Unlike its English and American counterparts, Scottish law allows three verdicts in criminal trials: innocent, guilty, and not proven. Several years ago, amateur Shakespeareans convoked moot courts in this country to decide who wrote Shakespeare’s plays: Was it the man from Stratford, or was it . . . . Continue Reading »
Copyright (c) 1999 First Things 98 (December 1999): 17-24. When debate about an artist’s merit no longer seems to have any point, one is left either with an icon of culture, too sacred to enjoy, or with a target of satire, brought down to our more humdrum level by a vaudeville lampooning of the . . . . Continue Reading »
Eugene Peterson has commented on the unhappy fact that modern pastors have become “spiritual technologists” who reduce pastoral care to “running the church” and problem-solving. “The secularized mind,” he writes, “is terrorized by mysteries.” Those in its grip “deny or ignore the . . . . Continue Reading »
The practice of combining love and justice in the governance of relationships between parents and children is crucial to the moral formation of the young. This balancing act also requires the most strenuous and careful exercise by those who would be good parents of the very moral virtues that they . . . . Continue Reading »
In this highly individualistic age, it is probably safe to assume about every victim what Tolstoy at the beginning of Anna Karenina assumes about every unhappy family: that each is unhappy in his or her own way. This could mean that to think about victimization now is to be overwhelmed with an . . . . Continue Reading »
It is not hard to imagine the common sense reaction to the news that a distinguished historian had attempted to cover the history of human suffering in a little over two hundred pages. What have humans ever thought, done, or made that is not directly or indirectly involved with suffering in one or . . . . Continue Reading »
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