Joseph Bottum

My problem with your localism , Rusty, is the Jews. But, then, it’s always the Jews, isn’t it? Or the blacks, or the foreigners, or the diseased. The problem usually comes down to the Jews, though. In the experience of Western civilization, the Jews have proved for a long time the stone . . . . Continue Reading »

The brave Ron Rosenbaum points out what everybody actually knows but has been afraid to say: Michael Jackson just wasn’t much good after age 16 or so. His entire adult career was an exercise in publicity rather than performance. . . . . Continue Reading »

I was reading William Cobbett’s Rural Rides this weekend, for reasons too incidental to go into. Well, maybe not as incidental as all that. Last year, Rusty Reno explored a little the modern pop music of resurgent rural localism in England , Quebec , and South Africa . And the topic . . . . Continue Reading »

Fr. King was my theology professor, in the mandatory theology course I took as a freshman at Georgetown. He’d had throat surgery of some kind, and his voice was soft and ghostly—lost in the hum whenever the air-conditioner in White-Gravenor Hall would come on. I saw him far more rarely . . . . Continue Reading »

You’ve all seen the news about Walter and Gwendolyn Myers, arrested as spies for Cuba , right? Well, if this interesting report by Clarice Feldman is accurate , the Myers were recruited by a Cuban agent in 1979. At the time, Walter was apparently unemployed, while his wife was working for the . . . . Continue Reading »

We all knew this fight was coming. The Catholic Church and the Catholic colleges have been heading toward a crash since at least 1990, when John Paul II issued Ex Corde Ecclesiae, his apostolic constitution for Catholic institutions of higher education. And now, at last, the battle is . . . . Continue Reading »

We all knew this fight was coming. The Catholic Church and the Catholic colleges have been heading toward a crash since at least 1990, when John Paul II issued Ex Corde Ecclesiae , his apostolic constitution for Catholic institutions of higher education. And now, at last, the battle is . . . . Continue Reading »

Today begins the new website design for First Things : more punch, more power, more action, more zowie! Or so I’m told. You’ll have to check it out to see for yourself. As I promised in our May issue , we’ve launched our redesigned and much-improved website, which includes both a . . . . Continue Reading »

We all knew this fight was coming. The Catholic Church and the Catholic colleges have been heading toward a crash since at least 1990, when John Paul II issued Ex Corde Ecclesiae , his apostolic constitution regulating Catholic institutions of higher education. And now, at last, the battle is . . . . Continue Reading »

R. Scott Appleby is embarrassed by the vulgarity of the protests out at Notre Dame. And perhaps he should be”for those protests are pretty vulgar. “People are weary of it,” the Notre Dame history professor told the Washington Post . “I certainly feel this is not the best way to . . . . Continue Reading »