Joseph Bottum

The beauty school on Brighton Lane spills pink-smocked girls at twelve o’clock. They blossom cigarettes and talk, pluck lilacs from the parish green and plant them in their hair for spring. But the bells of St. Columbkille’s clang and Brighton mourners dim the street, with roses on the . . . . Continue Reading »

The Shadow Man: A Daughter’s Search for her Father By Mary Gordon Random House, 274 pages, $24 Every human situation, Epictetus once declared, is like a vase with two handles. If you have quarreled with your brother, you can grasp the handle which is the fact that you have quarreled, or grasp . . . . Continue Reading »

Good Hamlet,” begs his mother at the audience’s first sight of the black-clothed prince, “cast thy nighted color off,” And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark. Do not forever with thy lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust. Thou know’st ‘tis common; all that lives must die, . . . . Continue Reading »

Violence Unveiled By Gil Bailie Crossroad, 293 pages, $24.95 The Gospel and the Sacred By Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly Fortress, 175 pages, $14 paper The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred By James G. Williams Trinity, 288 pages, $16 paper The Sacred Game By Cesareo Bandera Pennsylvania State University . . . . Continue Reading »

Every philosopher knows, at last, that not all ethical systems are equally good. We demand that a general ethics conform, as philosophers put it, to both truth and logic”which is to say, we demand that it not contradict the facts we hold about the universe and that it not contradict itself. And . . . . Continue Reading »

There is a vague connection to vulgarity-there exists a tinge of logical association-when Calvin Klein advertises underwear by draping underclothed boys with girls who seem to tremble on the breathless edge of emphysema. Underwear suggests the body parts it covers, after all; those body parts . . . . Continue Reading »

What passes in the human heart is known to God alone, and the private spiritual life of T. S. Eliot may have been rich and full. But Eliot’s publicly presented spirituality-the spirituality in the Four Quartets, Murder in the Cathedral, and The Rock -seems merely weak and strange. Not all . . . . Continue Reading »

Part of the problem with the awful kind of augury performed by Alvin Toffler and the futurists is that it is heretical to any religion outside L. Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology, and part of the problem is that it is aesthetically vulgar, but most of the problem is that it is all so silly it . . . . Continue Reading »

We have in town a store where clerks in hushed and reverent tones sell breviaries and Bibles, Holy Cards and St. Christopher medals, rosaries and coffee-table books of photographic scenes of Rome, Assisi, and the Holy Land. On the walls, and all for sale, are photos of the Pope and JFK and Mother . . . . Continue Reading »

On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society By Gergrude Himmelfarb Knopf 192 pp. $23 “Ideas,” wrote the Victorian and Roman Catholic historian Lord Acton, “have a radiation and development, an ancestry and posterity of their own, in which men play the part of . . . . Continue Reading »