R. R. Reno

What’s next?  An animal rights suicide bomber at the Bronx Zoo? Our tendency is to try to read some larger meaning into the bizarre story of James Lee, the paradoxically anti-human humanist—saving us from ourselves by making sure there aren’t any more selves—who held . . . . Continue Reading »

Labor Day is upon us, the long weekend that puts an exclamation point on summer’s end. I’m planning, if that’s the right word, to do nothing in particular. Rest, however, is never simple and often ambiguous. We sometimes speak of those who have died as finally at rest, or as resting in peace. It’s not a negative image, but then again it’s not positive either… Continue Reading »

Alex Knepper is an undergraduate at American University, and he’s not gonna take it any more. In a forcefully written denunciation of what he diagnoses as a mindless anti-conservatism at the root of the Leftist mentality, ” The roots of the left’s love affair with Islam ,” . . . . Continue Reading »

Unfortunately, the United States government and the development agencies it funds seem determined to export our culture of contraception. As a story in the Philippine Daily Inquirer reports , American agencies have been intimately involved in the design of a big push to “normalize” . . . . Continue Reading »

I’ve long enjoyed reading Camille Paglia, surely one of the most interesting voices in academia, full of piss and vinegar, and capable of original thought. I remember reading her insightful and very funny essay, “The Joy of Presbyterian Sex,” in the 1980s and marking her down as . . . . Continue Reading »

A number of friends have pushed and probed, wondering if I’m not being overly simplistic when I say that Islam is largely irrelevant to the future of America. First of all, I am being overly simplistic. Islam and America—these are extraordinarily complex cultural realities. When I wrote . . . . Continue Reading »

As readers of my thoughts on Islam and American politics may have suspected, I’ve been beating my head against the wall lately, trying to understand why American conservatism allows itself to be ideologically outmaneuvered by liberalism, and this even as conservatism wins elections. But . . . . Continue Reading »

Today I weighed in on the Ground Zero mosque controversy , making a case that it’s not a big deal. A major premise of my argument is that Islam is not all that much of a factor in America. It’s something many of us fail to see, because we misread the behavior of the liberal . . . . Continue Reading »

A friend asked. I was almost taken aback by my answer: “I don’t really care.” I can’t muster a great deal of concern about the proposed Islamic center in New York near Ground Zero. Maybe I’m callous. Maybe I’m out of touch with the American people. But the more I think about it, the less I care… . Continue Reading »

The National Conference of Catholic Bishops has released the Labor Day Statement by Bishop William F. Murphy, the Chairman of the Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development. No breaking news, just some well-meaning sentiments and reasonably sound observations. For example, Bishop Murphy . . . . Continue Reading »