Ramesh Ponnuru and Reihan Salam, two of the right’s smartest and most intellectually honest intellectuals disagree over whether Mitt Romney should run for president in 2016. Ponnuru has the better case, but, in reading both men, it becomes clear the degree to which Romney was not the reason for the GOP defeat(s) in 2012. Continue Reading »
My son Stephen and I spent an unusual, albeit unusually moving, Independence Day: We attended the golden wedding anniversary celebration of my friends Piotr and Teresa Malecki, which began with a Mass of thanksgiving in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel of Cracow’s Wawel Cathedral—the place where Piotr and Teresa had exchanged vows on July 4, 1964, kneeling before their old kayaking and hiking friend, the archbishop of Cracow (who, as Pope St. John Paul II, was canonized some two months before the Maleckis’ jubilee.) Continue Reading »
When scientists like Laurence Krauss and Neil deGrasse Tyson call philosophers to answer for their crimes today, the lovers of wisdom aren’t accused of anything as exciting as corrupting the youth.
This Thursday, for the first time since he argued before the Supreme Court in 2013 for a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, Theodore Olson will be back in the Federalist Society limelight. The former Solicitor General of the United States under President George W. Bush—for whom he successfully argued Bush v. Gore—will be talking not gay marriage but class actions and the BP oil spill settlement. A few years ago, that would have amounted to business as usual. Olson, a gifted communicator, would regularly serve as a Federalist Society speaker, even acting as their reviewer in chief after the Supreme Court wrapped up its session each June. However, when he rather publicly began calling for the court creation of “equal protection” rights utterly unfathomable to our nation’s founders, those duties generally ceased. Continue Reading »
Several years of prison ministry have convinced me that there are substantial parallels between what we think about incarceration and how we understand salvation. After all, Christians believe that we are imprisoned by sin and that, rather than trying to escape our condition, we need to undergo a personal transformation before we can enter into the full presence of God. True, sin is universal in a way that jail is not. Nonetheless, crimes against the civil order and rebellion against God overlap in interesting and complicated ways, which makes prisoners among the most conspicuous, though certainly not the most hopeless, examples of humanity’s fallen state. Continue Reading »
Clive James is dying just as he lived—in full public view. The Australian-born poet, critic, BBC television personality, Radio 4 presenter, translator, memoirist, journalist, raconteur, and wit is dying of leukemia and emphysema. James retired himself from television years ago, but at seventy-four he keeps very much in the public eye, as British newspapers report each new farewell poem he publishes. Continue Reading »
Like, we didn’t see this coming? Pets are becoming the center of custody struggles among divorcing couples. Continue Reading »
Richard of St. Victor, a 12th-century Scottish theologian, is not exactly a household name in 21st-century Christian circles. Truth to tell, I only know of him because of a curious conversation I once had with my friend, the late Richard John Neuhaus, who, as only he could, told me of a friendly discussion he’d had with Rabbi David Novak one summer about the Scotsman’s Trinitarian theology, which tried to establish by reason that God must be triune. (We talked about a lot of strange and wondrous things, up there on the cottage deck in the Ottawa Valley.) Continue Reading »
If marriage is a sacrament, then the way in which practices that lead to marriage function as liturgies deserves attention. Continue Reading »
After the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Hobby Lobby decision in late-June, the Boston Globe printed an editorial under a regretful header: “Supreme Court loses its way in vague contraceptive decision.” Continue Reading »
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