Joseph Bottum

In Reason magazine, Radley Balko continues his coverage of a botched SWAT raid in a small town in Maryland. The libertarian Reason often understands itself as somehow opposed to the religious intellectual analysis that First Things does, but the rise of no-knock raids and paramilitary police forces . . . . Continue Reading »

The new issue of First Things is on newsstands, and the free article this month—available even to non-subscribers, if you can believe that such people exist—is Hadley Arkes’ powerful study of empathy and the rule of law : What President Obama offers in the search for empathy is not a . . . . Continue Reading »

The new issue of First Things is out”the August/September issue, filled with as broad a range of material as we’ve ever published. There’s economics, politics, legal theory, literary theory, history, poetry, and ethics. And then there’s René Girard”the grand literary theorist turned anthropologist turned theologian”who contributes an essay, drawn from his forthcoming book, on the lessons of war and the apocalypse. “Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure,” he writes… . Continue Reading »

John Henry Newman on Catholic universities: Here, then, I conceive, is the object of the Holy See and the Catholic Church in setting up Universities; it is to reunite things which were in the beginning joined together by God, and have been put asunder by man. Some persons will say that I am . . . . Continue Reading »

Reading Alexander Waugh on Christopher Buckley , I thought about the strangely immoral project of weighing our parents—a thought I’ve had before : Every memoir of childhood is necessarily overshadowed by parents, and I could find, were I to turn my mind that way, stories of my . . . . Continue Reading »

All right, I’ve finished, at last, a serious read through the new encyclical Caritas in Veritate , recording—for my own edification, though probably no one else’s—the first thoughts that occurred to me along the way. For what they’re worth, here the ten posts are: one , two . . . . Continue Reading »

Chapter 7 begins with a complex analogy: As no one builds himself without the initial gift from God and influence from other persons, so no people or culture builds itself. The sheer assertion would probably have been better here. (A general rule of thumb for editors: If the metaphor is more . . . . Continue Reading »

And on we go to Chapter 5, paragraphs 53 through 67. Poverty is caused by isolation, Benedict insists: isolation from other humans, and isolation from the foundation that is God. Is that right? Maybe. Okay, I guess so. In a certain sense. But the text here in the opening of Chapter 5 is very muddy. . . . . Continue Reading »

The title of Chapter 4, paragraphs 43 through 52, promises that the text will take up the topic of the environment. But the chapter opens with an attack on the idea of rights as divorced from duties: “An overemphasis on rights leads to a disregard for duties.” Pieces of several arguments . . . . Continue Reading »

If that combination—a more socialist economics and a more traditional culture—is possible, then we need more explanation than Chapter 2 gave us, and, not surprisingly, it is with an explanation that Chapter 3 opens. The intellectual problem that Benedict has set himself is a thorny one: . . . . Continue Reading »