A former colleague of mine in Congress recently told me that he now describes himself as a nondenominational Protestant rather than an evangelical. His reason? He has met too many evangelicals who view their faith as serving their politics. He believes this subordination is not only . . . . Continue Reading »
Cardinal Zen was my guest in Kingston in 2013 because he knows the Church needs more men like St. John Fisher. Henry kept Cardinal John Fisher in the Tower of London; now the Chinese regime threatens Cardinal Zen with prison. Continue Reading »
Inside the Mind of Thomas More: The Witness of His Writings by louis w. karlin and david r. oakley scepter, 130 pages, $11.95 This little volume by Louis Karlin and David Oakley uses Thomas More’s own writings to demonstrate the nature of his witness to the truth. The authors gently . . . . Continue Reading »
David Oakley and senior editor Mark Bauerlein discuss Oakley’s book Inside the Mind of Thomas More: The Witness of His Writings. Continue Reading »
When exactly did utopia become less interesting than dystopia? The vision of a grim and gray future is just as much a fantasy as that of a perfectly ordered society, but somehow it is the grim one that now captures our attention. The descriptions of a glistening City of the Sun or a New Atlantis . . . . Continue Reading »
A Man for All Seasons is a magnificent religious film—perhaps the best ever—despite its author’s stated intentions. Continue Reading »
Wolf Hall, the BBC adaptation of Hillary Mantel’s novel about early Tudor England, began airing on PBS’s “Masterpiece Theater” Easter Sunday night. It’s brilliant television. It’s also a serious distortion of history. And it proves, yet again, that anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable bigotry in elite circles in the Anglosphere.The distortions and bias are not surprising, considering the source. Hillary Mantel is a very talented, very bitter ex-Catholic who’s said that the Church today is “not an institution for respectable people” (so much for the English hierarchy’s decades-long wheedling for social acceptance). As she freely concedes, Mantel’s aim in her novel was to take down the Thomas More of A Man for All Seasons—the Thomas More the Catholic Church canonized—and her instrument for doing so is More’s rival in the court of Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell. Continue Reading »
The fact that this hatchet job on Thomas More appears in an impeccably well-done BBC production shows how fast our culture is changing, and how much work defenders of religious liberty have before them. Continue Reading »
The continuing contemporary interest in Thomas More (1478–1535) is hardly to be accounted for by popular fascination with sixteenth-century English politics or even by admiration for a martyr to a religious cause no longer universally popular. It is more likely that More’s memory remains fresh . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
