Ryan Sayre Patrico

Annie Lubliner Lehmann’s son Jonah was diagnosed with autism at the age of three. After twenty-two years of struggling to change her son, Lehmann writes that it was Jonah who finally changed her: Not long ago, I came across a basement copy of “Cinderella.” It reminded me of a time . . . . Continue Reading »

At Books and Culture , former First Things junior fellow Jordan Hylden reviews Richard John Neuhaus’ final book, American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile : In his last book, American Babylon, Neuhaus gives us an imaginative vision of how to be a faithful and hopeful Christian witness in . . . . Continue Reading »

That’s what James Morrison reports in today’s Washington Times : The Vatican has quietly rejected at least three of President Obama’s candidates to serve as U.S. ambassador to the Holy See because they support abortion, and the White House might be running out of time to find an . . . . Continue Reading »

Newly discovered documents reveal that Cardinal Cardinal John Henry Newman’s writings directly influenced Sophie Scholl, who was beheaded in 1943 for defying the Nazis: New documents unearthed by German academics have revealed that the writings of the 19th-century English theologian were a . . . . Continue Reading »

In yesterday’s Washington Post , Michael Kinsley said good riddance to traditional newsprint. Capitalism, he argues, is just doing its job, and we’ll be left with a leaner, meaner, more efficient news distribution system in the end: Capitalism is a “perennial gale of creative . . . . Continue Reading »

The Times of London has a fair-minded and sobering article today on the troubling growth of stem-cell tourism: [Stem cells] are touted as little short of a miracle: inject them into brains to restore the cells lost to Parkinson’s disease; inject them into the spines of the paralysed to make . . . . Continue Reading »

What do you know, those cute little guys can count : Baby birds can do arithmetic, say researchers in Italy. Scientists from the universities of Padova and Trento demonstrated chicks’ ability to add and subtract objects as they were moved behind two screens. Lucia Regolin, an author of the . . . . Continue Reading »

No, Robert , I didn’t say Richard Dawkins is silly for not fearing the complete annihilation of the self. As you point out, some entirely unsilly people, Socrates and Cicero among them, have felt the same way. I was instead—unsuccessfully, it seems—using sarcasm to point out how . . . . Continue Reading »

More from the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up department: For nearly 30 years, [Ann Holmes] Redding has been an ordained minister in the Episcopal Church. Her priesthood ended Wednesday when she was defrocked. The reason? For the past three years Redding has been both a practicing Christian and . . . . Continue Reading »

Over at Slate , Daniel Gross has more on why the owners of the Chicago Sun-Times went bankrupt . Gross points out that, while almost every newspaper in the country is struggling financially, the vast majority of newspapers that have filed for bankruptcy were run by executives who decided to accrue . . . . Continue Reading »