Now online (and possibly in the mailboxes of those who subscribe), the November issue of First Things, featuring our first ever survey of America’s colleges and universities. Unlike other rankings, we include the schools’ social and religious life as well as their academics… . Continue Reading »
A few days ago I posted on First Thoughts an item contrasting an article from the (Southern) Baptist Press claiming that only two of the 33 miners trapped underground in Chile were Christians, with one by an English Catholic who stressed the miners Catholicism and said he had no doubt at all that there werent that many Adventists or Evangelicals down there. … Continue Reading »
The philosopher Joel Marks is an honest man, it seems. For much the better part of a long career, he had had no difficulty in preserving a happy harmony between his atheism and his commitment to a basically Kantian moral philosophy… . Continue Reading »
A week after the Nobel Prize went to Robert Edwards for his accomplishments in developing in vitro fertilization as a treatment for infertility”and more than thirty years after Edwards first successful IVF procedure in 1978”IVF still looks like an amateur lab experiment… . Continue Reading »
We are not at home in the world, at least not in our current damaged condition. As St. Augustine put it: we long to untangle ourselves from the earthly city and its wounding self-loves so that we can journey toward the heavenly city, but our bondage is self-wrought, and we cannot free ourselves… . Continue Reading »
There are two types of evangelicals in America: those who naively embrace whatever trendy items happen to be hot sellers at “Christian” bookstores”WWJD? bracelets, Testamints, prayer of Jabez scented candles”and those who shun such kitsch. I am solidly of the second type. Like a good Pharisee, I thank God every day that Im not like those people… . Continue Reading »
There was considerable just war argument before, during, and after the Iraq War. Some of it was not terribly insightful, but, in the main, the debate demonstrated that the principles of the classic just war tradition, if not the traditions intellectual architecture, were still in place in American public life… . Continue Reading »
In last week’s episode of the hit TV series Glee, the acerbic cheerleading instructor Sue Sylvester revealed to her Down Syndrome-afflicted sister that she stopped believing in God because of the way she, the sister, had been treated by people who saw her as “less than perfect.” “You were perfect in my eyes,” Sylvester said . . . . Continue Reading »
Sandro Magister, the authoritative Vatican watcher at La Repubblica, last week noted one of the most significant and under-reported facts about Christian life in the Middle East: Christian numbers are growing in only one country in the region, namely the State of Israel. Elsewhere, Muslim hostility is smothering Christian life… . Continue Reading »
Curious to see whats out there, since we dont watch television at home, while visiting friends recently I flipped through the channels after the children were in bed, and came across some sort of roast, I think on VH1. A woman who turned out to be the host was insulting several people sitting nearby … Continue Reading »