This is one strange book. Strange and frequently wonderful. Weighing in at 852 pages, nobody is going to read Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts at one sitting. James is an Australian-born British literary critic and television personality now edging up . . . . Continue Reading »
Here at First Things , we’ve managed, more or less, to avoid talking about the new atheism tracts that seem to have infected the blogs and the bestseller lists. Partly because they’re so bad. And partly because they’re so old-fashioned, as though their authors had rediscovered a . . . . Continue Reading »
We play a game in my family called Blame It on W. At first, we were a little slow to understand the rules, but, living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, we pretty soon got the hang of it. To take an obvious example, even if Bush didn’t actually fly the planes into the Twin Towers (and the . . . . Continue Reading »
I Literary, Philosophical, Theological In one of my lectures last spring, I happened to mention an oddity about canons. For those who are unfamiliar with the usage, canon nowadays refers to any standardized body of texts that someone being trained in a certain discipline is required to know. In . . . . Continue Reading »
You usually know that somebody is losing the argument when he loses his cool and resorts to bluster, abuse, caricature, and the invocation of authorities who agree with him. The New York Times Book Review , for reasons that surpass charitable explanation, gave Michael Behe’s most recent book, . . . . Continue Reading »
Robert Miller worries that one of the arguments in my post on Amnesty International is philosophically unsound . He admits, though, that "there are many senses of the word right , and Anderson is perfectly correct that, in one of these senses, there can be no right to do what’s morally . . . . Continue Reading »
As a longtime reader and fan of First Things , I have admired Fr. Richard John Neuhaus’ keen insights on any number of issues. He has written convincingly on the necessary role of the Church in society rather than acquiescing to the secularists’ demands for a "Naked Public . . . . Continue Reading »
In the early 1950s, or so I’m told, two young men who would later come to world prominence attended some of the same political science lectures at the Sorbonne. One was the son of Polish-Jewish parents who had emigrated to France; the other was from Cambodia. One had lost his mother to the . . . . Continue Reading »
We live in a time of both danger and opportunity for the Catholic Church in the United States. The danger is that large numbers of Catholics will, as a result of clergy sex scandals and the large, highly publicized cash awards and settlements following in their train, lose confidence in the . . . . Continue Reading »
Ryan Anderson argued persuasively last week that Amnesty International’s new position on abortion laws makes AI effectively pro-abortion, and that AI is being disingenuous in denying this. This is his important point, and I agree with it completely. I am concerned, however, that one of the . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
