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What’s Wrong With Poetry?

When I was young I reflexively told people I liked poetry. I hardly knew any poets and barely understood those I had read, but poetry seemed to be a necessary affectation for the burgeoning literary snob that I was. I read randomly: Blake and MacLeish, Poe and Dickinson, Whitman and Carroll. I memorized “The Tiger” because I had to, “The Raven” because I was bored in class, and Dickinson because I was bored while sneezing… . Continue Reading »

Call of the (Sort of) Wild

We have a cardinal nesting just outside our upstairs back door. Step out on the landing and there she is in a bush, not three feet away at eye level. She built it while we were on vacation, otherwise our constant coming and going surely would have discouraged her. It is a nest composed, I note, of eclectic materials but a good part looks like a plastic grocery bag. Recycling has reached the animal kingdom… . Continue Reading »

A Dictatorship of Sentimentalism

It was just about a year ago that Anne Rice”who two years earlier had chronicled her return to the Catholic church in the best-selling Called Out of Darkness; A Spiritual Confession”announced via Facebook that she was “quitting” Christianity:

I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being ‘Christian’ or being a part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen… . . Continue Reading

The Real Pius XII

In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain published a book stating that anti-Semitism had become a “pathological phenomenon.”

Maritain’s warning was welcomed by concerned believers, and even the secular press. The New York Times praised Maritain’s insight that “hatred of Jews and hatred of Christians spring from a common source; and the same men who began persecuting Jews are now persecuting Christians, and more or less for the same reason.… . . Continue Reading »”

A Particularly Universal Love

In an article for Haaretz (subsequently picked up by the über-aggregator The Huffington Post), Mira Sucharov reopens the “particularism vs. universalism debate,” arguing the utter superiority of universalism and the foul depravity of particularism in strident terms“even to the extent of invoking everyone’s favorite debating tactic: tying the other side to Hitler. Surprisingly, this is the smaller of the two major problems with her argument.… . . Continue Reading »

Down Syndrome and the Purpose of Prenatal Testing

One night, not long after we learned of our daughter’s Down syndrome diagnosis, my wife and I were lying in bed when she pointed to her pregnant belly and said, “You know, we’ve been talking about this child as if she were imaginary, but she’s here in the bed with us now.” It was a powerful moment for me. I believe I became prolife right then and there… . Continue Reading »

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