In recent decades, the familiar list of seven deadly sins drawn up by the Church has become attractive to writers who wish to combine personal glimpses with sociological and moral insight; I think Henry Fairlie of The New Republic was the first modern journalist to try his hand at the genre. Why this rubric has become fashionable is a question in itself. Seven Deadly Sins: A Very Partial List is Aviad Kleinberg’s current entry… . Continue Reading »
A few days ago Inside Catholic re-ran a piece of mine from 2007, wherein I related personal experiences with “old” and “new” Catholic liturgy. It was a gentle essay that concluded in the hope that Catholics could find a way to bring the best parts of past and present liturgies together and weave them into a marvelous whole cloth upon which we might all stand “as we wait in joyful hope, for the coming of the Lord.” … Continue Reading »
Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech can be read as a concise restatement of Reinhold Niebuhr’s political ethics as a guide to U.S. foreign policy for the twenty-first century. The major themes in Niebuhr’s thinking found powerful resonance in the speech, in which an American president in a new century reasserted, as the doctrinal basis of his foreign policy, the cherished political theology of America’s two major parties for most of the past century… . Continue Reading »
In his December 10, 2009, Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, President Barack Obama offered a vigorous defense of the just war tradition in response to problems of evil and injustice in the world. More than this, however, he offered a moral vision that closely followed, without any direct reference, the ideas of perhaps the most influential American theologian of the twentieth century… . Continue Reading »
The past year has not been abundant with fortune for the world or our nation”which made it precisely a time when one ached for commentary from Richard John Neuhaus. We waited, by an instinct that thought he would reply quickly. But there was an uncharacteristic silence.… . Continue Reading »
An Anniversary
01.08.2010
Robert Louis Wilken
In 1961, Richard John Neuhaus was installed as pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Brooklyn. Several days later he wrote me. “Installed Misericordias Domini”much pomp, ceremony, and incense.” It was the last word I heard from him for almost six months… . Continue Reading »
In 1961, Richard John Neuhaus was installed as pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Brooklyn. Several days later he wrote me. “Installed Misericordias Domini”much pomp, ceremony, and incense.” It was the last word I heard from him for almost six months. It was as though he had been swallowed up by the city and his new congregation. For Fr. Richard as well as for the people of St. John’s the day of installation was a glorious occasion… . Continue Reading »
Start your year off right with First Things. Yes, subscribe now to receive it at home; that way, you’ll receive every issue without delay, hot off the presses. Issues such as the January 2010 issue”full of articles both weighty and light-hearted… . Continue Reading »
Michael Slater’s new biography, Charles Dickens, is subtitled A Life Defined by Writing. It’s a bit clumsy, perhaps, but certainly apt. With The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens became, at 24, an international star. Suddenly he was lauded and adored and in constant demand… . Continue Reading »
It was in 1904, at Christmastime, that American impresario Charles Frohman first staged James M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan: or, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up at London’s Duke of York’s Theatre. Perhaps the astute Jewish producer had noticed, as David Goldman put it in his December 2006 essay “Sympathy for Scrooge,” that “the Christmas season [is] a moment when the entire Gentile world is given over to a child’s view of things.” … . Continue Reading »
What ought to be a time of meditative joy and happy celebration has become a time for combat. December, say scores of the faithful, is a time for war—the Christmas wars. Happy holidays is denounced as a godless substitute for Merry Christmas. The Christmas wars are now as much a part of the season as mistletoe and reindeer…
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