Joseph Bottum

The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling By Gertrude Himmelfarb Ivan R. Dee, 288 pages, $26 In the French Revolution’s “empire of light and reason,” Edmund Burke observed, “all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, . . . . Continue Reading »

Back in my home state of South Dakota, the state legislature voted on Friday to ban all abortions except those to prevent the death of the mother. The governor, Mike Rounds, hasn’t yet signed the bill, but said he was leaning toward doing so¯though two years ago, he vetoed similar . . . . Continue Reading »

Over the last several months, an enormous amount has been said about how the United States is falling behind the rest of the world in science: endless newspaper editorials, chin-pulling on television talk-shows, widely publicized demands for legislative action. After the scandals of faked science . . . . Continue Reading »

Yesterday, I mentioned the links we’ve added on the left of the screen, one of which encourages applications to the Tertio Millennio seminar in Poland this summer. Michael Novak e-mailed this morning to mention another central European seminar this summer, the Slovak Seminar on the Free . . . . Continue Reading »

Over on the left side of this webpage, you’ll see two new items worth clicking on, if you’re young and wondering what to do. The top one invites applications for junior fellowships at F IRST T HINGS beginning in the late summer of 2006. These are one-year internships for young writers . . . . Continue Reading »

The easy charge is hypocrisy. In response to the Danish cartoon riots, the Boston Globe editorialized that "As with the current consensus against publishing racist or violence-inciting material, newspapers ought to refrain from publishing offensive caricatures of Mohammed in the name of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Over at the Against the Grain website , Christopher Blosser has done a first-rate job collecting links to the various initial reactions to Deus Caritas Est , the new encyclical from Pope Benedict XVI. The immediate press reports, as he summarizes them, seem to vary from the silly to the . . . . Continue Reading »

For the last year, the marvelous John Rose and Mary Angelita Ruiz have been our Junior Fellows at the magazine, and they seem to have had a good time, despite having to put up with such shady characters as Joseph Bottum and Richard John Neuhaus. NOW F IRST T HINGS has two Junior Fellowship . . . . Continue Reading »

Fr. Richard McBrien¯the Notre Dame theology professor and long-time lefty Catholic columnist¯is being tagged with the charge of plagiarism. The Boston Herald has picked up the story , which involves its Beantown competitor, the Boston Globe , and seems to run like this: On December 11, . . . . Continue Reading »

There’s no contradiction in saying "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," for the two facts occasionally coexist. So, I recently argued in the Weekly Standard , we are living in a moment in which a set of Catholic ideas and rhetorical gestures¯the Catholic way . . . . Continue Reading »