Want to be canonized as a saint? You may want to move to Italy: 46.7 percent of saints lived in that country at the time of their deaths. That is just one of the many interesting tidbits to be gleaned from Barro, McCleary, and McQuoid’s new paper, The Economics of Sainthood (a preliminary . . . . Continue Reading »
Robert Louis Wilken, a board member and frequent contributor of First Things , has a review in the Wall Street Journal of two new books on the Crusades: The recorded past and the remembered past are seldom the same. Nowhere is this more evident than with the Crusades. The Crusades were a belated . . . . Continue Reading »
Twenty-five years ago the first .com Internet domain name was registered. Read the story here. How has our world changed as a result of the Internet? The good, the bad and the ugly. It’s all there/here/out there/on our computers for us to read, interact with, react to, live with, struggle . . . . Continue Reading »
Trouble in US-Israeli relations is real, but is misrepresented in the press accounts. No-one—really, no-one—cares about the Palestinians. The tiff centers on Israel’s plans to attack Iran. And Obama may be in more trouble than Netanyahu.This week’s Spengler essay at Asia . . . . Continue Reading »
The Washington Posthas a story about a pilot program to identify donatable organs from the cadvers of people who die in emergency rooms. From the story:Using a $321,000 grant from the Department of Health and Human Services, the emergency departments at the University of Pittsburgh Medical . . . . Continue Reading »
The American Catholic bishops sent a bulletin to parishes this weekend, urging Catholics to oppose the abortion funding provisions in the current version of the health-care. Unfortunately, Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, promptly endorsed the current bill: . . . . Continue Reading »
Ok, so my rant about Beth Moore was, well, imprecise. But there is one characteristic of Moore’s efforts that her critic missed, and it is one which is pervasive among many teachers. While in her case it dove-tailed very nicely with the word-faith approach, it expresses itself quite . . . . Continue Reading »
Courtesy of Alan Jacobs , I see some academics are starting to grapple with the issue. But how successfully? Danah Boyd tackles Google Buzz: “Nothing that the Buzz team did was technologically wrong,” Ms. Boyd said. “Yet the service resulted in complete disaster.” Google got . . . . Continue Reading »
The study of how traditions developed surrounding the Church Year is fascinating. This Sunday in Lent is traditionally known as “Laetare” Sunday. Here’s an explanation of how this came to be called the Sunday of Joy, in the middle of Lent. The traditional/classic vestments worn by . . . . Continue Reading »
Some policy controversies are wearying. Not because they have worn their importance down over decades spent in the argumentative rock tumbler, of course. High-stakes issues tend actually to get more portentous, over time, as we sink greater and greater emotional and intellectual investments into . . . . Continue Reading »
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