Joseph Bottum

At least I caught up on my reading. The seventy-fifth-anniversary issue of Fortune was particularly interesting. I didn’t really mind that it was dated September 2005. Where, except in a doctor’s waiting room, can you easily find popular magazines more than a year old? The Christmas 2004 . . . . Continue Reading »

I’m not so sure, Ross, that you’re right about the way you frame the issue of the war and the election. Of course, in your response to me , you may be righter than I was . But I don’t see that I was saying anything much different from, for example, E.J. Dionne, who wrote in his . . . . Continue Reading »

Since September 11, 2001¯or at least since the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and probably since the invasion of Afghanistan¯there has been a fundamental imbalance in the way the left and the right have perceived the use of the American military in the war against the Jihadists.Of course, . . . . Continue Reading »

Is it just my imagination or has Robertson Davies faded considerably over the past decade? I was sick in bed the middle of last week and, in my convalescence, pulled down a couple of his early novels to read¯only to be struck by how rarely one hears his name anymore. Before he died in 1995 at . . . . Continue Reading »

As a special bonus for Columbus Day weekend, we’re making available here on our website a second article from the October issue of First Things . It’s called " When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano: Catholic Culture in America ," an account of the curious Catholic . . . . Continue Reading »

I The swallows would swirl through San Juan Capistrano, rising like a mist from the sea every March 19. Or so the legend goes. In fact, the blue-feathered birds sometimes reached California as early as mid-February, and when they arrived at the end of their long trek from Argentina, they would . . . . Continue Reading »

I was hunting this weekend for a line from James Farl Powers¯J.F. Powers, as he signed himself¯and got caught again in the strength of his prose. Powers is such a curious figure: the greatest of the writers in the 1950s American Catholic renaissance, and the most faded. After his death in . . . . Continue Reading »

Even after Ross Douthat’s post and mine , there may be more to unravel from the new Pew poll on the political parties and religion.I wrote, as though it were perfectly self-evident, "We cannot¯we should not¯have a party so strongly identified with opposition to religious . . . . Continue Reading »

The Associated Press carried an item yesterday ¯here’s a copy from Forbes ¯that mentioned First Things . Actually, it was an unimportant wire story about Supreme Court justices’ required financial statements for 2005. It did contain this sentence, however: "Scalia . . . . Continue Reading »

As the Power Line blog points out, you’d be hard pressed to find a greater opposition in headlines than the ones about the new Pew study on politics and religion. The New York Times has it: "In Poll, G.O.P. Slips as a Friend of Religion." And the Washington Times insists: "Few . . . . Continue Reading »