In May 1989, protestors in Tiananmen Square erected a plaster statue of the Goddess Democracy. For almost a week, it faced off against the giant portrait of Chairman Mao that hangs from the Gate of Heavenly Peace. The juxtaposition seemed to sum up the choice facing China: communist rule or liberal . . . . Continue Reading »
Modernity does not just refer to the time in which we happen to live, the era that follows the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Those who first recognized themselves as modern defined themselves self-consciously over against the ages that preceded them, though few probably grasped in its fullness . . . . Continue Reading »
In the last fifty years, most writing about modern Catholicism has treated Vatican II as the great watershed. According to the standard narrative, the Church before the Council was wedded to a stultifying scholasticism and sunk in soul-crushing authoritarianism. After the Council, a new spirit . . . . Continue Reading »
Polish society represents an integral and democratic Catholicism, one that has resisted the anti-culture of postmodernism and neoliberal cosmopolitanism. Continue Reading »
A Catholic politics never seeks to be a sacred politics, never proposes a full and complete integration of statecraft with soulcraft. Continue Reading »
PROTESTANT PARANOIA? R. R. Reno confirms Samuel Gregg’s suspicion that First Things is tempering its embrace of free markets (“Building Bridges, Not Walls,” November). Perhaps he can confirm—or deny—whether the journal is also rethinking its commitment to the free exercise of . . . . Continue Reading »
CONTEMPT OF COURT James Nuechterlein (“Remembering Peter Berger,” October) feels that the 1996 First Things symposium on the judicial usurpation of politics was inappropriate because it cast doubts on the legitimacy of American political order. As it is, however, the problem is still with us. If . . . . Continue Reading »
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