Even if you go around with one or several fingers stuffed into each ear, you will not be able to exclude the words “Hannah Montana” from your field of consciousness, especially now that the number one movie in the United States bears that name. No American citizen is permitted to be . . . . Continue Reading »
Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith by daniel j. cohen johns hopkins university press, 256 pages, $50 It is tempting to treat mathematics as though it existed in a socio-historical vacuum, unaffected by what happens to people and societies. Though, like any other . . . . Continue Reading »
We live in a time of both danger and opportunity for the Catholic Church in the United States. The danger is that large numbers of Catholics will, as a result of clergy sex scandals and the large, highly publicized cash awards and settlements following in their train, lose confidence in the . . . . Continue Reading »
The publishing world, it seems, is just as prone to the fickleness of trends and fashions as is, well, the fashion industry. A few years ago, a whole spate of books came out on Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, most of them flogging (surely not by coincidence) the same dead horse of papal perfidy. . . . . Continue Reading »
I don’t have the computer skills, let alone the patience, to set up my own blogsite. So I am especially grateful to the editors of First Things for their ecumenical hospitality in opening their cyber-pages to voices other than their own during this month of August. In my first foray into this . . . . Continue Reading »
An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in RomaniaBy Marta Petreu Ivan R. Dee. 332 pages, $30It is an unenviable task for a biographer to dig up the dirt in someone’s life, and it is worth the effort only if the achievements of the person whose biography he has embarked on . . . . Continue Reading »
Of Time and the River I love the way the river rollicks here, and how it sluices headlong down the hill to hurtle through these spruces in a thrill of spray. Up-slope, beneath the glacier’s sheer façade, this melt of snow that fell the year the earth was made emerges as a rill; then, far . . . . Continue Reading »
Go back in your mind’s eye to the fall of 1940, the fateful period that Winston Churchill called Britain’s “finest hour.” Having subdued the Low Countries and France, Adolf Hitler now turned his attention to the last remaining democratic power in Europe. Hermann Göring convinced Hitler . . . . Continue Reading »
It is a truth seldom acknowledged that the most delightful art is also the most didactic. Jane Austen comes readily to mind, as does the best of children’s literature. Supposed counterexamples only prove the rule. Oscar Wilde is celebrated for his dictum that “bad art is always sincere,” but . . . . Continue Reading »
Murderous cruise missiles crash into factories, office buildings, farm houses, all just across the border in Serbia, while on the other side of the frontier twelve million Hungarians stare apprehensively into their television sets thinking, “There but for the grace of God goes Hungary.” Yet, . . . . Continue Reading »
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