Soho, in the West End of the British capital, has had a rather dodgy history. Wikipedia notes that, by the mid-19th century, “all respectable families had moved away, and prostitutes, music halls and small theaters had moved in.” So had Father Arthur O’Leary who, in 1792, established in Soho the first Catholic church since the Reformation that had not been located on some foreign embassy’s territory. … Continue Reading »
About 15 years ago a new Catholic parish was erecting its single-building church and social center. The pastor asked the religious sister who acted as Director of Religious Education to choose the tiles for the parish center’s bathrooms. The gentleman’s bathroom was outfitted in a rather pretty shade of gray with darker accents. The ladies room, however, startled everyone who entered it; gazing into the mirrors at their bilious reflections, woman after woman grimaced and asked “who on earth decided on spicy-mustard yellow?” … Continue Reading »
The Smokers was, I think, meant to be a black comedy, but is too accurate to be funny, because you know that hundreds of thousands of young women exactly like the three girls whose story it tells move through their teenage years just as unhappy and confused and desperate, and you cannot laugh at children who are lost in the dark… . Continue Reading »
Hegel is perhaps the greatest defender of marriage and family life among philosophers of the modern era. First, Hegel argues against Immanuel Kant and others who see marriage as a contract for mutual sexual use. He faults this view for failing to subordinate sex to a durable, spiritual, rational love whereby two become one. Genuine love rises above the contingency of sexual passion, whereas sexual urges are “destined to be extinguished in [their] very satisfaction.” … Continue Reading »
Modern American Presidents have a rare predilection for crusades. Wilson sent American troops into World War I to “make the world safe for democracy,” and a few days after 9/11 George Bush outbid Wilson by declaring that history calls us to “rid the world of evil.” British Prime Ministers warn darkly of iron curtains and bolster the nation with stiff-lip realism about defending civilization. That’s too modest for American Presidents, who give their military engagements apocalyptic labels like “Operation Infinite Justice,” the original name for the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. … Continue Reading »
Corpus Christi is the liturgical feast for poetry. The audacious claim that bread and wine become body and blood for the life of the world needs the poet’s dense art to reveal the mystery without pretending to strip it bare. It is no coincidence that one of the Church’s greatest Eucharistic theologians, Thomas Aquinas, also wrote some of Christianity’s finest hymns when the feast was instituted in 1264… . Continue Reading »
For some four weeks now I’ve been traveling to Gothenburg, Nebraska, to conduct worship services for a mission church that split off from a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The mission church”newly named Trinity Lutheran”has aspirations of becoming a congregation of the North American Lutheran Church and, so it seems, I am the only NALC pastor available within three hundred eighty-three miles, one way… . Continue Reading »
The gloomy pitcher’s count facing Protestant denominations did not prevent Orthodox Presbyterians from celebrating their seventy-fifth with humility and gratitude. … Continue Reading »
Bespectacled, balding, and thin, the Australian scholar Peter Singer has the looks of a stereotypical college professor. You would never be able to tell simply by his unassuming persona that his mind holds some of the most controversial ideas in American academia. Singer has spent a lifetime justifying the unjustifiable. He is the founding father of the animal liberation movement and advocates ending “the present speciesist bias against taking seriously the interests of nonhuman animals.” … Continue Reading »
Amidst the excitement of John Paul II’s beatification on May 1, the 20th anniversary of the late pope’s most important social encyclical Centesimus Annus, got a bit lost. Blessed John Paul II was not a man given to rubbing it in. Still, it is worth noting that the encyclical, which celebrated the collapse of European communism and probed the social, cultural, economic, and political terrain of the post-communist world, was dated on May Day, the great public holiday of the communist movement. … Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
