Not with the myth and phosphorus of metaphor. Notwith lines of force looped in true-love knots.Not by dumping the urn and reading the ashes. Notthrough sonic wantonness, but not through disciplined listening, either. Notwith numbers always setting words at naughtnor letter-cluttered words whose O is . . . . Continue Reading »
For the last two years, a little-watched congressional investigation has been exploring the nature of religious freedom and, specifically, whether the United States is an effective steward of that cause when it funds ideologically charged foreign aid projects overseas. After obtaining information . . . . Continue Reading »
I noticed it last Christmas: It’s the women who really hate Ebenezer Scrooge. In the opening scene of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the main victims of Scrooge’s scorn are his nephew Fred and his clerk, Bob Cratchit. Fred enters Scrooge’s office with a “God save you!,” . . . . Continue Reading »
For the last few decades, James Davison Hunter has eloquently chronicled the fracturing of America. When his Culture Wars appeared in 1991, it might have been possible to dismiss as Chicken Little-ism his thesis that America was being riven by two incommensurable worldviews. No more. And . . . . Continue Reading »
I appreciated Matthew Burdette’s insights into “Progressive Supersessionism” (October 2024), drawing out continuities between today’s anti-theological progressive claim to supersede traditional religion and culture and that movement’s forebear, a theological liberal Protestant claim that . . . . Continue Reading »
Climate change poses risks to people throughout the world. Christians have a moral duty to mitigate those risks, to the extent possible. The Catholic tradition of social teaching provides some valuable terms for framing that duty. Yet this same tradition suffers from gaps, especially regarding the . . . . Continue Reading »
The almost complete lack of reflection on the normalization of assisted reproductive technologies for producing children is a telling sign of the unseriousness of our age. The transformation of our typical thoughtlessness into an aggressive boosterism on behalf of these technologies is a more . . . . Continue Reading »
Martin Heidegger is notorious for his embrace of Nazism in the 1930s. Yet he was a luminous commentator on the religious substance of modern poetry. Perhaps because of his own misbegotten metaphysical aspirations, Heidegger could feel and understand the anguish of those who sought but could not . . . . Continue Reading »
I’m a great lover of the English language, but I must confess that, lately, I’ve come to dread three words in particular. You hear them everywhere—at dinner, at the office coffee corner, in line to pick up the children from school. There’s always someone walking about half-dazed and . . . . Continue Reading »
Those early weeks, you could have been anyone, Too young for fingerprints, much less a name,And years away from our first catch-and-toss— A little flesh and blood, no brain, no bone, No one to blame.You did not count, you were not even close. We do . . . . Continue Reading »
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