R. R. Reno

After I left the Episcopal Church to enter the Catholic Church a half a dozen years ago, a good and wise friend told me to avoid taking pot shots from afar. Sage advice. But a video by Gene Robinson this is part of the It Gets Better campaign has a line that strikes me as telling, and I can’t . . . . Continue Reading »

Past ages have accepted the preeminent power of faith, and argued over what to believe, not over whether to believe. We tend to wonder whether the passion of belief isn’t a danger, perhaps the danger to be overcome. A recent book by Mark Johnston, Saving God: Religion after Idolatry, revises Christianity to make it is less dangerous… . Continue Reading »

Good for Todd Hartch. The professor of history at Eastern Kentucky University decided to go public, writing a letter opposing the decision by the university president to extend benefits to domestic partners akin to those available to married couples. On Public Discourse, he gives an account of his . . . . Continue Reading »

Well, I’m not surprised. As Joe mentioned last week , the death salesman who created the exhibitions of human bodies is now putting up his specially prepared cadavers up for sale . Gunther von Hagens came up with techniques for extracting fluids and fatty flesh from dead bodies that are . . . . Continue Reading »

OK, OK, I overstated my case with words like “irrefutable” when I commented on Richard Stith’s very interesting insights into the opportunity provided by the federalization of health insurance policy in America. Obviously, the question of the wisdom of federalizing health . . . . Continue Reading »

Today, Richard Stith has an i mportant short article on the front page of our website. He points out that, except for government programs for the poor, our old forms of health insurance, ones that were based more clearly on free market principles, had fairly expansive coverage of elective . . . . Continue Reading »

“Hey, what are you doing here?” a friend asked when I showed up on Tuesday night to watch the election coverage. “Didn’t you write last Thursday, pronouncing politics unimportant?” Not exactly, I said. Politics is important. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines human beings as political animals… . Continue Reading »

Decades ago I spent a month or two of a summer in Boston. I still remember the inward cringe when I first traversed the sterile brick plaza at Government Center. It features one of those busy concrete buildings with jutting, thrusting, and vaguely functional slabs that vaguely reminds you of a . . . . Continue Reading »

It’s not easy to answer, the simple question of where to study theology. Interests, backgrounds, convictions, and levels of academic preparation combine in complicated ways when choosing a graduate program in theology. Still, certain qualities always matter: intellectual climate, commitment to . . . . Continue Reading »

Since the middle ages and the rise of the universities as distinct institution, the academic life has been a ripe target for satire. I can’t say this video is as artful as send up of scholastic logic and disputation in The Battle of the Seven Arts by Henri d’Andeli, but has some funny . . . . Continue Reading »