I am in the first 50 page of Midcentury, a 1961 novel by John Dos Passos. Dos Passos (born 1896, died 1970) is largely forgotten today. He doesn't even appear much on syllabi in undergraduate American literature courses. There are two reasons for that. One is Dos Passos' politics. Like so many others, he started out as a writer on the left, in the 30s flirting with the Communist Party and joining Hemingway in Spain to help in the fight against the Fascists. The murderous conduct of Stalinists in Spain turned him off of communism, and further world events pushed him farther right during and after the war. The more he came to despise collectivism, even to the point of briefly supporting Joe McCarthy, the less the literary world favored him. The other reason Dos Passos has disappeared is literary. (Randy Boyogoda's essay in the current issue of First Things directly relates to this point.) His fiction comes out of an era in which the novel was a great carrier of history and ideas. Continue Reading »
A nice piece by Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post, on the efforts of Lord George Weidenfeld, a British Jew, to save some Syrian Christians. Weidenfeld was himself rescued by Christians in 1938. A British Protestant group brought him to London from Vienna, thus saving him from the Holocaust. . . . . Continue Reading »
Several months ago, I disembarked a bus here in New York City, moved into a Brooklyn studio apartment, and began a summer of service here at First Things. These few weeks have been full of learning, educational conversations, and fellowship. Now, as I leave First Things and move on to the next stop . . . . Continue Reading »
The worst sinner in Christian history was Judas Iscariot. Of course he betrayed Christ and handed him over to his death. That was bad. But far worse was his internal conviction that things couldn’t get any better, that he and his situation were irredeemable.This is a great analogy for our own . . . . Continue Reading »
Revolutions can be notoriously violent. However, in a brief few months in 1989, a landslide of peaceful revolutions replaced authoritarian dictators with democratic governments, defying the brutal legacy of popular revolution. In a period of a few months, revolutions took place in seven Eastern . . . . Continue Reading »
New events include a seminar on Long Island for priests in Catholic schools and a colloquium in Italy with Cardinal Burke on Vatican II and religious freedom. Continue Reading »
An old slogan has made a comeback. While speaking about the newly-released Planned Parenthood videos, a presidential candidate has walked back from a recent defense of their practices to say something you don’t hear much anymore from the pro-choice crowd: “I have said for more than 22 years that . . . . Continue Reading »
