First Thoughts

Liberty Adrift

How America's Original Sin Still Haunts Us in the Fourteenth Amendment

The Calvary Option?

Does the Church actually need a new (or new old) option? Continue Reading »

First Links—7.28.15

Looking Away From Abortion
Ross Douthat, New York Times

Richard Nixon's Culture War
Mark Judge, Real Clear Religion

Antiracism, Our Flawed New Religion
John McWhorter, Daily Beast

Cecile Richards is Right
Kathryn Jean Lopez, National Review

Dryads and Hamadryads
Matthew Walther, Washington Free Beacon

Failed Poets

Roberto Bolaño neatly captures the spirit of The Savage Detectives in an establishing scene early in the book. Seventeen-year-old Juan García Madero is the beneficiary of an unexpected sexual favor in the back room of a restaurant. When he is close to experiencing la petite mort, a waitress pokes . . . . Continue Reading »

Francis, Obama, and Ideological Colonization

Let us be on guard against colonization by new ideologies. There are forms of ideological colonization which are out to destroy the family. They are not born of dreams, of prayers, of closeness to God or the mission which God gave us; they come from without, and for that reason I am saying that they . . . . Continue Reading »

Grace and Truth on Campus

As a conservative Christian at a small liberal arts school, I’m a part of a small minority group in an emphatically liberal student body. Thanks to my views—as well as my willingness to share my opinion—I have had the dubious privilege of becoming, for many, the representative figure of conservative Christianity on my campus. Continue Reading »

First Links—7.27.15

The Dominican Option and the Common Good
C. C. Pecknold, Ethika Politika

The Flesh Made Word: Tattoos, Transgression, and the Modified Body
Christine Rosen, Hedgehog Review

What is the Role of Leo Strauss in Conservative Thought?
Peter Lawler, The Imaginative Conservative

Why do Westerners Join ISIS? 
Simon Cottee, The Atlantic

The New York Times on Mideast Christians

Mideast Christians have the misfortune to be too foreign for the Right and too Christian for the Left. Continue Reading »

What Can an Old Quranic Parchment Really Show?

Birmingham University has announced that it possesses what could be the world’s oldest fragments of the Muslim Holy Quran. We cannot be certain yet whether it is the oldest, as we have other sets of old Qur’anic manuscripts, such as those investigated by IRCICA in Turkey and the palimpsest ones found in the Great Mosque of Sana’a, Yemen, in 1972. But using radiocarbon dating, the Birmingham researchers suggest that this parchment fragment, written on sheep or goat skin, may date to sometime between 568 and 645. This could place this parchment within the first three decades of Islam, taking us back to the days of Muhammad or his immediate followers. Continue Reading »

First Links—7.23.15

The Different Social Visions of Liberals and Conservatives
Yuval Levin, Daily Signal

Chicago's Amusement Tax
Samuel A. Rosado, National Review

Pope Francis Approval Ratings Slump Sharply
David Gibson, Religion News Service

A Larger, Purer Church
Dominic Bouck, O.P., Dominicana