I started reading it when it came out a couple of years ago, and I would like to say it is the kind of book you can’t put down but, distracted by something or the other, I did put it aside until the trip to Poland a couple of weeks ago. Gilead , like the town by that name, is fictional, or so . . . . Continue Reading »
The situation in the Middle East has been changing so rapidly, it seems impossible to have timely commentary on it. The best outcome one can imagine is a restoration of Lebanon. Hezbollah has been for years an organization existing in the cracks of modern nation-states. It is in certain ways a . . . . Continue Reading »
"Who would presume to know the intentions of another human being?" someone asks in Lady in the Water . Who indeed, but the most prosaic and literal-minded of critics? And it is to his critics that M. Night Shyamalan has really addressed both this question and his latest film¯critics . . . . Continue Reading »
Over on the University of Chicago law school’s faculty website, Prof. Geoffrey Stone posted an argument about embryonic stem cells that’s quite revealing, in its way. The post garnered some attention from other law professors, here and here , for instance. The always interesting Eugene . . . . Continue Reading »
Yesterday’s New York Times ran an interesting story about Henri Tessier, the elderly archbishop of Algeria, "where he has been witness to what he says is the slow ‘death of a church.’" The immediate purpose of a Christian presence in Algeria, he claims, "is not to . . . . Continue Reading »
"Government Will Defend Polish ‘Morals.’" The story in the Herald Tribune underscores the sneer quotes around morals . As it happens, the prime minister had told the parliament in Warsaw that "the government will defend Polish culture and morals." One imagines an . . . . Continue Reading »
It’s hardly a breaking news story that the old mainline Protestant denominations are in trouble, both doctrinally and in membership numbers. It’s even less of a breaking story that a wide range of nondenominational churches¯or churches only loosely affiliated with a . . . . Continue Reading »
We were unable to get away from New York to attend President Bush’s stem-cell speech yesterday, but our friend Wesley J. Smith flew from California to see the event, and he promised to let us know how it went: I attended President Bush’s stem cell speech yesterday, and I have to say, it . . . . Continue Reading »
So, the tough-guy mystery writer Micky Spillane has died , passing away at age eighty-eight in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina. Back in 2001, the New American Library reissued a set of his Mike Hammer books, and I wrote at the time: Your first impulse will be to like Mickey Spillane. Here’s a . . . . Continue Reading »
Amy Welborn seems to have given up the editorship of the "Loyola Classics" that Loyola Press puts out , but while she was working on the project, she got several good writers to pen introductions to a range of interesting reprints of Catholic fiction. By the end, though, Welborn had . . . . Continue Reading »
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