of Christianity

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Heather Mac Donald’s defense of “skeptical” (i.e., atheist) conservatives against the Religious Right has by now been widely disseminated. It first appeared in The American Conservative and drew a response , on this blog and in The National Review , from Michael Novak who (very generously and gently, I thought) sought to broaden Mac Donald’s shockingly superficial understanding of religion and the religious impulse. Mac Donald then followed up with a response in The National Review . As in the earlier article, she dismissed the notion that we are inheritors of Christianity’s moral legacy and insisted on the possibility of being good without God: Religious institutions and beliefs are human creations, and arguments for conservative values can proceed on the basis of reason alone.

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Between Father and Daughter

Wed, 01 Mar 2000 00:00:00 -0500

Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love
by dava sobel
walker and company, 432 pages, $27

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The Self in Full

Mon, 01 Nov 1999 00:00:00 -0500

An autobiography is a strange beast. While it offers unique access to the inner life of an individual from the perspective of the only person capable of assessing it, it is problematic precisely because the self-knowledge of first-person narrators is problematic. Autobiography also posits a coherent, defined self which occupies a position from which to look back and evaluate the life. Yet, if we think about it at all, we are aware, being strangers in the cosmos, that every lived moment is simultaneously slipping into past time and rendering the notion of a stable self questionable. Walker Percy’s observation in Lost in the Cosmos captures the enigma of self and self-knowledge:

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Seeking Something Spiritual

Tue, 01 Jun 1999 00:00:00 -0400

After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950's.
By Robert Wuthnow.
University of California Press. 277 pp. $29.95

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