Web Exclusives

The False Choice Between Development and Daughters

In an era when girls can rightly aspire to unprecedented status alongside their brothers, why are more parents choosing not to let them live? Continue Reading »

23 Aug 2007 0

Land of Lincoln: A Review

by Brian Murray

In the elementary schools of the American Midwest, Abraham Lincoln has always enjoyed a good press. Schoolchildren in northern Indiana, I can attest, marked Lincoln’s birthday by drawing crayon portraits of the president while listening to inspirational stories about his life. In middle school . . . . Continue Reading »

23 Aug 2007 0

Mugabe and the Churches

by James Kirchick

Robert Mugabe, the dictator of Zimbabwe, claims to be a man of faith¯and with some reason. He was born to mission-educated parents and, like many Zimbabweans of his generation, he attended a Jesuit school. He reportedly still attends weekly Mass in Harare. Martin Meredith, a former southern . . . . Continue Reading »

22 Aug 2007 0

The Name of God

by Robert T. Miller

Tiny Muskens, the Roman Catholic bishop of Breda in the Netherlands, says that Dutch Catholics ought to pray using the word Allah rather than God or its synonyms in Dutch. Muskens argues that it makes no inherent theological difference in which language one prays, and he notes that in countries . . . . Continue Reading »

20 Aug 2007 0

A Criterion for Compromises

by Richard John Neuhaus

Our friends over at the New Criterion have put out a big anthology including the editors’ choice of essays and reviews published in its first twenty-five years. The book is Counterpoints and is edited by, as you might expect, the editors of the New Criterion , Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer. . . . . Continue Reading »

17 Aug 2007 0

The Malling of Mecca

by Michael Linton

It’s big. No, I mean really BIG. And I’m not talking about the Burj Dubai , which when it reached 1,680 feet on July 21 became the tallest building on earth (and a thousand feet short of its completed height¯yes, I said a thousand ). I’m talking about that huge project on the . . . . Continue Reading »

16 Aug 2007 0

The Seamless Garment Reconfigured

by Nicholas Frankovich

Hawks and social conservatives in the United States find themselves in a delicate coalition that will either solidify or disperse. Can it survive Giuliani and his campaign for the Republican nomination for president? He says he’s against terrorism and abortion and would fight the former but . . . . Continue Reading »

15 Aug 2007 0

Why Atheism Is Selling … Books

by Joseph Bottum

In his June/July First Things article, " Remembering the Secular Age ," along with emails he’s been sending us over the past few months, Michael Novak has been tracking the claim that atheism is back. Or so, at least, you might imagine from all the figures in recent months, one after . . . . Continue Reading »

14 Aug 2007 0

How to Pray

by Elizabeth Powers

As a Catholic growing up in the years before Vatican II, I knew very few Protestants, much less evangelicals, even though I lived in Kentucky and southern Indiana, heartland of Protestantism, and not the Episcopalian variety. As a matter of fact, until I went to college, there were no blacks and not a single person I would have been able to identify as Jewish among my acquaintances. Such was the status and class separation of the 1950s, an outcome of the hermeticism of middle-class life of that era. Continue Reading »

13 Aug 2007 0

Keeping the Humanist Faith, Sort Of