Joseph Bottum

In an On the Square round-up this morning , I take up the House bill that passed this weekend. Not everyone is happy that the Stupak Amendment was added, of course. Here’s the latest from Planned Parenthood : Congress passed a bill that will undercut women’s access to comprehensive . . . . Continue Reading »

That the House of Representatives managed not to fund abortions while passing the new health-care bill is the good news. That it managed to pass the health-care bill without funding abortion is the bad news, too. In an odd way, it’s maybe even worse news than if the leading Democrats in the House had succeeded at including abortion funding, which is clearly what they wanted to do… . Continue Reading »

Also: Remembering 1989 by Michael Novak

Timothy Dolan came to town with a hammer in his hand . My column in the New York Post on the latest moves by Archbishop Dolan: Beginnings are such difficult things, and a bishop always has to struggle to find his public place in a new town—especially on a stage as hard as New York’s. He . . . . Continue Reading »

“Every anti-choice group in the country is pulling out all the stops to derail health care reform,” Planned Parenthood announced this week. “For example, right now, Catholics are being asked to contact their legislators, telling them to alter current health care legislation to . . . . Continue Reading »

Okay, so I’m willing to listen and think about it, when the CEO of Barclays, John Varley, gets up at St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London and says “Is Christianity and fair reward compatible? Yes.” I’m even willing to listen and think about it when Lord Griffiths, of Goldman . . . . Continue Reading »

Descendre dans la rue et tirer au hasard dans la foule —a beautiful language, French is, though the line, from Jean-Paul Sartre, means “going down to the street and shooting at random in the crowd.” It’s from Sartre’s short story, “Erostratus,” titled after . . . . Continue Reading »

The president of Notre Dame, Fr. Jenkins, is receiving an award tonight here in New York—from the American Irish Historical Society dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. The society’s reasons for honoring him include things of which the Irish and Catholic—and . . . . Continue Reading »

When I open up my web browser on my computer each day, I always go first to a news site—just to see if anything is on fire, so to speak. For a couple years now, that site has been CNN.com , not because I thought the people there had particularly good news sense, but just because the print . . . . Continue Reading »

“I don’t know what they teach these kids at Harvard,” said retired New York deputy fire chief, Jim Riches . That, according to the Crimson , in response to the arrest of a young man who graduated from Harvard’s law school last spring—Brian Schroeder, who has been accused . . . . Continue Reading »

Claude Lévi-Strauss has died , at the age of 100. He was, in his way, a great mind, if somewhat typical of his era—a fact made manifest by the typical response to his death, which expresses not so much surprise that he has died as surprise that he was still alive, to have died. Without . . . . Continue Reading »