Joseph Bottum

I’ve always thought there’s an easy way to sidetrack the redefining of human nature by biotechnology. All we have to do is revive the space program and promote the colonization of space. All we have to do, in other words, is offer a different temporal purpose and a more exciting goal.An . . . . Continue Reading »

The philanthropist Sir John Marks Templeton passed away today—a sad moment for all who benefited from his support and his ideas. Born in Tennessee, he attended Yale University and Oxford before becoming an enormously successful investor in world markets. Both his education in England and his . . . . Continue Reading »

Sadly, our friend Thomas M. Disch has passed away , and even more sadly, apparently by his own hand on the Fourth of July. The man could do anything involving words. He wrote award-winning science fiction such as Camp Concentration and (my favorite) the bleak volume The Genocides . He wrote a . . . . Continue Reading »

Here’s an interesting essay on the nineteenth-century Victorian architect Augustus Pugin, one of the leading champions of the Gothic revival—a man who thought Europe’s cathedrals were the world’s greatest architectural achievement, precisely because the point of pointed . . . . Continue Reading »

The first reviews of Cry Wolf have appeared. That’s the novel, an anti-immigration parable, by Paul Lake, the poetry editor of First Things . Paul and I don’t quite see eye-to-eye on all these issues, but there’s no denying he’s written a fun, fast, and powerful read on the . . . . Continue Reading »

What are you doing looking here on the Fourth of July? Go away. Set off some firecrackers. Recite some patriotic speeches. Watch the rockets’ red glare. Read about how the Peterkin boys , Solomon John, and Agamemnon made their disaster of “fulminating paste” from iron-filings and . . . . Continue Reading »

Robert George, Joseph Bottum, Robert Wilken, Richard John Neuhaus After this year’s board meetings, several of us gathered for . . . well, a hootenanny, I guess you’d have to call it. Little did we know that our junior fellow Nathaniel Peters used his camera to record some . . . . Continue Reading »

If I remember correctly, it was an Anglican, Bishop Ussher, who added up the ages of the patriarchs in the Old Testament to arrive at the astonishingly precise date of Creation: 4004 B.C.—September 21, 4004 B.C. The reading of ancient texts for clues about the calendar has a venerable . . . . Continue Reading »

The University of Louisville had a contract with Duke University for a series of four football games over the course of a few years, but Duke pulled out of the series after the first game. Whereupon, Louisville sued for $450,000—pointing out, quite reasonably, that the contract between the . . . . Continue Reading »

Our friend Wesley J. Smith writes : I have been warning and warning that a virulent anti-humanism is becoming rampant. A site on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (roughly akin to the BBC) Website— Planet Slayer —specifically, “Professor Schpinkee’s Greenhouse Calculator . . . . Continue Reading »