Summertime on Mama Bell’s back stoop,it always started with someone saying, “Your mama don’t wear no drawers”—school kids playing the dozens— and we’d fall over laughing, pretending to look up some lady’s skirt, until a boy would say, “Well, your . . . . Continue Reading »
Right On about Gulf War George Weigel’s “The Churches & War in the Gulf” (March) was splendid. It is quite simply the best exposition of the subject I have yet seen. My congratulations. Charles Krauthammer Washington, D.C. Hook in Heaven? I very much appreciated Michael Novak’s beautiful . . . . Continue Reading »
The Edges of Science: Crossing the Boundary from Physics to Metaphysics by Richard Morris Prentice Hall, 244 pages, $18.95 What was happening, if anything, before there was time? And what does “before” mean in that sentence? Are physicists and cosmologists on the edge of . . . . Continue Reading »
The interfaith dialogue between Christians and Jews has become such a familiar feature of contemporary religious life that it is hard to imagine a time when it was virtually unheard of. Yet this dialogue has existed in self-conscious form only since the end of World War II. Jewish Perspectives . . . . Continue Reading »
On the morning of March 23, 1982, a group of young Guatemalan army officers brought a retired army general, Efrain Rios Montt, to power in a coup d’etat. Rios Montt, an evangelical Protestant and member of the Word Church, was president of a Catholic country in Catholic Latin America. The . . . . Continue Reading »
Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry by Alasdair MacIntyre University of Notre Dame Press, 241 pages, $24.95 Over the course of the last five years or so the quality of philosophical inquiry into both ethical and religious matters has increased significantly. Martha Nussbaum’s The . . . . Continue Reading »
As every schoolchild knows, Christopher Columbus, a Genoese navigator, discovered America in 1492. Or perhaps it would be better to say that every schoolchild used to think these were the facts about the European arrival in these lands. For several years now, a chorus of voices (growing larger and . . . . Continue Reading »
January 30, 1991 Dear Richard, Your column in the Wall Street Journal (January 23, 1991), “Just War and This War,” came just in time for me. I have been thinking hard, as you can imagine, about what a pacifist does in war. The article—well done as usual—has provoked me to . . . . Continue Reading »
If the Vanderbilt transition from Methodist to neuter exhibits a typical pattern of academic secularization, what we will find at the root of these events is a sponsoring church that is nonchalant about its burden: one that wishes to be the patron of a college or university without being its . . . . Continue Reading »
Half a mile, not more, separates 50th Street and Park Avenue in central Manhattan from the northwest corner of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue. But the two points mark the antipodes of New York City’s axis of religious dedication: to timelessness at one pole, to change at the other. On the 50th . . . . Continue Reading »