One of the central tropes of Islamic responses to Christianity is that the Qur’an is not the Muslim equivalent of the Christian scriptures, but of Christ. Thus Mahmoud A. Ayoub says:The Qur’an is, for Muslims, the literal and timeless divine Word which entered our time. It became a book . . . . Continue Reading »
The public response to two movies on artificial insemination, including The Switch , just out and not doing well, tells us something about the way Americans feel about the subject, writes Mary Rose Somarriba in Artificially Conceiving a Bad Romantic Comedy . And they’re on to something, she . . . . Continue Reading »
America tends to import its key religious figures. That was the lesson I learned while trying to compile a last week’s list of most influential native-born religious figures . Many readers grumbled that the arbitrary criteria excluded some of the most important men and women in . . . . Continue Reading »
My alma mater, the University of Notre Dame, released an Institutional Statement Supporting the Choice for Life on 8 April 2010:Consistent with the teaching of the Catholic Church on such issues as abortion, research involving human embryos, euthanasia, the death penalty, and other related life . . . . Continue Reading »
I quoted Hadley Arkes, one of the founding members of the magazine’s board, in The Lost Telos of Sexuality below. Readers interested in his recent entry into the Catholic Church will want to read an interview with him just out in the National Catholic Register . Among other things he says in . . . . Continue Reading »
As readers of my thoughts on Islam and American politics may have suspected, I’ve been beating my head against the wall lately, trying to understand why American conservatism allows itself to be ideologically outmaneuvered by liberalism, and this even as conservatism wins elections. But . . . . Continue Reading »
I recently came across the following passage from the architect Ralph Adams Crams commencement address at the Yale School of Fine Arts (as it was then called), published in The Ministry of Art (1914): The artist is bound and controlled by the laws of his art, but doubly is he bound by his . . . . Continue Reading »
Ayn Rand acolyte, Nick Newcomen, has driven 12,328 miles with a GPS tracking device on to spell out “Read Ayn Rand” . According to The Guardian , “Newcomen took about 10 days to complete each word, turning on his GPS logger when he wanted to write and turning it off between . . . . Continue Reading »
David Goldman’s A Depressing Double Dip , today’s second “On the Square,” is now up. In it he argues that the economy has several deep sources of weakness the forecasters didn’t forecast, and that they “derive from long-term demographic changes rather than . . . . Continue Reading »
In response to my article on polyamory, mentioned in Why Just Two? , Hadley Arkes wrote me with a few comments of his own on the subject, which he’s given me permission to post here. During the hearings over the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, he wrote, he and Robert George had argued . . . . Continue Reading »