Stephen M. Barr

It seems to me that the Catholic bishops are missing a golden teaching opportunity. Bishops are rightly concerned that for them to publicly warn or chastise politicians because of their voting records on abortion will be misunderstood as politically motivated. All sorts of issues get dragged into . . . . Continue Reading »

Mary Rose, I think you may be jumping the gun a bit about the pre-Christian tablet recently reported on in the New York Times . You say, “All we can ascertain from this discovery is that this notion mentioned on the tablet—the notion of a suffering messiah dying and rising from the dead . . . . Continue Reading »

Nathaniel calls our attention to Bishop Trautman’s difficulties with the word ineffable as reported in the Erie Times-News . The same newspaper article relates the following: Trautman called parts of the proposed translation “archaic” and “just clumsy language.” One . . . . Continue Reading »

Last week Ryan Anderson called our attention to a new kind of moral analysis developed by Elizabeth Harman of Princeton University and announced at a conference recently held there. This is how Harman formulated her new discovery: “Things have moral status throughout their existence, just in . . . . Continue Reading »

I partially disagree with my friend Robert Miller on the matter of papal bird-flipping. Only partially, because I tend to agree with him about the quasi-apologies proffered by the Vatican after the Regensburg speech, but disagree about Cardinal Re’s remarks. Robert says, “if you intentionally . . . . Continue Reading »

I was very pleased to hear this morning that the 2008 Templeton Prize has been awarded to Michal Heller (who publishes in English under the name Michael Heller), a Polish priest, physicist, philosopher, and theologian. Here is an excerpt from what I said about him in the October 2004 issue of First . . . . Continue Reading »

I got an email Monday from a philosophy-professor friend asking what I thought of the new “theory of everything” (“TOE”) developed by one Garrett Lisi, who apparently is being talked up on the Internet and in some newspapers as a “new Einstein”. Lisi does not . . . . Continue Reading »

Bill Donohue of the Catholic League (of which I am a proud member) issued a press release yesterday attacking an idiotic column by one Joe Feuerherd that appeared in the Washington Post . In that column, Feuerherd blasted the Catholic bishops of this country for supposedly telling him who to vote . . . . Continue Reading »

Anthony, I won’t comment on the putative geekiness of Neil Turok , given that many people, including some of my own children, would aver that I am myself a geek of the first water. I can say, however, that Neil has always seemed to me, on the few occasions I have met him, a very nice fellow. . . . . Continue Reading »

I was just looking at the Wikipedia article on Capablanca, Anthony , and it quotes an interesting evaluation of Capablanca given by Bobby Fischer in a 2006 (!) radio interview. Here’s what Fischer said: Morphy and Capablanca had enormous talent, Steinitz was very great too. Alekhine was . . . . Continue Reading »