Under the avalanche of commentary on the new translation of the Ordinary Form of the Mass, just approved by the Vatican, I poke my head above the erudite criticisms, to speak as a man whose entire priesthood has been in parishes… . Continue Reading »
A friend asked. I was almost taken aback by my answer: “I don’t really care.” I can’t muster a great deal of concern about the proposed Islamic center in New York near Ground Zero. Maybe I’m callous. Maybe I’m out of touch with the American people. But the more I think about it, the less I care… . Continue Reading »
Barack Obama won the presidency by making his mantra, “Yes, we can.” It seems downright un-American to say, “No, you can’t,” but it is getting harder and harder to avoid the conclusion that the American economy is the little engine that couldn’t… . Continue Reading »
If a classic, as Mark Twain claimed, is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read, then William F. Buckley, Jr.’s God and Man at Yale is the epitome of a conservative classic. Few who have read it (and they are indeed few) would dispute its importance to the founding of modern conservatism… . Continue Reading »
Pope Benedict XVI’s pastoral visit to Great Britain next month will unfold along a pilgrim’s path metaphorically strewn with landmines. Headline-grabbing new atheists like Richard Dawkins, along with their allies in the international plaintiff’s bar, may try to have the pontiff arrested as an enabler of child abuse… . Continue Reading »
Assigned the task of silencing debate on the Park51 project, the press and the center-left punditry have decided to haul out the overused tar-brush of racism, by which they mean to depict 65 percent of all Americans”Americans who’ve lived quite peaceably with our Muslim population, with no mass lashing-out against women of cover, no desecration of mosques, no random acts of violence in the years following the attacks of 9/11”as “bigots,” “xenophobes,” and “Islamophobes.” … Continue Reading »
“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth,” Christ declares in the Gospel of Matthew. “I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.” The Bible is full of hard sayings like this”too many, too hard, to be entirely exegeted away … Continue Reading »
I was fairly close to both Angela and Jacob throughout our teens; at least, we were all part of the same circle. I briefly entertained the hope of something closer between Angela and myself, and for a few weeks she was more or less my girlfriend; but Jacob “swept her off her feet,” and they were at one school and I at another, so I had no chance. It made no difference to our friendship, though… . Continue Reading »
“From existentialism to deconstruction,” writes Pascal Bruckner in his broadside, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, “all modern thought can be reduced to a mechanical denunciation of the West, emphasizing the latter’s hypocrisy, violence, and abomination.” I wouldn’t say that John Rawls or Jürgen Habermas or Benedict XVI fit that description… . Continue Reading »
There’s nothing like being ejected from the bosom of family, parish, and church college into the orbit of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus to give a young Lutheran a run for her money. During my tenure at First Things he paid me the compliment of trying to make a Catholic out of me. I thanked him by discovering I had a call to the ordained ministry and heading for seminary. It was a memorable fifteen months… . Continue Reading »
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