The most consequential cultural and political event in American history in the past half century was the Roe v. Wade decision of January 22, 1973. An argument can be made that it is rivaled by September 11, but that fateful day did not result in the deep realignment of religious, cultural, and . . . . Continue Reading »
Living a chaste life on a college campus is difficult. Defending your commitments to chastity, whether to your friends in the dorm room or to your professors in the classroom, is even more difficult. If you haven’t been a university student for a while, think back to what the sexual climate on . . . . Continue Reading »
Perhaps it is wrong for me to comment about a movie I have no intention of seeing: But if this review of the new semi-documentary Zoo is accurate, it apparently has a sympathetic take on “the last taboo,” meaning bestiality. (“Zoos” in this context don’t refer to animal . . . . Continue Reading »
The publishing world, it seems, is just as prone to the fickleness of trends and fashions as is, well, the fashion industry. A few years ago, a whole spate of books came out on Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, most of them flogging (surely not by coincidence) the same dead horse of papal perfidy. . . . . Continue Reading »
The German historian of manners Norbert Elias begins his book The Civilizing Process by asking how the “modes of behaviour considered typical of people who are civilized in a Western way” came about. Through a survey of etiquette books and other documents dealing with topics like table . . . . Continue Reading »
Robert Southwell is perhaps the most famous of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, a young sixteenth-century Jesuit who was hanged, drawn, and quartered for spending more than forty days on English soil as a Catholic priest. He wrote the poetry for which he is still studied and celebrated while . . . . Continue Reading »
It’s weeks into 2007 already, and I don’t really know what I’m going to read this year.Ronald Knox, maybe. He died fifty years ago, on August 24, 1957, and the coming months should see their share of anniversary revivals of his writing. I’ve never quite known what to make of . . . . Continue Reading »
In my tenure as a junior fellow here at First Things , I’ve done a few things that have made my editors and co-workers scratch their heads. But my biggest argument, at present, is with our editor Joseph Bottum, who suggested last week that Duke University is a "cruise ship for pampered . . . . Continue Reading »
I wrote in this space last week about how Bishop Stanislaw Wielgus, on the eve of his installation as metropolitan-archbishop of Warsaw, admitted that he had collaborated with the security services of the former communist government of Poland and then resigned. I was harshly critical of the Holy . . . . Continue Reading »
As an American, far away, with a deep love for Poland, my deepest sorrow is felt for all the citizens of Poland, for the Polish church, and even for the now-resigned archbishop and his family.There were so many heroic acts by so many people in Poland and its neighboring countries during the Soviet . . . . Continue Reading »
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