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Hygienic Relics

Kevin Staley-Joyce

NPR reports that a Swiss company is one of several firms offering the bereaved the chance to transform their loved ones’ ashen remains into diamonds as postmortem keepsakes. In three...

Papal Distinctions

Kevin Staley-Joyce

Along with being named person of the year by  Time , Pope Francis has gained a similar accolade from a zeitschrift of more rarified interest, namely,  The Advocate , the nation’s...

Transgender Denial at Smith College

Kevin Staley-Joyce

Feminism of the primitive observance meets Third-wave feminism in this unusual  story . Calliope Wong, who self-identifies as neither male nor female, applied to the famously “lifestyle left” and...

Offending Analogies

Kevin Staley-Joyce

During the Supreme Court’s oral arguments yesterday examing Proposition 8, Chief Justice John Roberts entertained an analogy for the move to redefine marriage: If you tell a child that...

The Journalist’s Index of Forbidden Phrases

Kevin Staley-Joyce

Carlos Lozada, editor of the  Washington Post ‘s Outlook section, provides a fantastic list of some of the hackneyed words and phrases his stylebook forbids. It’s striking to see...

Praying with Pope Francis

Kevin Staley-Joyce

Pope Francis is a pontiff of firsts—-the first Jesuit, the first Francis (of Assisi, not the Jesuit Francis Xavier), and the first pope from the New World, and indeed...

A Capuchin Pope?

Kevin Staley-Joyce

For the small percentage they comprise of Catholics worldwide, Italians are disproportionately represented in the Roman Curia and ecclesial governance more broadly, not to mention their long history of...

“Except the New York Times”

Kevin Staley-Joyce

It seems a safe bet that First Things’ beloved founder would have been a kindred spirit to Amos Shuchman, a New Yorker whose obituary  appeared earlier this month in...

Clerics as the Clerisy

Kevin Staley-Joyce

Duncan Stroik writes in Crisis   of the need for priests and seminarians to achieve literacy in art and architecture, expected as they are to play the role of...

Boasting Honestly

Kevin Staley-Joyce

Wall Street recruiters receive their fill of curious applications, with some aspirants inflating GPA figures and test scores, and others presenting overwrought or bluffed accounts of job skills and...

Obituaries for Earthbound Pets

Kevin Staley-Joyce

A few years back, First Things published a somewhat incredulous  While We’re At It entry noticing the curiously named Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, a service that promised to take care...

Marriage Ad Absurdum

Kevin Staley-Joyce

In their forthcoming book on marriage, Robert George, Sherif Girgis, and Ryan Anderson warn (in context of their broader argument) that it serves no one’s interests to define marriage...

On Supersized Words

Kevin Staley-Joyce

Patrick Ross, author of  The Artist’s Road   blog, enjoins English speakers and news producers to stem the tide of “word inflation” when reporting compelling news items, this week’s...

No Satisfaction in Same-Sex Marriage

Kevin Staley-Joyce

It’s no secret that one major undercurrent of the same-sex marriage movement is the desire to change the marriage culture—-family and childrearing norms, for instance—-not simply to realize the...

Manual Labor, Academe, and Baseball

Kevin Staley-Joyce

Joe Carter’s column this week draws on the autobiographical to illustrate an important point of comparison between workers in the world of labor and their counterparts in the world...