When Cyclone Nargis hit Burma a month ago, killing as many as a hundred thousand people, the French foreign minister invoked the “responsibility to protect” as a way to override the Burmese government’s intransigence and thus deliver live-saving aid. For weeks, aid trickled in as . . . . Continue Reading »
The first word that comes to mind on visiting Belfast in 2008 is change. Continue Reading »
Look, when we think about ending an early human life, this is something that is really bad for the embryo or early fetus that dies, it’s losing out tremendously—I agree with that as I already said. And then you said that it’s one of the things that we should care about. And, um, I think . . . . Continue Reading »
How am I indebted to him? Let me count the ways. No, it would take too long. Suffice it to say that he received me into full communion; he ordained me a priest; he was a friend who never said no when he could say yes. And he was a great Cardinal Archbishop of New York. John Paul II called him . . . . Continue Reading »
Late one night, a young scholar at Cambridge named Michael Ward reads “The Planets,” a minor poem by C.S. Lewis. In it he encounters a curious phrase about the influence of Jupiter: winter passed / And guilt forgiv’n. This, he notices, is exactly what happens in one of Lewis’s most . . . . Continue Reading »
When Samuel Alito replaced Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court in 2006, observers predicted that Anthony Kennedy would quickly become the key figure in the nation’s jurisprudence. And recent terms have confirmed those predictions: Across a wide range of controversial constitutional issues, . . . . Continue Reading »
Law as a Means to an End: Threat to the Rule of Law by brian z. tamanaha cambridge university press, 268 pages, $31.99 It is a commonplace in American legal culture that law is a means to an end, that laws serve such social purposes as protecting individuals against physical harm, promoting . . . . Continue Reading »
After the Baby Boomers:How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion by robert wuthnow princeton university press, 312 pages, $29.95 Baby boomers are becoming old news and dated scholarship. For nearly a half century after the Second World War, the cohort of babies . . . . Continue Reading »
Religion and Politics: “The Great Separation” I approached Mark Lilla’s new book with considerable interest and with the expectation of encountering a fresh way of thinking about perennial problems. The book is The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (Knopf). It is true . . . . Continue Reading »
Paradiso by dante alighieri translated by robert and jean hollander doubleday, 944 pages, $40 With the publication of Paradiso, Robert and Jean Hollander have completed their landmark translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, begun with the Inferno in 2000 and followed by Purgatorio in 2003. Reading . . . . Continue Reading »
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