December 1997
1997 December Letters
The San Francisco Solution? Thank you for publishing Archbishop William J. Levada’s “The San Francisco Solution”(August/September), on…
A More Real World
The Public Square A More Real World The day Mother Teresa died, an editor at USA Today…
Memoirs of a Catholic Boyhood
The muddy Illinois River ranks among the least distinguished of the Mississippi’s tributaries, a brown expanse of…
Law and the Christian Story
Conservative Christians have in recent years devoted a good deal of energy and attention to criticizing lawyers…
Christ and Creation’s Longing
In 1971, I published In Defense of People, the first book-length critique of “the ecology movement” that…
Augustine’s World and Ours
One of the most striking differences between constitutional democracies and tyrannies in our time pertains to certain…
Russia Repents?
For anyone watching events in Russia, the confrontation between “reformers,” led by Boris Yeltsin, and their opponents,…
America’s Messiah
For musicians, Christmas means Messiah. This is not a comment upon musicians’ religiosity, but rather upon their…
The Problem with Salad Bowl Religion
I wonder what my rebbe ancestors would think of me,” writes a young Unitarian Universalist minister in…
Of Bible Codes and Idols
Just to set the phrase “Torah Code” here evenly spaced at ten characters, I consumed a lot…
Nice People and the Rest of Us
Politics in the West has in recent years lost much of its ideological edge. The collapse of…
Untangling Evolution
There’s no denying that historically evolution has been harmful to religious faith. It has contributed to undermining…
In His Steps
The Moral Vision of the New Testament by Richard B. Hays. HarperSanFrancisco, 508 pages, $25. This book…
Ambivalent Obsession
The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism by Regina M. Schwartz. University of Chicago Press,…
Briefly Noted 141
Near Unto God by Abraham Kuyper; adapted by James C. Schaap Eerdmans, 235 pages, $14 paper Recent…
None Dare Call It Apostasy
The Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism by Michael W. Cuneo.Oxford University…
Challenging the Modern
Ernest L. Fortin: Collected Essays edited by J. Brian Benestad. Three volumes. Rowman; Littlefield.Vol. I, 349 pages, Vol.…
Not a Ghost of a Chance
Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot by Antonia Fraser. Doubleday, 347 pages, $27.95. The…
Nativity
if I lived in Seattle at Christmastime I’d have committed suicide a long time ago it’s bad…
Diaspora
On the giant’s hill, in the child’s eye, the old house stands hermaphrodite, the mother-father rolled in…
If God Is That Sublime Moment
If God is that sublime moment in the story when Jesus said, “And his father seeing him…