Dear Friends, What you read on firstthings.com makes a difference. Today we face an increasingly hostile intellectual culture, one that presumes that faith undermines reason, and that religion creates conflict and hostility in society. … Continue Reading »
If you go down St. Mark’s Place, between First and Avenue A, you’ll find a hotdog place“Crif Dogs, to be exact. If you go into Crif, you’ll see a counter at the end serving hotdogs. Two old arcade machines sit on the right. On your left there’s a phone booth, unremarkable since payphones were last used when those arcade machines were brand new… . Continue Reading »
Domestic chickens inside the city limits of Lawrence, Kansas are no longer being threatened with slaughter. Any chickens elsewhere will have to fend for themselves. This, it may surprise you to know, is disappointing news to performance artists everywhere and to one performing artist, Amber Hansen, in particular. It was Ms. Hansen’s ambition to do just that, kill a few chickens, and call it art… . Continue Reading »
Over the past year, “starchitect” Frank Gehry’s design for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial on the National Mall, has been the subject of immense and growing criticism and controversy. Objections to the proposed design, more of an anti-memorial than a memorial, have come from all quarters including the entire Eisenhower family, the National Civic Art Society (on which we serve as Board members), numerous other civic organizations, journalists, politicians, and architects… . Continue Reading »
Mary Eberstadt is my friend, but I’ll risk charges of special pleading and self-plagiarism by quoting my endorsement on the dust jacket of her new book, Adam and Eve after the Pill (Ignatius Press): “Mary Eberstadt is our premier analyst of American cultural foibles and follies, with a keen eye for oddities that illuminate just how strange the country’s moral culture has become.” … Continue Reading »
In the National Marriage Project’s exhaustive 2011 “State of Our Unions” report, a sidebar among the analyses and graphs draws attention to a subset social scientists tend to ignore in their ubiquitous research on marriage and parenting: big families. Noted researcher Alan Hawkins explains the dearth in blunt terms … Continue Reading »
When the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) raised a reasonable objection to the HHS mandate connected to the Affordable Care Act”a rule which will require all employers (including organizations like the Little Sisters of the Poor and the Sisters of Life) to betray their consciences and include free sterilization coverage and free contraception and antiabortion drugs in their health insurance plans”White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was dismissive. “The bishops,” he asserted, “never supported health care reform to begin with.” … Continue Reading »
Has the Catholic Church gone soft on Communism? It seems an absurd question, given the Church’s record against it, but one might have thought as much, given some of the commentary leading up to Pope Benedict’s visit to Cuba… . Continue Reading »
The family has been planning to take advantage of our little patch of suburbia to plant a small flower and vegetable garden, something we never dreamed of doing during the 10+ years we lived in New York City. But the nice weather caught us unprepared. The man at the hardware store told my wife that the unseasonably high temperatures meant that all recommended planting schedules should be advanced by one month. We thought we had a little more time to get our acts together. Such is life… . Continue Reading »
I was recently asked to identify the biggest cultural challenge facing American Evangelicals. In my judgment, the biggest cultural challenge is not “out there” in “the culture” but internal“I almost said, “inherent”“to Evangelicalism: the persistent marginalization of the Eucharist in Evangelical church life, piety, and political engagement. Evangelicals will be incapable of responding to the specific challenges of our time with any steadiness or effect until the Eucharist becomes the criterion of all Christian cultural thinking and the source from which all genuinely Christian cultural engagement springs… . Continue Reading »
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