In his posting on First Things earlier today, Ross Douthat writes "justice is rarely served by folly"¯a phrase that gives nice shape to an appealing notion: Israel’s decision to attack Hezbollah, like the U.S. decision to invade Iraq, was morally justifiable, but these wars have . . . . Continue Reading »
For years, critics of the idea of same-sex “marriage” have made the point that accepting the proposition that two persons of the same sex can marry each other entails abandoning any principled basis for understanding marriage as the union of two and only two persons. So far as I am . . . . Continue Reading »
Responding to my doubts about the prudence of recent war making (the United States in Iraq, Israel in Lebanon), Jody points out ¯ quite rightly¯that nobody can know to a precise degree of certainty whether a war will be successful before it is waged, and that blunders in the course of a . . . . Continue Reading »
It strikes me, Ross, that you’re digging yourself into terminological difficulties here , primarily because you’re trying to make the justice of the war match the chronology of your thinking about the war. A person might have thought Israel’s attack on Hezbollah was just when it . . . . Continue Reading »
I appreciate Ross’ comments about war , as well as Robert’s , that love of enemies, and being your brother’s keeper, means setting limits, and that those limits have to, at some point or another, be backed with force. I think that’s the part of the argument that people . . . . Continue Reading »
In the healthily rambunctious spirit of Michael Novak’s posting yesterday (I refer to his "Beer Blessing" in ecclesiastically resplendent Latin), I was reminded of Belloc’s immortal lines in praise of the place of ale in Western civilization. I apologize in advance for the . . . . Continue Reading »
People who call themselves atheists often say rather strange things about people with faith¯things like, "Well, if you need the comfort, go on and believe." An odd notion, that there is "comfort" in faith. Serious believers often don’t find it so. Actually, it has . . . . Continue Reading »
After the tremendous response to Rome Diary , Richard John Neuhaus’ daily reports from Italy on the papal funeral and election in the spring of 2005, we kicked around the idea, here at the magazine, of continuing to post regular items on the First Things website. Blogging, you might . . . . Continue Reading »
Tristram Shandy "was postmodern before there was a modern to be post about," says actor Steve Coogan to an implied movie audience. Coogan plays the eponymous hero (not to mention the hero’s own father) in Michael Winterbottom’s film version of the mid-eighteenth-century comic . . . . Continue Reading »
I started reading it when it came out a couple of years ago, and I would like to say it is the kind of book you can’t put down but, distracted by something or the other, I did put it aside until the trip to Poland a couple of weeks ago. Gilead , like the town by that name, is fictional, or so . . . . Continue Reading »
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