Archive

with a response byEdmund Waldsteinand reply by Ross Douthat How should contemporary Christians react to the decline of their churches, the secularization of the culture, the final loss of Christendom?...

Ross Douthat replies to Edmund Waldstein’s article “All We Need Is Everything,” which is a response to Ross Douthat’s article “A Gentler Christendom.”  I am grateful to Edmund Waldstein for...

For the last fifty years, from the Second Vatican Council onward, it made sense to speak of an American Catholicism fully reconciled to liberal democracy. On the fringes there...

Let’s begin with a story. It’s one I’ve heard many times; it’s one I’ve told more than a few times myself. It’s a story about the Catholic Church in...

Freedom By Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 576 pages, $28 What if Jane Austen’s Bennet sisters had been bright young graduates of Bowdoin or Colgate or Dartmouth, with...

There was a time in American life, not so very long ago, when the only significant relation between religion and popular culture seemed to be the tedious symbiosis enjoyed...

In November 2003, Stephen King received a lifetime achievement medal from the National Book Foundation for his “distinguished contribution to American letters.” The foundation’s notion of “distinguished contribution” is...

In his post on the midterm elections and their discontents, Jody Bottum argues that conservatives haven’t made support for the Iraq War a defining test of one’s conservatism, in...

Jody already remarked on the new Pew survey showing that while Americans are less inclined to call the GOP “friendly” to religion than they were two years ago (down...

In Sunday’s Times , Judith Shulevitz reviews Kristin Luker’s new book on the sex-ed wars, When Sex Goes to School , which argues . . . well, here’s how...

It hasn’t received that much coverage over here, but a recent Guardian editorial raised the possibility that the intelligence used to break up the terror plot in London was...

Over at his Crunchy Con blog, Rod Dreher links to an interesting investigative piece on the world of Ole Anthony, the ascetic Texan who runs a Christian commune called...

For anyone who isn’t sick of the debate over Mel Gibson, anti-Semitism, and whether people who liked The Passion should repent in sackcloth and ashes now that its creator’s...

I generally agree with the comments so far emphasizing Israel’s right to defend itself, the necessity of using force against evil men, and the danger of applying “turn-the-other-cheek” logic...

Responding to my doubts about the prudence of recent war making (the United States in Iraq, Israel in Lebanon), Jody points out ¯ quite rightly¯that nobody can know to...