Stephen Meredith’s “Looking for God in All the Wrong Places” in the February 2014 issue of First Things accuses Intelligent Design theory (ID) of being a variant of occasionalism, which he defines as the denial “that efficient causality occurs outside God.” . . . . Continue Reading »
Barack Obama’s Roanoke speech is most famous for his “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that, somebody else made that happen” remark, but, as Yuval Levin astutely mentioned at the time, it was not the most interesting or sinister part of the president’s . . . . Continue Reading »
The second season of Netflix’s House of Cards introduces a new aide for Vice President Frank Underwood, who seems to have a puppyish enthusiasm for intrigue. Seth Grayson, trying to prove his sneaky bona fides, applies for a job as press secretary by digging up damaging information on the . . . . Continue Reading »
When the Holy See signed the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990, a friend knowledgeable in legal matters said, with considerable vehemence, that the Convention was a snare and a delusion that would eventually come back to bite the Vatican. The bite came earlier this month, in a . . . . Continue Reading »
The Industrial Revolution, as we know it, could have occurred five centuries earlier. While Europeans were living short, subsistence-level lives, the rest of the world was witnessing an explosion in technology and trade coming out of Ming China. Continue Reading »
When G.K. Chesterton died in 1936, his achievements were recognized the world over. Msgr. Ronald Knox called him “a prophet in an age of false prophets.” The New York Times described him as “the most exuberant personality in English literature.” George Bernard Shaw said he was “a man of colossal genius,” and Pope Pius XI hailed him as “a gifted defender of the Catholic Faith.” Continue Reading »
I am no stranger to incendiary language. Organizations on the left and the right alike use loaded language: words designed, not to foster thoughtful discourse, but simply to whip the like-minded into a lather. Still, this was one of the more incendiary paragraphs that I had read in a while: In . . . . Continue Reading »
In a few moments, we will lay hands on you to mark you as a minister of the Church of Jesus Christ. This is an effective ritual that achieves what it portrays and proclaims. Right now, you don’t hold pastoral office in the Church. By the end of the afternoon, you will. Our hands won’t declare that you already are a minister. They will make you one. You will be irreversibly changed. Continue Reading »
There is apparently now an organization for the one-fifth or so of Americans who always check “none” on forms asking for their religious preference. Folks in this self-described category are called “nones” (pronounced the same as “nuns,” though something entirely . . . . Continue Reading »
In a recent interview regarding America, Israel, and the wider Middle East, Malcolm Hoenlein, the long-serving head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, spoke out unequivocally against the persecution of Christians around the world and the West’s . . . . Continue Reading »
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