An instructive and fascinating debate has erupted over what at first glance may seem an academic point. The debate is between Matthias Küntzel, the author of Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 , and Andrew Bostom, the editor of The Legacy of Jihad and author of the . . . . Continue Reading »
“To understand all is to forgive all.” It’s a beguiling French adage, although of doubtful truth. Senator Barack Obama, we were told, has invited America to engage in a “national dialogue about race.” This morning’s paper describes the dialogue as “last . . . . Continue Reading »
Though the most Deistic of the Founding Fathers, even Jefferson was not a full-fledged Deist if we accept that philosophy as having had two fundamental tenets: a rejection of biblical revelation and a conviction that God, having created the laws of the universe, had receded from day-to-day control . . . . Continue Reading »
With the April issue of First Things about to appear on the newsstands, we have unlocked the February issue ¯making the text available online even to non-subscribers. Of course, the sheer existence of non-subscribers is something of a mystery, one of those things that make us scratch our heads . . . . Continue Reading »
Macbeth is Shakespearean tragedy at its scariest. It opens with a crash of thunder and a flash of lightening, with a hurly-burly of fog and filthy air, with three spellbinding wicked witches¯and it only gets worse from there. Notoriously difficult to produce, Macbeth has been christened . . . . Continue Reading »
The Nation , a hard left publication of secular bent, is no friend of faith, life, or family. Still, I was expecting to be more amused than outraged by the lead article in the March issue, profiling the work of the Population Research Institute (PRI) and several other groups collectively concerned . . . . Continue Reading »
As word of an appellate decision¯ In re Rachel L. ¯in California got around earlier this month, homeschoolers around the country reacted with incredulity and outrage. Ruling on a petition filed by attorneys representing the youngest two of eight homeschooled children, the judicial panel . . . . Continue Reading »
Yes, I know today is officially Saint Patrick’s Day, its having been transferred from next Monday because nothing takes precedence in the Church’s calendar over Holy Week. That makes sense. I thought of doing an item on how Irish Catholicism, which Tom Cahill tells us once saved . . . . Continue Reading »
The seventeenth-century German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is my philosophical hero. I am proud (but not quite happy) that I share with this great philosopher at least one feature. He was a master in spreading, not to say dissipating, his genius into too many fields of . . . . Continue Reading »
“I don’t propose to revisit the question of whether what we call the Sixties was in fact born in the Fifties, or whether it unfolded its full plumage in that low decade, the Seventies,” writes George Weigel. “Rather, I want to examine six crucial moments in the Sixties with an . . . . Continue Reading »
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