Start your year off right with First Things. Yes, subscribe now to receive it at home; that way, youll receive every issue without delay, hot off the presses. Issues such as the January 2010 issue”full of articles both weighty and light-hearted… . Continue Reading »
Michael Slaters new biography, Charles Dickens, is subtitled A Life Defined by Writing. Its a bit clumsy, perhaps, but certainly apt. With The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens became, at 24, an international star. Suddenly he was lauded and adored and in constant demand… . Continue Reading »
It was in 1904, at Christmastime, that American impresario Charles Frohman first staged James M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan: or, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up at London’s Duke of York’s Theatre. Perhaps the astute Jewish producer had noticed, as David Goldman put it in his December 2006 essay “Sympathy for Scrooge,” that “the Christmas season [is] a moment when the entire Gentile world is given over to a child’s view of things.” … . Continue Reading »
What ought to be a time of meditative joy and happy celebration has become a time for combat. December, say scores of the faithful, is a time for war—the Christmas wars. Happy holidays is denounced as a godless substitute for Merry Christmas. The Christmas wars are now as much a part of the season as mistletoe and reindeer… Continue Reading »
Last week”on the feast of the Immaculate Conception”St. Vincents Hospital here in New York opened a Catholic womens healthcare center… . Continue Reading »
Late afternoon on Christmas Eve, the year I was eleven, my father took me with him across the river. I cant remember what the urgency was, but he was a busy lawyer, and he needed some papers signed by a rancher who lived across on the other side of the Missouri from Pierre… … . Continue Reading »
There was a woman screaming on Park Avenue, flecks of saliva spraying from her mouth as she raged into her cell phone, Its not my fault. Over and over, like the high-pitched squeal of a power saw cutting bricks: Its not my fault and a run of foul names, Its not my fault and another run of names, Its not my fault, you (blank)ing (blank). Its not my fault, you evil (blank). Its … not … my … fault… . Continue Reading »
I fear I may have missed some of the beauty of Advent. I missed the lessons from two pregnant cousins as they reveal for us the blessing of a joyful expectation—lessons from the pregnancy narratives. We are at a decided advantage over Elizabeth and Mary… . Continue Reading »
Several of the founders, most notably Benjamin Rush, were fond of displaying the interdependence of liberty and virtue and the interdependence of virtue (at least in most people) and religion (or at least such a religion as Judaism and Christianity) that nourished Americas new conception of liberty… . Continue Reading »
Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights commemorating the miraculous restoration of the Temple following the Hasmonean expulsion of the Greek occupiers from Jerusalem in 165 B.C., began this year on Friday evening, the beginning of the Sabbath… . Continue Reading »
There’s a joke going around among American ninth graders: Want to scare your parents? Tell them the teacher put up a map of the Western Hemisphere and called on you to point to Mexico, and you couldn’t find it. Among young Americans, ignorance of basic facts about our nation’s geography, history, and principles has become legendary… . Continue Reading »