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The King’s Good Speaker

The great English statesman, Sir Thomas More, is often and justly revered as the patron of conscience rights. Despite a lifetime of faithful and diligent service to King Henry VIII, More’s silent opposition to the Act of Supremacy led to his eventual and famous execution at Tower Hill on 6 July, 1535. Unknown to many who celebrate More’s fateful silence, however, is the same man’s ardent defense of free speech”a defense that first came to the fore, quite appropriately, during More’s tenure as Speaker of the House of Commons, some twelve years before his death… . Continue Reading »

What If America Did Become a Theocracy?

With the end of summer comes the official election season, the beginning of a thirteen month stretch in which the public must endure Republican candidates droning on about Social Security, political pundits blabbering about tax cuts, and leftist journalists screeching about the impending theocracy. Although they have been repeating the same warnings since the mid-1980s, the leftist theophobes are certain that this is finally the year when the theonomists storm the National Archives and replace the Bill of Rights with the Ten Commandments… . Continue Reading »

Russian Orthodoxy and Lenin’s Tomb

Almost 40 years ago, an aging Anglican clergyman told me a story about his first trip to Paris as a boy”perhaps in the 1920s. His grandfather had called him in, told him that he had a gift to be used in the French capital, and then gave my friend a small pocket mirror. The boy, puzzled, asked his grandfather what the mirror might be for. The following dialogue ensued … Continue Reading »

Calling Olly Olly Oxen Free at Ground Zero

At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Robert Kennedy”finding kinship with a doomed heroine of fiction”referenced the loss of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, by quoting Shakespeare’s Juliet: “When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.” During the wake and funeral of my own beloved brother, that imagery kept bubbling up through my awareness, and it comforted me… . Continue Reading »

Warrior’s Faith

Last Friday saw the opening of Warrior, a Mixed Martial Arts film that turns out to be about something else: a fierce-yet-muted struggle between a father, Paddy, and his grown sons, Brendan and Tommy. It stars Tom Hardy (late of Inception and soon to be seen as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises), Joel Edgerton, and the redoubtable Nick Nolte, and it’s tracking 84 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes… . . Continue Reading »

The Monster’s Story

Dr. John C. Cutler was a monster. A monster who died after a long and successful life in government and academia, with scholarships and lectures created in his memory. As readers may know, in the mid-1940s he experimented upon poor Guatemalans, including mental patients and orphans as young as nine, trying to find a cure for syphilis. The most horrifying example, already much posted on the web (I quoted it on “First Thoughts” a few days ago), is “that of a mental patient named Berta.” … Continue Reading »

God Is Still Back

When nineteen jihadist hijackers slammed two airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and another into the Pentagon ten years ago, they saw themselves as heroes of an apocalyptic holy war. For a moment, it seemed that they had instead given new life to secular modernity. During the decades preceding 9/11, religion of an intense variety made a surprising comeback. Pentecostalism blazed through South America, an exotic stew of indigenous Christianities bubbled up in Africa, Chinese churches grew at an astonishing rate, Evangelicals had political clout in the U.S., Islamic fundamentalism was on the rise. As the Economist’s John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge put it in the title of their 2009 book, “God is back.” … Continue Reading »

Richard John Neuhaus and the Priestly Vocation

Twenty years ago today, on the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Richard John Neuhaus was ordained a Catholic priest. Cardinal John O’Connor ordained Father Neuhaus in 1991 at St. Joseph’s Seminary, just north of the city in Dunwoodie. Exactly one year previous, on September 8, 1990, Cardinal O’Connor had received Richard into full communion with the Catholic Church, in a ceremony held in the private chapel of the cardinal’s residence… . Continue Reading »

Education, Mis-education, and the Mountains as Professors

A little more than a year ago now, I decided to drop off the grid. I had been making a long slow escape from my previous life of working in politics, and I had finally truly crossed the Rubicon: I bought a cabin high up in the mountains of Colorado, hidden in the woods, beyond a locked Forest Service gate, and down a steep dirt road… . Continue Reading »

Rawl’s Veil and Solomon’s Intuition Pump

“I always took for granted,” wrote political philosopher John Rawls, “that the writers we were studying were much smarter than I was. If they were not, why was I wasting my time and the students’ time by studying them?” There is no doubt that Rawls, a man who is often considered the most significant political philosopher of the twentieth century, was a much smarter man than I will ever be. While I don’t subscribe to his particular form of liberalism, I do think his views should be afforded due consideration… . Continue Reading »

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