Cultural studies, postcolonialism, and postmodernity have so completely corrupted higher education that one wonders if their infiltration of English departments beginning some twenty years ago was a right-wing plot. The unreadable jargon, coupled with a seamless blend of utopianism and cynicism, . . . . Continue Reading »
For anyone who isn’t sick of the debate over Mel Gibson, anti-Semitism, and whether people who liked The Passion should repent in sackcloth and ashes now that its creator’s sheets-to-the-wind sentiments about the Jews have been revealed, I’d recommend dipping into Mark . . . . Continue Reading »
Frederica, you write , "One way that war is hell, and something that may be a clue to some mysterious spiritual truth, is that soldiers who kill are much more traumatized by that than by any injuries they sustain." That’s certainly been the conventional wisdom since Vietnam, and I . . . . Continue Reading »
Further to my comments about The Lord of the Rings , I wanted to mention a new documentary about Tolkien’s epic that does it anything but justice. Tolkien described The Lord of the Rings as "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work" and, on another occasion, insisted that the fact . . . . Continue Reading »
In his post yesterday, my former boss Robert P. George did not mention the public statement on marriage signed by an impressive array of scholars to which he is a signatory. Likewise, he didn’t note that this scholarly document has already made significant contributions to the public debate . . . . Continue Reading »
A friend asks if I know the difference between a saint and a martyr: A saint is someone who radiates goodness and bears no faults. A martyr is someone who lives with a saint. (Access contributors’ biographies by clicking here .) . . . . Continue Reading »
Ever since he coined the term “the dictatorship of relativism” shortly before his election as Pope Benedict XVI, the phrase has continued to haunt me. At first glance it sounds like an oxymoron: How can a relativist seek to impose a dictatorship? Aren’t dictators called absolutists . . . . Continue Reading »
Sandro Magister reports from Rome that Fr. Alberto Bonandi, a famous moral theologian, has published an article in Teologia , the journal of the Theological Faculty of Milan and Northern Italy, in which he argues that Catholics, married in the Church but subsequently divorced and remarried civilly, . . . . Continue Reading »
In these hot days of August, who has energy for anything, including reading? Well, there’s "beach reading" of course, but that’s just the point. People can be induced to read books (novels mostly) that don’t burn up the little gray cells, but if I might hazard a guess, . . . . Continue Reading »
In the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscribers only), Alan Wolfe has taken on Fr. Neuhaus’ "Dechristianizing America"¯an essay that appeared in the June/July issue of First Things . Of course, if you’re not a reader of the print magazine, you will not have . . . . Continue Reading »
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