No one has mistaken our day as an age of powerful, rational discourse. The McLaughlin Group doesn’t usually evoke memories of Lincoln-Douglas, and Twittering about your favorite bagel from Panera isn’t exactly correspondence on the level of John and Abigail Adams. But perhaps I’m being unfair. . . . . Continue Reading »
Norman O. Brown. Once a favorite of counter-culture intellectuals, we do not hear his name very much anymore. He has been eclipsed, perhaps, by his prescience. Once a shocking voice of new revelations, Brown now reads like a strangely urgent advocate of ideas that postmodern culture takes for . . . . Continue Reading »
“Nothing to be done,” Estragon says, struggling with his boot as he sits on a rock in a barren waste. Two and a half hours later, not much has changed. “Let’s go,” he says to his friend Vladimir. They do not move, except to clasp hands, grasping for each other in an empty . . . . Continue Reading »
We all knew this fight was coming. The Catholic Church and the Catholic colleges have been heading toward a crash since at least 1990, when John Paul II issued Ex Corde Ecclesiae , his apostolic constitution regulating Catholic institutions of higher education. And now, at last, the battle is . . . . Continue Reading »
R. Scott Appleby is embarrassed by the vulgarity of the protests out at Notre Dame. And perhaps he should be”for those protests are pretty vulgar. “People are weary of it,” the Notre Dame history professor told the Washington Post . “I certainly feel this is not the best way to . . . . Continue Reading »
[The following is the keynote address delivered at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. on May 8, 2009.] Introduction I am deeply honored to give the Keynote Address at this annual gathering of Catholics to pray for our nation. I express my heartfelt esteem and gratitude to those who, . . . . Continue Reading »
Radical evil sets the threshold of victory so high that we risk contamination by confronting it on its own terms. Terrorists tempt us to torture them, by striking against innocent noncombatants out of the shadows. The present debate over torture is a black cloud as big as a man’s hand . . . . Continue Reading »
The Catholic faith is not simply a collection of doctrines and ideas, or a body of knowledge, or even a system of beliefs, although all those things are important. At its root, Christianity is an experience: a life-changing, personal experience of the risen Jesus Christ. Everything else in the . . . . Continue Reading »
In a recently published memoir, The Seal: A Priest’s Story , Fr. Timothy Mockaitis recounts his central role in an unprecedented legal drama. On a fairly routine visit to Oregon’s Lane County Jail, Mockaitis heard the confession of an inmate accused of multiple homicide. Unbeknownst to . . . . Continue Reading »
Early in April, with the publication of the May issue of First Things, I stepped out from behind the pseudonym Spengler to begin arguing my more considered ideas under my own name. The experience has been an interesting one: constricting in some ways and yet freeing in others. My Spengler columns actually began as a joke. In 1997 the Asia Times asked me to write a humor column, and the name Spengler seemed a funny touch: the author of The Decline of the West as a comic writer for an Asian daily. The print edition of the newspaper soon went under, but I revived the persona for the online-only edition in 1999. Contrary to my expectations, it won an audience and became a vehicle for more than I had originally imagined it would be. Continue Reading »
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