Joe Carter

Congratulations to First Things contributing editor David Bentley Hart: The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, today awarded the 2011 Michael Ramsey prize to ‘Atheist Delusions’ by David Bentley Hart at a gala lunch at the Telegraph Hay festival. Speaking about the winning . . . . Continue Reading »

Let’s take a survey: Are Americans (a) really bad at estimating, (b) really gullible, (c) both really gullible and really bad at estimating? After seeing the results of this Gallup survey , I think the answer is obvious: U.S. adults, on average, estimate that 25% of Americans are gay or . . . . Continue Reading »

Kevin DeYoung has a thoughtful, balanced article on patriotism and the church : 5. All this leads to one final point: while patriotism can be good, the church is not a good place for patriotism. We should pray for service men and women in our congregations. We should pray for the President. We . . . . Continue Reading »

[Note: Since the FT staff will be in a meeting all day and our blogging will continue to be light (it’ll pick up again next week), I thought I’d resurrect a pop culture post from last summer that sparked an entertaining discussion/debate.] They were the best of fads, they were the worst of . . . . Continue Reading »

Julian Baggini has a intriguing interview with philosopher and theologian Richard Swinburne about the existence of the soul. . . . . Continue Reading »

The nine justices on the Supreme Court are a surprisingly literary bunch . What do Nabokov, Hemingway, Montesquieu, Wittgenstein, Stendhal, Proust, Shakespeare, Dickens, Faulkner, Solzhenitsyn, and Trollope have in common?  They’re all readily mentioned by Supreme Court Justices when . . . . Continue Reading »

As fiscal pressures lead to cutbacks in the public sector, says Lewis M. Andrews , organized religious groups are stepping into the void: As much as America has suffered since the start of the financial crisis in 2007, there is no doubt that for many the situation is about to get worse. The . . . . Continue Reading »

While the overall trend is encouraging, the increase in abortions among the poor is cause for concern : Abortion rates fell among most groups of women between 2000 and 2008, except for those classified as poor, finds an analysis conducted by the nonprofit Guttmacher Institute and published online . . . . Continue Reading »

Over on our Evangel blog, Gayle Trotter has an interview with former Senator Rick Santorum : GT: You think that President John F. Kennedy made a mistake about the role of religious faith in politics. What was his mistake? RS: Senator Kennedy — he was a senator at the time — made his . . . . Continue Reading »

I know I should be skeptical of popular science reporting (much less glorified press releases ), but until Stephen Barr clarifies that this is much ado about nothing I’m gonna go ahead and let myself believe that an undergrad intern really did find some of the universe’s “missing . . . . Continue Reading »