Archive

In a final scene of ­Dorothy Sayers’s 1930 novel Strong ­Poison, a murderer devours a large quantity of Turkish delight in the parlor of Lord ­Peter Wimsey, Sayers’s amateur-­sleuth...

The wind has shifted. People want hard religion, not easy religion. They seek out communities that are demanding rather than permissive. They want truth-based ­theologies, not outlooks softened with...

A battle has broken out on the American right. Two visions of what it means to have children are contending for supremacy. On one side stands the genetic-determinist right, which...

Imagine a world without Protestantism. I don’t mean a world without Christians who are neither Catholic nor Orthodox. I mean a world in which there are only two groups...

Super Bowl ads are a great American art form. Paying eight million dollars or more for a chance to capture the collective national imagination in thirty seconds isn’t merely...

I have often seethed at the pigheadedness of bureaucrats. Their roles in the ecclesial and academic worlds are particularly galling. Knowing little (or choosing to ignore what they know)...

Things don’t turn out as we expect. People don’t either. Take friendship as an example, or perhaps just a parable. Among Guy de Maupassant’s hundreds of stories—biting and penetrating...

Early in 2016, articles began to appear noting similarities between Pope Francis and Donald Trump. Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” corresponded to Francis’s mandate for Vatican reform. Trump...

One recent afternoon, while visiting Universal Studios, I found myself seriously contemplating socialism. I was standing in line for one of the theme park’s most popular attractions, huddled with...

Church life in America has been majority-­female for some time. According to Pew Research, women make up 57 percent of those who attend religious services weekly. Faithful women have...

Annex Greenland! Take back the Panama Canal! Canada as the fifty-first state! Speaking at an early January press conference, Donald Trump put the world in a tizzy. German chancellor Olaf Scholz recoiled...

In my ideal undergraduate course in literary criticism, the first semester would include a brisk introduction to large language models. This is less absurd than it sounds. Recall that...

Gendered Proclivities Rhys Laverty (“Lady Scrooges,” December 2024) was perceptive in pointing out that women helped build today’s unforgiving cancel culture. On the other hand, the feminism responsible is...

In late June 2022, a small rubber dinghy sailed down the Danube River in Budapest, past the Hungarian Parliament. It displayed a sign: “Mr. Pressman, don’t colonize Hungary with...

Recently I had an experience that I suppose is becoming increasingly common. The large, publicly traded energy company that has taken control of gas and electric utilities in my...