A friend asked. I was almost taken aback by my answer: “I don’t really care.” I can’t muster a great deal of concern about the proposed Islamic center in New York near Ground Zero. Maybe I’m callous. Maybe I’m out of touch with the American people. But the more I think about it, the less I care… . Continue Reading »
Barack Obama won the presidency by making his mantra, “Yes, we can.” It seems downright un-American to say, “No, you can’t,” but it is getting harder and harder to avoid the conclusion that the American economy is the little engine that couldn’t… . Continue Reading »
If a classic, as Mark Twain claimed, is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read, then William F. Buckley, Jr.’s God and Man at Yale is the epitome of a conservative classic. Few who have read it (and they are indeed few) would dispute its importance to the founding of modern conservatism… . Continue Reading »
Pope Benedict XVI’s pastoral visit to Great Britain next month will unfold along a pilgrim’s path metaphorically strewn with landmines. Headline-grabbing new atheists like Richard Dawkins, along with their allies in the international plaintiff’s bar, may try to have the pontiff arrested as an enabler of child abuse… . Continue Reading »
Assigned the task of silencing debate on the Park51 project, the press and the center-left punditry have decided to haul out the overused tar-brush of racism, by which they mean to depict 65 percent of all Americans”Americans who’ve lived quite peaceably with our Muslim population, with no mass lashing-out against women of cover, no desecration of mosques, no random acts of violence in the years following the attacks of 9/11”as “bigots,” “xenophobes,” and “Islamophobes.” … Continue Reading »
“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth,” Christ declares in the Gospel of Matthew. “I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.” The Bible is full of hard sayings like this”too many, too hard, to be entirely exegeted away … Continue Reading »
I was fairly close to both Angela and Jacob throughout our teens; at least, we were all part of the same circle. I briefly entertained the hope of something closer between Angela and myself, and for a few weeks she was more or less my girlfriend; but Jacob “swept her off her feet,” and they were at one school and I at another, so I had no chance. It made no difference to our friendship, though… . Continue Reading »
“From existentialism to deconstruction,” writes Pascal Bruckner in his broadside, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, “all modern thought can be reduced to a mechanical denunciation of the West, emphasizing the latter’s hypocrisy, violence, and abomination.” I wouldn’t say that John Rawls or Jürgen Habermas or Benedict XVI fit that description… . Continue Reading »
There’s nothing like being ejected from the bosom of family, parish, and church college into the orbit of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus to give a young Lutheran a run for her money. During my tenure at First Things he paid me the compliment of trying to make a Catholic out of me. I thanked him by discovering I had a call to the ordained ministry and heading for seminary. It was a memorable fifteen months… . Continue Reading »
When it comes to homosexuality, those who support gay rights don’t often find themselves agreeing with conservative Christians. Advances in biomedical technology, however, should push the two groups to agree that the biological basis for the homosexual orientation is irrelevant. Although their motivations may differ, each side has reasons for promoting the idea that sexual activity is freely chosen behavior… . Continue Reading »
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