Whenever there is a contest between etiquette and acknowledged virtues, etiquette loses. Hardly anyone would dispute the proposition that morals are more important than mere manners, and the assertion that etiquette can and should be jettisoned for a higher good is commonly made and accepted in . . . . Continue Reading »
What is it that Christians ought to say and do about the issue of sexual relations between single people? This question currently presses most painfully upon the life of the churches. The real issue is not whether the churches ought to adopt a new sexual ethic, but whether the new sexual ethic they . . . . Continue Reading »
To grow up in Canada is to inherit a privileged position for understanding modernity—sufficiently distant from that hurtling spaceship of “the republic to our south,” while retaining (perhaps from connections to nature, to the history of France, and to Catholicism) a sharp, intuitive sense . . . . Continue Reading »
The greatest challenge the biographer faces is to grasp and reveal the inner life of his subject. His task is simplified when he chooses a subject visibly engaged in great public events of his time—wars, politics, social reform, for example. If the biographer is good at what he does, he will . . . . Continue Reading »
In response to many inquiries, we are pleased to report that Father Neuhaus continues to recover very satisfactorily from early January’s emergency surgery for colon cancer. As this issue goes to press, the usual battery of tests, plus exploration during surgery for the reversal of a temporary . . . . Continue Reading »
Gays on Parade? In his article “Homosexuality in Uniform: Is It Time?” (February), Eugene T. Gomulka would have been better off arguing his point from a pure theological/moral basis instead of relying on the same old myths concerning gay men and women that society is slowly rejecting as . . . . Continue Reading »
I know a man who spends four or five weeks of every year in the army. He is a young man, but not all that young—fortysomething—and has a wife and four small children. He lives in Jerusalem. His annual five-week tour of service in the Israel Defense Force is called in Hebrew by a term . . . . Continue Reading »
Let me re-introduce you to Mr. Harold Skimpole. Skimpole lives in the pages of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House; he made his first appearance 140 years ago, yet those who are acquainted with the principal hierophants of New Age spirituality may receive more than a slight shock of recognition: He . . . . Continue Reading »
The mountainside failed. But when we saw that deep spot the dead sun came back heavy as an engine and my pick rattled like a gun. The ice unravelled; we peeled it from his toothy face, glittering brown, a woody rubber round his mind, the Bronze Age still stuck to . . . . Continue Reading »
From a distance it looked like ordinary wood, a snuff-colored twig one might rake for burning. Surfaced by the bulldozer from a sarcophagus of clay, it could have been the brittle finger-bone of a prophet, or a phalange of an extinct ape from another age. Black . . . . Continue Reading »
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