The civic catechisms of our day still celebrate Thomas Jefferson’s experiment in religious liberty. To end a millennium of repressive religious establishments, we are taught, Jefferson sought liberty in the twin formulas of privatizing religion and secularizing politics. Religion must be “a . . . . Continue Reading »
My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Walter Berns, has written that the philosophy of John Locke was decisive in the American founding. According to Berns, Locke’s disguised but unmistakable aims were to break with the traditional Christian understanding of nature and to drive . . . . Continue Reading »
Last Christmas our parish hall displayed a Nativity painting by a local artist, showing a dark-haired woman in a wheelchair holding an infant, with a man in hospital scrubs standing solicitously behind them. The scene was instantly recognizable to anyone who has had a baby in this country in the . . . . Continue Reading »
I’m angry, and I have been ever since I watched a 767 slam into the North Tower of the World Trade Center while walking to the office on a lovely late-summer morning last September. Sure, like most Americans, I’ve also experienced shock and profound sadness. But the anger came early, and it’s . . . . Continue Reading »
In opera, it’s good to be the tenor. You get the high notes, you get the girl, and you get the big fees. And this has been a half century rich in remarkable tenors. Perhaps there has been no voice so purely beautiful as Luciano Pavarotti’s (or as profitable), and probably no singer so broadly . . . . Continue Reading »
The first word from the cross: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Christians call them the Triduum Sacru, the three most sacred days of the year, the three most sacred days of all time when time is truly told. Maundy Thursday, so called because that night before he was betrayed . . . . Continue Reading »
The sixteenth century was a period of tumultuous change in Western Europe. The need for some kind of moral and intellectual shake-up within the church had been obvious for some time. Many religious and political writers of the fifteenth century had been aware of the weaknesses of the medieval church . . . . Continue Reading »
I am just postmodern enough not to trust “postmodern” as a description of our times, for it privileges the practices and intellectual formations of modernity. Calling this a postmodern age reproduces the modernist assumption that history must be policed by periods. Just as modernity created the . . . . Continue Reading »
Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions by søren kierkegaard princeton university press, 181 pages, $39 Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits by søren kierkegaard princeton university press, 442 pages, $45 Kierkegaard presented these two books of discourses to his . . . . Continue Reading »
Those who once spoke, or who speak, the language of the rights of man make up a most varied group: Jefferson and Mounier, Robespierre and Saint Just; Roosevelt but also Vyshinsky; John Paul II and Ronald Dworkin. Which is to say, this language has been used in a whole assortment of ways. Thus if the . . . . Continue Reading »
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