Uncategorized
Sacrilege or Exaltation
The Hebrew word ma’al is a key term in Chronicles. It means “act of unfaithfulness” or “sacrilege,”…
Cowboys, Robots, and Private Eyes
On this episode of the First Things Podcast: 1:10 Senior editor Mark Bauerlein explains how classic hardboiled…
What We’ve Been Reading—11.4.16
Elliot Milco: I’ve spent much of my free time over the past two weeks watching the AMC…
Defending Conscience Rights at Hacksaw Ridge and in the HHS Cases
Today, American moviegoers will flock to theatres to view Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge. In vivid detail, the…
Finding Stable Ground
In the midst of scandals, intra-ecclesial ideological battles, and a widespread attitude of indifference—if not scorn—toward religion…
American Prestige in Freefall
Writing in The Australian, Paul Kelly views the state of American politics from Down Under. He gets…
Celebrating the Reformation
In his elegant study of Reformation commemorations (Remembering the Reformation), Thomas Albert Howard notes that the first…
Reformation of Theological Writing
The Reformation was highly improbably, writes Andrew Pettegree in his lively, vivid Brand Luther: “that a monk…
Childhood, Guardian-Style
The Guardian, that British bastion not merely of the bien pensants but of the très bien pensants,…
Pain and Negation
In her The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry describes the “aversiveness” of our experience of pain. By…
Aging and the Unmaking of the World
Age obliterates and collapses our world, writes Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain (32-3): “the body…
Divine Sentience
In several places in Scripture, idols are characterized by their sensory deprivation (Psalms 115; 135). They have…
Peripheral Modernity
Tracing the pre-history of European modernity that started with the Cartesian cogito, Enrique Dussel (Underside of Modernity,…
Among the Mournful Historians
There were many Dick Turpins, writes James Sharpe in his study of the mythical English highwayman. There…
Improvization
Bruce Ellis Benson (Improvisation of Musical Dialogue) doesn’t think that “the binary schema of ‘composing’ and ‘performing,’…
