March 2011
America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life
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Letters—March 2011
Conservative Liberalism or Liberal Conservatism? I am grateful to James Kalb for his thoughtful and respectful engagement…
RJN and First Things
This issue marks the beginning of First Things ’ twenty-second year of publication, and every new publishing…
Reading the Bible with the Reformers
For the reformers the Bible was a treasure trove of divine wisdom to be heard, read, marked,…
Thomas Merton and Confucianism
I’m not sure when I first met Tom Merton. It was probably in the middle of my…
Newman’s Ideal University
Imagine you’ve just read Plato’s Republic and then—conscientious citizen that you’ve now become—you enter a Chicago voting…
Whig History at Eighty
It is odd that in the many recent discussions about what it might mean to pursue a…
Blurring Sexual Boundaries
The definition of gender-related discrimination and of “hate crimes” is becoming ever more imaginative on both sides…
The Dialectic and the Double Helix
While a graduate student in history in the 1990s, I once asked a German friend what she…
Real Death, Real Dignity
He was a dignified man suffering all the embarrassing ways a hospice deals with the body’s failure…
Paradoxical Portraits
Blessed and Beautiful: Picturing the Saints by Robert Kiely Yale, 288 pages, $40 n What I discovered,”…
Can We Know What We Know?
Mathematics and Religion: Our Languages of Sign and Symbol by Javier Leach Templeton, 188 pages, $19.95 n…
The Business of Medicine
White Coat, Black Hat:Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine by carl elliott beacon, 213 pages, $21.95…
Giving Caesar His Due
Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom by peter leithart ivp academic,…
Whooshing Through Life
All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by hubert dreyfus…
Late Night
Late orange light reflected from the lake / Leaps up into the mountain’s shade, / And suddenly…
At Stake
Brave luminaries, Jan Hus and William Tyndale, / Were made to glow like scrolling leaves on Kindle...
Dear Juan de la Cruz
I gave my class your “dark night” poem to read, / not telling them who wrote it.…
Outings
If you don’t have it in your own backyard, / go find it somewhere else. Outings are…
Govett’s Leap
Looking across to Bridal Veil Falls, / You feel your weight’s / Free will against the fence...
Drought Breaker
Two years of drought seem broken by a deluge / that would be the wrath of God…
Manna
Open your mouth / To feed that flesh / Your teeth have bled...
With Timbrels and Dance
After Mass at St. Patrick’s Church in Washington, Monsignor Salvatore A. Criscuolo and Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl…
