On the Square Today

John Daniel Davidson asks, “Has American Fiction Lost Sight of God?”

In an article in the New York Times Book Review last month, Paul Elie ponders why Christian belief figures, “as something between a dead language and a hangover,” in current fiction. He observes that the literary heirs of Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy are strangely absent from the present class of MFA-credentialed young novelists now in vogue. And while Elie is right that it is a strange development, he misdiagnoses the reasons why.

Also today, George Weigel on forty years after Roe v. Wade :

Forty years ago, on Jan. 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down  Roe v. Wade , one of the two worst decisions in its history. The court’s first mega-error, the 1857 decision in  Dred Scott v. Sandford , declared an entire class of human beings beyond the protection of the laws;  Roe v. Wade  declared another class of human beings, the unborn, beyond legal protection.