All Souls Day, November 2, is for the ordinary folk. The "faithful departed" means all our brothers and sisters in Christ, including evangelical Protestants. (Some are less faithful than others, and, of course, the same is true of Catholics.) Evangelicals are seen as the especially . . . . Continue Reading »
Mother Teresa, who dedicated her life to serving the poorest of the poor, said on more than one occasion that the greatest poverty in the world was not on the streets of Calcutta but here in the United States and Western Europe. She would say: "What a terrible poverty that says: I cannot feed . . . . Continue Reading »
Work hard, play by the rules, and go to church. The result will be that, by every measure of human well-being, you and your family will be better off. But you knew that. The problem is how to get people to do that. Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia reports on recent . . . . Continue Reading »
Tomorrow, on October 26, the Catholic hero Franz Jägerstätter will be beatified in Linz, Austria.Executed in 1943 for refusing to serve in Hitler’s army, Jägerstätter was once known only to his relatives and neighbors¯many of whom considered him mad. Born out of . . . . Continue Reading »
In one of his early books, Untimely Meditations , Friedrich Nietzsche spins a tale that, in paraphrase, goes like this: Once upon a time, on a minuscule planet orbiting a mediocre star on the edge of a backwater galaxy, clever little animals emerged from the slime¯and not longer after began . . . . Continue Reading »
On October 16, Antonin Scalia gave the keynote address at Villanova Law School’s second annual Scarpa Conference on Catholic Legal Studies. Speaking on "The Role of Catholic Faith in the Work of a Judge," Justice Scalia reached a conclusion many readers of First Things may find . . . . Continue Reading »
Dr. Who , television’s longest-running science fiction show, has returned to planet Earth after battling near extinction. Certainly, for anyone who grew up watching BBC from the 1960 to the 1980s, the mysterious Doctor and his police-box time machine are unforgettable¯so much so, that . . . . Continue Reading »
There are questions so big they’re almost laughable. What is the meaning of life? for instance. We’ve been grappling with that one ever since Adam and Eve saw the first exit sign. Our modern technology promises many blessings, but a GPS of life-direction is not among them. In diligent . . . . Continue Reading »
Walter Benjamin’s is a name to be conjured with in the academic disciplines where "theory" is king. A Jew and a Marxist, he was killed in 1940 while trying to escape Germany, having been rather late in catching on to what the Nazis were up to. Benjamin is not for bedtime reading. . . . . Continue Reading »
This is a story¯a creation myth from the Tofa: In the very beginning there were no people, there was nothing at all.There was only the first duck, she was flying along.Having settled down for the night, the duck laid an egg.Then, her egg broke.The liquid of her egg poured out and formed a . . . . Continue Reading »
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