Mary Angelita Ruiz

Time to apply for the Junior Fellowship at First Things . As I wrote last year , here are Some of the Things You Might Do As a First Things Junior Fellow (Not All in One Week): Monday, 3 pm: First Things editorial meeting; 8 pm: $15 tickets for Wagner’s Die Walküre at the . . . . Continue Reading »

Here’s a conflicted piece in this morning’s Los Angeles Times —transparently contemptuous of pro-life activism but respectful of the pain of men dealing with their complicity in abortion. . . . . Continue Reading »

Robert Southwell is perhaps the most famous of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, a young sixteenth-century Jesuit who was hanged, drawn, and quartered for spending more than forty days on English soil as a Catholic priest. He wrote the poetry for which he is still studied and celebrated while . . . . Continue Reading »

A Week in the Life of a First Things Junior Fellow (Somewhat Condensed and Idiosyncratic) Saturday, 7 pm: Night prayer, drinks, and dinner with Richard John NeuhausSunday, 1 pm: Lunch after Mass at sushi restaurant on Park AvenueMonday, 2 pm: First Things editorial meeting; 8 pm: $15 tickets for . . . . Continue Reading »

"Manliness is next to godliness," ran the Los Angeles Times headline on December 7. The article examines "a contrarian movement gaining momentum on the fringes of Christianity" that rebels against what the Times calls the "feminization of mainline churches": the frilly . . . . Continue Reading »

Last week I saw the final New York performance of a Twelfth Night now touring the United States, brought over by a British production company called Cheek by Jowl . This Twelfth Night is performed entirely in Russian by Russian performers, with Shakespeare’s English only as supertitles . . . . Continue Reading »

Assorted tech-savvy wags have created blogs for major literary figures ( G.K. Chesterton , for example), so it was inevitable that someone would create a blog for perhaps the most prolific diarist in English literary history. Samuel Pepys (pronounced Peeps) was a successful seventeenth-century . . . . Continue Reading »

For the past month, the New York Times has been running a series on “the new gender divide," which "examin[es] what has happened to men and women several decades after the women’s movement began." Sunday’s article , "Facing Middle Age with No Degree, and No . . . . Continue Reading »