Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey’s article “Insight at First Sight” (May 2023) was perceptive and timely. I have experienced the negative attitude toward love-at-first-sight and happily-ever-after stories while studying English in college. Students often resort to thinking of these . . . . Continue Reading »
My deep thanks to Brad East for his piece on doing theology in a divided church (“Theology in Division,” April 2023). The topic is centrally important and rarely taken seriously, as if its obviousness renders the challenge uninteresting. East’s larger points about aiming at a catholic theology . . . . Continue Reading »
East and West In his memoirs of growing up in the U.S.S.R., Wolfgang Leonhard recalled how he and his mother, a German Marxist-Leninist, emigrated from Germany to the communist paradise. When they looked for a map of Moscow, their new home, they found only useless, outdated ones and official plans . . . . Continue Reading »
John Finnis’s “Abortion Is Unconstitutional” (April) has already sent shockwaves through the pro-life movement and the broader abortion debate. The piece sparked a vigorous debate with prominent conservative scholar Ed Whelan. In the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg denounced what she . . . . Continue Reading »
The only excuse I can imagine for David P. Goldman’s taking up the shopworn claim that T. S. Eliot was an anti-Semite (“T. S. Eliot and the Jews,” March) is that, having been repeated so many times before, it might as well be repeated again as one of the unexamined prejudices of our culture. . . . . Continue Reading »
It is invariably a pleasure for an author when his book lands in the lap of a reviewer whose knowledge of the subject is as acute as that shown by Helen Andrews, who reviews my book on António Salazar in the February issue (“Benevolent Autocrat”). She observes that Salazar continues to divide . . . . Continue Reading »
All attempts to fit Thomas Becket into a mold that echoes the interests or prejudices of the writer fail to do justice to the man or to the complexities of his situation. Once he was appointed archbishop of Canterbury, for good or ill, it was his responsibility to protect the interests of the . . . . Continue Reading »
One of the most fascinating details of Mary Eberstadt’s “The Fury of the Fatherless” (December) is the observation that the BLM movement has a Marxist vision of the family: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families . . . . Continue Reading »
In graduate school, I was a teaching assistant for a course on postwar novels, and I observed over the course of two semesters that no one ever wrote a truly good paper on Ian McEwan’s Atonement or a truly bad paper on Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Something about . . . . Continue Reading »
Catesby Leigh notes in his essay “Monumental Contrast” (October) that the removal of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial in New York City is a sign that the “monumental aesthetic” in public art is an “endangered species.” Those of us in the art world know only too well that in civic art the . . . . Continue Reading »
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