Joe Carter

The discovery of fragments of the lost Codex Gregorianus, one of the oldest known law books, was announced this week : Part of an ancient Roman law code previously thought to have been lost forever has been discovered by researchers at UCL’s Department of History. Simon Corcoran and Benet . . . . Continue Reading »

J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye , Franny and Zooey , and Nine Stories , is dead at the age of ninety-one . His son confirmed that he died of natural causes. As I wrote last June , since its publication in 1951, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye has been the favored bildungsroman . . . . Continue Reading »

Disney ’s Three Little Pigs may appear to be a simple story. But as Ellen Handler Spitz notes, it’s a model of Aristotelian aesthetics : The earliest versions of the Three Pigs story are buried in time, although we do have nineteenth-century English renderings of it. I want, as a foil, . . . . Continue Reading »

Science explains why my wife and I get along so well: she’s exponentially more attractive than me. From the Journal of Family Psychology : Physical appearance plays a crucial role in shaping new relationships, but does it continue to affect established relationships, such as marriage? In the . . . . Continue Reading »

From an address by Archbishop Charles Chaput at the Fifth Symposium Rome: Priests and Laity on Mission: Having said all this, we still face a problem. And here it is: God has never been more absent from the Western mind than he is today. Additionally, we live in an age when almost every scientific . . . . Continue Reading »

At NRO, Kathryn Jean Lopez posts an exchange between Unitarian minister Maryiln Sewell and atheist Christopher Hitchens: Maryiln Sewell: The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from . . . . Continue Reading »

Scientists have recently discovered a way to grow pork in a petri dish —a technique to turn pig stem cells into strips of meat that could one day offer a green alternative to raising livestock. Although in-vitro pork won’t be reaching supermarket shelves anytime soon, it’s not too . . . . Continue Reading »

Generally speaking, I’m a tolerant, live-and-let-live, kind of guy. But there are four types of people that drive me nuts: libertarians, hippies, bad dancers, and folks who pull goofy stunts in public for attention. So you can imagine my dismay when on midnight April 12, 2008, the eve of . . . . Continue Reading »

How does Obama’s first year State of the Union Address compare to other recent Presidents? Below are word clouds, based on the number of times a word was mentioned in the speech, for the first-year SOTUs of Reagan through Obama. Barack Obama (January 27, 2010) George W. Bush (January 29, . . . . Continue Reading »

(Note: This is part four in a series on the suicides of three detainees at Guantanamo Bay in 2006. The other posts are here, here , and here .) Rather than address the rebuttal in my last post, Andrew Sullivan has decided to take a different path in our debate over the Guantanamo Bay suicides : Joe . . . . Continue Reading »