First Things RSS Feed - Mary Angelita Ruiz

It’s That Time of Year Again…

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 12:55:37 -0500

Men and Abortion

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 10:12:33 -0500

Ruiz: The Southwell Institute

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Robert Southwell is perhaps the most famous of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, a young sixteenth-century Jesuit who was hanged, drawn, and quartered for spending more than forty days on English soil as a Catholic priest. He wrote the poetry for which he is still studied and celebrated while in prison awaiting trial and execution. Along with Richard Crashaw and Gerard Manley Hopkins, he is considered one of England’s greatest Catholic poets.

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Ruiz: Junior Fellowships

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

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Ruiz: Jesus, Manly Man

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500

"Manliness is next to godliness," ran the Los Angeles Times headline on December 7. The article examines "a contrarian movement gaining momentum on the fringes of Christianity" that rebels against what the Times calls the "feminization of mainline churches": the frilly décor, the effeminate hand-holding, the strummy ballads.

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Ruiz: Twelfth Night & the Art of Humiliation

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Last week I saw the final New York performance of a Twelfth Night now touring the United States, brought over by a British production company called Cheek by Jowl . This Twelfth Night is performed entirely in Russian by Russian performers, with Shakespeare’s English only as supertitles projected above the stage.

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Samuel Pepys’ diary

Thu, 24 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Assorted tech-savvy wags have created blogs for major literary figures ( G.K. Chesterton , for example), so it was inevitable that someone would create a blog for perhaps the most prolific diarist in English literary history. Samuel Pepys (pronounced Peeps) was a successful seventeenth-century British civil servant who chronicled nearly every day of his life for almost nine straight years, from 1660 to 1669, including his business interest in ships and the British navy, his run-ins with the nobility, his merry meals with friends and family, his nightly prayers, and his “towsing” (ruffling up, disheveling) of women other than his wife (the latter two activities often on the same day). “Pepys” inaugurated his blog on January 1, 2003, by reprinting his entry from January 1, 1660; as of today, he is up to August 23, 1663. A small group of regular readers provides useful annotations.

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America’s “new gender divide”

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

For the past month, the New York Times has been running a series on “the new gender divide," which "examin[es] what has happened to men and women several decades after the women’s movement began." Sunday’s article , "Facing Middle Age with No Degree, and No Wife," by Eduardo Porter and Michelle O’Donnell, looks at the decline in the number of American marriages.

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