T. S. Eliot caught a bit of flak in the 1920s when he claimed that Shakespeare’s most famous play Hamlet was, of all things, a flop: “Far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece,” he said in “Hamlet and His Problems,” published in 1922, “the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others.” … Continue Reading »
How many Americans will never work again? Perhaps a lot. A close look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey raises some alarming questions about the prospects of significant parts of the American population. Thirteen percent of Americans twenty-five years and over without a high school diploma were unemployed in June … Continue Reading »
Unless the middle school in Shenandoah, Iowa, is training junior gynecologists, it is unclear why its eighth-graders need to be taught how to perform female exams and to put a condom on a 3-D, anatomically correct male sex organ. The representative from Planned Parenthood, which provided the instruction, justified the curriculum by saying, “All information we use is medically accurate and science based.” For them, sexual education can be denuded of all moral content as long as research studies and reams of statistics back up their claims… . Continue Reading »
Can Jews, Christians, and Muslims get along? At first glance, the notion that we are all “Abrahamic religions” seems useful, and many people concerned for peace between religions have invoked it, hoping to encourage cooperation and mutual affirmation. Modern Jews look to Abraham as their forebearer. Christians look to him as “ the father of us all” (Rom 4:16). Islam places him among the line of prophets that begins with Adam… . Continue Reading »
A special preview of The Public Square, from the new issue of First Things, the August/September issue, just being sent to subscribers and newsstands now:
You head down the road of public life in America, and you run up against religion. From the conversations in the barber shops and the coffee klatches, through the aldermen’s offices and the town halls, the school boards and the zoning commissions, the campaigns and the columnists, and eventually to the state houses and even, perhaps, to that white-domed Capitol building, far off in Washington”somewhere along the line you come to the crossroads where religion cuts across your path… . Continue Reading »
“The Internet was completely funded by porn,” said Greg Fitzsimmons at the twenty-third annual adult entertainment industry awards. He was only half-joking. The pornography industry drove or boosted many of the web’s most useful innovations”live chat, streaming video, online payment systems”as well as the popularity of fast connections. The Internet (in the guise of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is returning the favor by giving the trade its own top-level domain: .XXX… . Continue Reading »
In 2003, the ban on partial-birth abortion was signed by President Bush”and promptly challenged in court, leading to the 2007 Supreme Court decision upholding its constitutionality, Gonzales v. Carhart… . Continue Reading »
I want to start our conversation in an unlikely place. The scene is Mainz, Germany, April 1964. Just a few months earlier, in December 1963, Vatican II had published its groundbreaking document on the liturgy… . Continue Reading »
William Faulkner once said, “The past is not dead. It is not even past.” Antietam Ridge, Bloody Lane, Little Round Top, Seminary Ridge: the scenes of carnage are now quiet parks overseen by mounted commanders frozen in bronze, but they remain alive with memory. One can almost hear the final fading echoes of the soldiers’ yells as men marched into battle as canister torn across open fields… . Continue Reading »
The Supreme Court convened on Monday in its final session of the term and released its judgments on a number of cases that have drawn deep interest”and stirred high anxiety. One of the judgments was the case of the Christian Legal Society at the Hastings Law School in California (Christian Legal Society v. Martinez). I wrote on this case in our issue of June/July (“Vast Dangers in a Small Place”), and I regret to report that the outcome turned out to be quite as grievous as the one I anticipated in that piece… . Continue Reading »
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