Catholic churches are hard on the hard of hearing. Part of the problem is architectural. Catholic churches are built for the eye, not the ear. Interior spaciousness is meant to elevate your vision, just as the priest elevates the host. The church is a sacred space that opens onto the heavens. Churches that aim toward the light, however, often end up burying the human voice. There is plenty of room for incense to waft but also for voices to disperse. Nevertheless, size alone isn’t the problem … Continue Reading»
My family had been in Brooklyn (or, as I will ever call it, God’s country) for over a century, refugees from the Lower East Side and a Jacob Riis–style life in early-twentieth-century New York. My father didn’t speak much about his youth in Bensonhurst, but what he did say was enough to fill . . . . Continue Reading »
This is the end—for me, the beginning of life. —Dietrich Bonhoeffer (from his last recorded words) Words to a prison friend, spoken in haste. Gestapo men had come to transfer him, Low Sunday, sixty-seven years ago Today. The next morning, he’d be hanged with others. No question who . . . . Continue Reading »
Many of those here only know a verse of any given carol, sometimes less— sometimes an isolated phrase or terse refrain like “Gloria.” Most still confess the apostolic faith, though as naïve in its theology as those days when as children they would sing on Christmas Eve in church. Now . . . . Continue Reading »
The social contract in America is coming undone, and it will be revised and rewritten in the coming years. That’s to be expected. In the city of man, no governing consensus or established regime lasts forever. As James Piereson points out in the June issue of the New Criterion , although . . . . Continue Reading »
Some people can change their sexual orientation with the help of therapy. So said Robert Spitzer—“considered by some to be the father of modern psychiatry,” in the New York Times’ description—in his (in)famous 2003 study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, appropriately . . . . Continue Reading »
On June 19, 2012, the Reverend Fred Luter was elected as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination. In many respects, his election was unremarkable: The convention was held in his hometown of New Orleans, where he is the pastor of the largest Baptist . . . . Continue Reading »
The Affordable Care Act mandates that employers offer and individuals buy insurance that provides free contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs, and sterilization. It seems we have passed from a society that allows legal access to these drugs and services to one that insists that . . . . Continue Reading »
Thirteen theses in defense of so-called heteronormativity and other supposed heresies, from a Christian and specifically Catholic perspective, for the purpose of public . . . . Continue Reading »
Students in my constitutional law course are usually surprised, and often skeptical, when I propose that the most important case they will study is not about abortion rights, the death penalty, or the status of Guantanamo Bay, and does not concern Ten Commandments monuments, Christmas displays, or . . . . Continue Reading »
