Joseph Bottum

In his posting on First Things earlier today, Ross Douthat writes "justice is rarely served by folly"¯a phrase that gives nice shape to an appealing notion: Israel’s decision to attack Hezbollah, like the U.S. decision to invade Iraq, was morally justifiable, but these wars have . . . . Continue Reading »

It strikes me, Ross, that you’re digging yourself into terminological difficulties here , primarily because you’re trying to make the justice of the war match the chronology of your thinking about the war. A person might have thought Israel’s attack on Hezbollah was just when it . . . . Continue Reading »

After the tremendous response to Rome Diary , Richard John Neuhaus’ daily reports from Italy on the papal funeral and election in the spring of 2005, we kicked around the idea, here at the magazine, of continuing to post regular items on the First Things website. Blogging, you might . . . . Continue Reading »

The situation in the Middle East has been changing so rapidly, it seems impossible to have timely commentary on it. The best outcome one can imagine is a restoration of Lebanon. Hezbollah has been for years an organization existing in the cracks of modern nation-states. It is in certain ways a . . . . Continue Reading »

Over on the University of Chicago law school’s faculty website, Prof. Geoffrey Stone posted an argument about embryonic stem cells that’s quite revealing, in its way. The post garnered some attention from other law professors, here and here , for instance. The always interesting Eugene . . . . Continue Reading »

Yesterday’s New York Times ran an interesting story about Henri Tessier, the elderly archbishop of Algeria, "where he has been witness to what he says is the slow ‘death of a church.’" The immediate purpose of a Christian presence in Algeria, he claims, "is not to . . . . Continue Reading »

It’s hardly a breaking news story that the old mainline Protestant denominations are in trouble, both doctrinally and in membership numbers. It’s even less of a breaking story that a wide range of nondenominational churches¯or churches only loosely affiliated with a . . . . Continue Reading »

We were unable to get away from New York to attend President Bush’s stem-cell speech yesterday, but our friend Wesley J. Smith flew from California to see the event, and he promised to let us know how it went: I attended President Bush’s stem cell speech yesterday, and I have to say, it . . . . Continue Reading »

So, the tough-guy mystery writer Micky Spillane has died , passing away at age eighty-eight in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina. Back in 2001, the New American Library reissued a set of his Mike Hammer books, and I wrote at the time: Your first impulse will be to like Mickey Spillane. Here’s a . . . . Continue Reading »

Amy Welborn seems to have given up the editorship of the "Loyola Classics" that Loyola Press puts out , but while she was working on the project, she got several good writers to pen introductions to a range of interesting reprints of Catholic fiction. By the end, though, Welborn had . . . . Continue Reading »