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Faith in America’s Colleges

Joseph Bottum

Wheaton College in Illinois is the single best place to go to college in America. Or Thomas Aquinas College in California. Or the utterly secular Princeton University in New...

Mandatory Chapel

Joseph Bottum

Add up the music conservatories and the seminaries, the enormous land-grant universities and the tiny Bible colleges, the Harvards and the would-be Harvards, the art institutes and the yeshivas,...

Holy War Over Ground Zero

Joseph Bottum

There, the sign that says “Sharia,” the hand-drawn letters dribbling down in streaks as though they were bleeding. And there, another sign—this one reading “No Mosque at Ground Zero”...

Pullman Sleeper

Joseph Bottum

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by philip pullman canongate, 256 pages, $24 Teenage sex will save the world—teenage sex, in all its precocious power, in all...

Saro’s Love Song

Joseph Bottum

In May 2010, the body of Zardasht Osman, a twenty-three-year-old journalist who wrote under the name “Saro Zardasht,” was found in Arbil, the capital of Kurdistan. He had been...

The Signpost at the Crossroads

Joseph Bottum

You head down the road of public life in America, and you run up against religion. From the conversations in the barber shops and the coffee klatches, through the...

The Cost of Father Maciel

Joseph Bottum

Cardinal Sodano has to go. The dean of the College of Cardinals, he has been found too often on the edges of scandal. Never quite charged, never quite blamed,...

Once and Future Things

Joseph Bottum

It is astonishing, really, that First Things exists at all. The first set of editors”Richard John Neuhuas and James Nuechterlein”were in their fifties when, in 1989, the Rockford Institute...

Christians and Postmoderns

Joseph Bottum

Joseph Bottum, a young medievalist, made his debut in First Things with an account of faith in a postmodern age. From the February 1994 issue. I We are living...

American Exceptionalism and American Religion

Joseph Bottum

It is a curious formula, that phrase “American exceptionalism.” As commonly used, the phrase suggets that the United States somehow escaped the typical patterns of history”the patterns that seemed...

Irving Kristol, 1920–2009

Joseph Bottum

The two most enjoyable activities of mankind are gossip and metaphysics”the sparkles on the shallows of conversation about people, and the vast ocean of thought about reality, where the...

The Day for the Religious

Joseph Bottum

So the rabbis came. Or, at least, a thousand of them went to their telephones to listen to a conference call with President Obama about healthcare reform. And they...