Various

Evolving Darwin? I have over the years followed the writings of Stephen M. Barr on evolution and intelligent design. I do not have the scientific training that Barr has, but I’m usually able to follow his arguments, even when I disagree with them. But in his most recent article (“The Miracle of . . . . Continue Reading »

James R. Stoner, Jr. Who stripped the public square and left it naked? That puts the matter a bit abruptly, but it is worth asking why religion lost its prominent place in American public discourse during the later decades of the twentieth century––and why the attempt to restore it has . . . . Continue Reading »

Defending Human Dignity: John Paull II and Political Realism. By Derek Jeffreys. Brazos. 235 pp. $19.95. Derek Jeffreys, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, undertakes a study of the contributions of John Paul II to a Christian approach to political life and to international . . . . Continue Reading »

Defining Davidson Down Christoph Cardinal Schönborn (“The Designs of Science,” January) writes that “modern science first excludes a priori final and formal causes, then investigates nature under the reductive mode of mechanism (efficient and material causes), and then turns . . . . Continue Reading »

The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview. by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese. Cambridge University Press. 828 pp. $31.99. In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln remarked that Northerners and Southerners “read the same . . . . Continue Reading »

Godly Science Michael Behe’s elucidation of the social pressures on Catholic scientists to conform to a naturalistic explanation for all phenomena (“Scientific Orthodoxies,” December 2005) mirrors very accurately my experience as a former evolutionary geologist who eventually rejected the . . . . Continue Reading »

Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. By Anne Rice. Knopf. 321 pp. $25.95. Appalling. That’s the word that kept echoing through my mind as I turned the pages of Anne Rice channeling the seven-year-old Jesus Christ in her twenty-seventh novel, the first since her recent return to the Christianity of . . . . Continue Reading »

Speaking of Law In his review of Steven D. Smith’s work (“Law & Language,” November), Justice Scalia gets it not so much wrong as incomplete when it comes to his account of the nature of meaning. Using examples from linguistically challenged bridegrooms to typing monkeys, . . . . Continue Reading »

In Tiers of Glory: The Organic Development of Catholic Church Architecture Through the Ages. By Michael S. Rose. Mesa Folio. 136 pp. $29.95. A few years back, Michael S. Rose wrote Ugly As Sin, a fine denunciation of the sterility of contemporary Catholic church architecture and the damage it has . . . . Continue Reading »

Randomness and Intelligent Design The controversy resulting from Cardinal Schönborn’s opinion article in the New York Times has engaged, among others, faithful and well-informed Catholics who nonetheless disagree with each other on matters of substance. In his criticism of Cardinal . . . . Continue Reading »