Our friends over at the New Criterion have put out a big anthology including the editors’ choice of essays and reviews published in its first twenty-five years. The book is Counterpoints and is edited by, as you might expect, the editors of the New Criterion , Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer. . . . . Continue Reading »
It’s big. No, I mean really BIG. And I’m not talking about the Burj Dubai , which when it reached 1,680 feet on July 21 became the tallest building on earth (and a thousand feet short of its completed height¯yes, I said a thousand ). I’m talking about that huge project on the . . . . Continue Reading »
Hawks and social conservatives in the United States find themselves in a delicate coalition that will either solidify or disperse. Can it survive Giuliani and his campaign for the Republican nomination for president? He says he’s against terrorism and abortion and would fight the former but . . . . Continue Reading »
In his June/July First Things article, " Remembering the Secular Age ," along with emails he’s been sending us over the past few months, Michael Novak has been tracking the claim that atheism is back. Or so, at least, you might imagine from all the figures in recent months, one after . . . . Continue Reading »
As a Catholic growing up in the years before Vatican II, I knew very few Protestants, much less evangelicals, even though I lived in Kentucky and southern Indiana, heartland of Protestantism, and not the Episcopalian variety. As a matter of fact, until I went to college, there were no blacks and not a single person I would have been able to identify as Jewish among my acquaintances. Such was the status and class separation of the 1950s, an outcome of the hermeticism of middle-class life of that era. Continue Reading »
This is one strange book. Strange and frequently wonderful. Weighing in at 852 pages, nobody is going to read Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts at one sitting. James is an Australian-born British literary critic and television personality now edging up . . . . Continue Reading »
Here at First Things , we’ve managed, more or less, to avoid talking about the new atheism tracts that seem to have infected the blogs and the bestseller lists. Partly because they’re so bad. And partly because they’re so old-fashioned, as though their authors had rediscovered a . . . . Continue Reading »
We play a game in my family called Blame It on W. At first, we were a little slow to understand the rules, but, living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, we pretty soon got the hang of it. To take an obvious example, even if Bush didn’t actually fly the planes into the Twin Towers (and the . . . . Continue Reading »
I Literary, Philosophical, Theological In one of my lectures last spring, I happened to mention an oddity about canons. For those who are unfamiliar with the usage, canon nowadays refers to any standardized body of texts that someone being trained in a certain discipline is required to know. In . . . . Continue Reading »
You usually know that somebody is losing the argument when he loses his cool and resorts to bluster, abuse, caricature, and the invocation of authorities who agree with him. The New York Times Book Review , for reasons that surpass charitable explanation, gave Michael Behe’s most recent book, . . . . Continue Reading »
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