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 »
The recent publication of Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light by Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., with its frank avowals of the struggles with darkness of someone widely regarded as a saint (and not just by Catholics), has raised once more the question of the role of doubt in the life of faith. Are faith and . . . . Continue Reading »
A longtime subscriber has more than a decade of past issues of First Things ¯but lacks the shelf space to hold them. Ideally, he’d like to donate them to a library and only asks to be reimbursed for postage. If you know of a place that could put these issues to good use, email us at . . . . Continue Reading »
No one can deny there is plenty of disagreement in the Anglican Communion, but right now straightforward confusion is carrying the day.Around the world, Anglican primates have been asking the Americans to provide the rest of the church with clarity about their position on gay bishops and same-sex . . . . Continue Reading »
It’s an odd thing about us transplanted Canadians. In truth, most of my siblings and I (there are eight children) were born in Canada of American citizens, which gives us dual citizenship. The odd thing is that we are among the relatively few Americans who regularly keep an eye on things . . . . Continue Reading »
Two fine recent articles by evangelical scholars serve to highlight a problem I have mentioned before in this space : the remarkable inability of accredited spokesmen for the Christian Church to address the moral challenges faced by our civilization in the struggle with militant Islam.First of all, . . . . Continue Reading »
In May 1994, Pope John Paul II issued his apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. It is, as far as Vatican documents go, very short. It deals with one specific issue, namely the Church’s ban on the admission of women to the ministerial priesthood, a ban first articulated in the 1976 Vatican . . . . Continue Reading »
I’d like to start with a proposition. Here it is: To be a Christian is to believe in history. Think about the Bible. All the great world religions have sacred books: the Qur’an, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Analects of Confucius. What those sacred texts have in common is that they’re essentially . . . . Continue Reading »
Last month I posted here some thoughts about abortion rights and the right to die. At Mirror of Justice, Rick Garnett offered a few tough-minded comments and has persuaded me that the equation between abortion and suicide may be too involved for anyone to depict it, as I tried to do, in broad . . . . Continue Reading »
The English language is so very rich, and not least when it comes to language about language. I confess to having a weakness for the aphorism. I like to quote them and have even tried my hand at a few. A friend tells me I mean epigram, not aphorism. Maybe so, but the distinctions are subtle. It . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
