The report made headlines across the globe, but even those generally sympathetic to its conclusions acknowledged the difficulties in performing a study like this. And the conclusions, as a result, seem to rest on very shaky foundations.The subject is the new global study on abortion just published . . . . Continue Reading »
Back in February, I received a phone call from the journalist Paul Elie. I knew his name from a book he published a few years ago, called The Life You Save May Be Your Own , an appealing effort that I reviewed favorably in First Things .He wanted to talk about an article, for the Atlantic Monthly , . . . . Continue Reading »
The streets of New York are clergy-friendly. In my limited experience, more so than other world cities. Of course, Rome doesn’t count. There one might get the impression that the Church is suffering from a superfluity rather than a shortage of priests. Greet all the priests and sisters you . . . . Continue Reading »
Tomorrow, October 12, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged . It was a huge, hotly debated bestseller in its day, and its sales have held steady ever since. Its author, certainly, retains a certain mystique as the exacting thinker still revered by . . . . Continue Reading »
“Expansive and yet vacuous is the prose of Kahlil Gibran,” writes Alan Jacobs in the new issue of First Things . And weary grows the mind doomed to read it. The hours of my penance lengthen, The penance established for me by the editor of this magazine, And those hours may be numbered as . . . . Continue Reading »
Whatever one thinks about whether it is possible for Christian theology to be systematic—and there are good reasons to think not—we can at least say it is good manners to attempt to lay out everything one thinks in an orderly fashion.The brief dogmatics seems to have made a return to . . . . Continue Reading »
To my Fathers in Christ, the Catholic Bishops of Connecticut,I approach you, in the form of this letter, with a mind troubled by the words of your statement read at Mass in my parish on Sunday, September 30, regarding Plan B and the four Catholic hospitals in our state. Surely we, the lay faithful, . . . . Continue Reading »
It has been suggested to me that this wedding homily might be of more general interest. Perhaps you will agree. I might add that Gwyneth is the daughter of George and Joan Weigel. She and Robert are now serving medical internships at Johns Hopkins. In the Name of the + Father, and of the Son, and . . . . Continue Reading »
Imagine a book on Renaissance art without any pictures. And I don’t mean without illustrations, I mean without any pictures. No frescos by Michelangelo, Madonnas by Raphael, springtime scenes by Botticelli, or even woodcuts by Dürer. We might have a few fragments of a bit of a panel by . . . . Continue Reading »
On a trip to Crete last March to research onetime Venetian colonies, our class of twelve wandered into an Orthodox church in Chania. It was one of the many Cretan “double-nave” churches that, select art historians would argue, originated in Crete’s Venetian period, when both . . . . Continue Reading »
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