I’m a stringer for one of those “major American newspapers”—it’s fun to see your byline as long as you remember it’s lining a bird cage tomorrow—and as part of an assignment last week I interviewed a pretty successful gospel/country/pop singer, “pretty . . . . Continue Reading »
For the past month, the New York Times has been running a series on “the new gender divide," which "examin[es] what has happened to men and women several decades after the women’s movement began." Sunday’s article , "Facing Middle Age with No Degree, and No . . . . Continue Reading »
Why do so many people these days sound like conservatives but still insist they are liberals? I recently had a conversation with a female lawyer who spoke as if she had just finished reading Oswald Spengler. When she learned that I was a college professor, she unleashed a torrent of vitriol against . . . . Continue Reading »
I spoke last week of the fictions of relativism and concluded with one of E.M. Cioran’s typically laconic aphorisms about the East’s greater honesty toward the absolute. Well, maybe. But maybe not. I once read a marvelous book by Dava Sobel called Longitude: The True Story of a Lone . . . . Continue Reading »
Writers who call themselves atheists have often surprised me by their reasons for not believing in God. In the long history of humanity, of course, their unbelief is an anomaly, a distinctly minority position. Even Clarence Darrow once said that he certainly did not believe in the Jewish or . . . . Continue Reading »
Thanks for all the help finding those churches¯brick, modern, disappointing; too empty of ideas even to be awful¯that seem to mark too much of Catholic architecture in the United States. The emails have come pouring in, and it’s going to take me a day or so to sort them out before I . . . . Continue Reading »
I have long felt that the defining event of my lifetime has been an ongoing cultural revolution. A recent book by Philip Rieff, My Life among the Deathworks , confirms this. According to Rieff, from the beginnings of human history, men and women have thought that happiness comes from a disciplined . . . . Continue Reading »
What does a typical American Catholic church look like? In something I was working on last night, I wrote about a set of (usually suburban) churches: “Not even distinguished enough to be bad examples of their kind, they just are —each one vaguely modern, vaguely brick, vaguely . . . . Continue Reading »
A reader wrote to correct my recent observations about the contemporary culture of transgression. It was not Robert Mapplethorpe who put the cross in a jar of urine; it was Andres Serrano. I’ll admit that most contemporary art blurs in my mind. A few months ago, I toured the Chelsea galleries. . . . . Continue Reading »
OK, now we’re cooking with Crisco. I posted this morning about my quest for the definitive American Catholic churches—those buildings that aren’t even distinguished enough to be bad examples of their kind. They’re just vaguely modern, vaguely brick, vaguely . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
