Wilfred M. McClay

Back in February, I received a phone call from the journalist Paul Elie. I knew his name from a book he published a few years ago, called The Life You Save May Be Your Own , an appealing effort that I reviewed favorably in First Things .He wanted to talk about an article, for the Atlantic Monthly , . . . . Continue Reading »

Two fine recent articles by evangelical scholars serve to highlight a problem I have mentioned before in this space : the remarkable inability of accredited spokesmen for the Christian Church to address the moral challenges faced by our civilization in the struggle with militant Islam.First of all, . . . . Continue Reading »

My suspicions were aroused when I saw a headline to a July 1 Associated Press story in the hometown paper , declaring “‘Sharing Chores’ Moves Up On Good-Marriage List.” This yawner of a finding was attributed to a Pew Research Center study just released on the . . . . Continue Reading »

There was a welcome report on Wednesday that Italy had stepped into the vacuum created by the balking French, offering to serve as the lead country in supplying troops to man the multinational Lebanese peacekeeping force. This act of Italian leadership (two words you don’t often see together) . . . . Continue Reading »

The Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., with which I am pleased to be affiliated, was founded in the 1970s in large measure to combat the perception that an intellectually and morally impoverished understanding of the dominant American religious traditions had rendered those . . . . Continue Reading »

Although I have tried mightily, I cannot find much merit in the idea that there is a "party of death" at work in American politics. It seems to me that this formulation states the problem wrongly. Indeed, our biotechnological enthusiasts are nothing if not partisans of life, infinitely . . . . Continue Reading »

Did the United States really have a beginning that can be called its . . . . Continue Reading »

I wanted to add a word or two to Fr. Neuhaus’s posting last week about the conference on religion and liberalism held at Columbia University on February 10. I was there, and the account of it presented in the New York Sun didn’t sound much like the event I attended. The papers were far . . . . Continue Reading »

The New York Times had a pleasing article on Tuesday, providing a small glimpse into the life of a genuinely modest author whose name you know (though it’s possible you didn’t know she was a Southern lady, or anything else about her, including the fact that she is still alive and . . . . Continue Reading »

The Chronicle of Higher Education, being the trade journal of higher education, is one of those publications one reads, not because one wants to, but because one he has to. It is, in its own way, a faithful register of all that is trendy and profitable in the field, and an influential arbiter of . . . . Continue Reading »