Recriminations abound. At Immaculate Conception down on First Avenue and 14th Street, where I say Mass regularly, I was this morning required to adjudicate a near-violent dispute between a young black man and an elderly Irish regular at daily Mass. Did or did not George Steinbrenner betray the . . . . Continue Reading »
“True enough, but he made the trains run on time.” We are all familiar with that defense of the dictatorial buffoonery of Benito Mussolini, who hardly belongs to the A Team of twentieth-century monsters such as Hitler and Stalin. As many scholars have since noted, he, in fact, did not . . . . Continue Reading »
“The Lion of Muenster,” Clemens August von Galen, was beatified at St. Peter’s on Sunday. Departing from the practice of John Paul the Great, Pope Benedict did not preside at the beatification ceremony but showed up at the end to hail the “heroic courage” of Cardinal . . . . Continue Reading »
“I’ve been looking for something not to like,” a reader writes, “and now I’ve found it. You’re a Yankee fan.” I’m surprised he had to look so hard. But it’s true, the season is over. I’ll admit, however, that there’s a twinge of . . . . Continue Reading »
In the current issue of the Weekly Standard , Joseph Epstein has a scintillating analysis of the celebrity cult to which much of our society is in thrall. The article put me in mind of a lecture many years ago by Paul Tillich, a towering figure of the time, at the University of Chicago. In an . . . . Continue Reading »
The battle of the polls goes on and on: Pro-life up, pro-life down, pro-choice down, pro-choice up. Some of us have been following the survey research on attitudes toward abortion for decades. The striking thing is how steady the data are. A small minority thinks abortion should be legal for any . . . . Continue Reading »
Harriet Miers continues to be pilloried by numerous conservatives, and some of them are being quite nasty about it, as Matthew Scully notes on the op-ed page of the New York Times . Scully is the author of Dominion , a book on human responsibility for animals that has received major attention in . . . . Continue Reading »
Robert Benne of Roanoke College, writing in the November issue of FIRST THINGS, offers his take on the ELCA Lutheran churchwide assembly in Orlando. The sexuality task force did not get all that it wanted and, as a result, the ELCA has not formally departed from two millennia of Christian teaching . . . . Continue Reading »
The 19th annual Erasmus Lecture, with Dr. Timothy George holding forth on the men who shaped modern evangelicalism, was a splendid affair. He held the close attention of the mostly Catholic audience of more than 500 people at the Union League Club, many of whom readily acknowledged that they were . . . . Continue Reading »
Keep in mind that this is intended as high laudation. Ken Johnson, art reviewer of the New York Times , is discussing a new exhibit at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan: “The Viennesse Expressionist Egon Schiele (1890-1918) had only two urgent interests: himself and his sexual fantasies. Out of . . . . Continue Reading »
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