Joe Carter

A new survey of primary and secondary school children in the UK gives Americans reasons not to feel too bad about the state of our own science education : Just under a half of boys (49%) correctly pinned down gravity as Newton’s ground-breaking discovery, compared with 76% of girls. Just over . . . . Continue Reading »

Want to be canonized as a saint? You may want to move to Italy: 46.7 percent of saints lived in that country at the time of their deaths. That is just one of the many interesting tidbits to be gleaned from Barro, McCleary, and McQuoid’s new paper, The Economics of Sainthood (a preliminary . . . . Continue Reading »

Robert Louis Wilken, a board member and frequent contributor of First Things , has a review in the Wall Street Journal of two new books on the Crusades: The recorded past and the remembered past are seldom the same. Nowhere is this more evident than with the Crusades. The Crusades were a belated . . . . Continue Reading »

Congressman Stupak agrees with your assessment , Steve. From an interview today with National Review Online : Stupak notes that his negotiations with House Democratic leaders in recent days have been revealing. “I really believe that the Democratic leadership is simply unwilling to change its . . . . Continue Reading »

“[M]y daughter, who has been studying Boethius, the great systematizer of the quadrivium, explained to me the connections between the arts of the quadrivium, in a way that also helped me see the way mathematics really does provide a unifying model for the order and design that underlies all . . . . Continue Reading »

Recently, there have been a number of well-meaning, though misguided, conservatives who are advocating filling in the Census with false information. Justin Taylor explains why that shouldn’t be an option for Christians : Some conservatives—for example, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, a . . . . Continue Reading »

Okay, so maybe I’m confused about that whole correlation/causation thing. But something happened in the 1960s and then again in the 1980s to cause grade inflation in colleges . The rise in grades in the 1960s correlates with the social upheavals of the Vietnam War. It was followed by a decade . . . . Continue Reading »

Although I’m agnostic about civil religion , I think the court made the right call in the decision not to remove God from the Pledge and currency : “The Pledge is constitutional,” Judge Carlos Bea wrote for the majority in the 2-1 ruling. “The Pledge of Allegiance serves to . . . . Continue Reading »

Matthew Schmitz has a remembrance of French New Wave director Eric Rohmer : Among the best known of Rohmer’s films are his Six Moral Tales, movies imbued with delicate longing and keen moral awareness in which characters struggle to come to terms with their duties and desires. It’s easy . . . . Continue Reading »

“I think I’ve wasted your time. I think this is the first time I have wasted an hour of your time and I apologize for that.” — Glenn Beck apologizes for his interview with former Congressman Massa. “Yes, it’s true that you may like strawberry ice cream more than . . . . Continue Reading »