People who call themselves atheists often say rather strange things about people with faith¯things like, "Well, if you need the comfort, go on and believe." An odd notion, that there is "comfort" in faith. Serious believers often don’t find it so. Actually, it has . . . . Continue Reading »
After the tremendous response to Rome Diary , Richard John Neuhaus’ daily reports from Italy on the papal funeral and election in the spring of 2005, we kicked around the idea, here at the magazine, of continuing to post regular items on the First Things website. Blogging, you might . . . . Continue Reading »
Tristram Shandy "was postmodern before there was a modern to be post about," says actor Steve Coogan to an implied movie audience. Coogan plays the eponymous hero (not to mention the hero’s own father) in Michael Winterbottom’s film version of the mid-eighteenth-century comic . . . . Continue Reading »
I started reading it when it came out a couple of years ago, and I would like to say it is the kind of book you can’t put down but, distracted by something or the other, I did put it aside until the trip to Poland a couple of weeks ago. Gilead , like the town by that name, is fictional, or so . . . . Continue Reading »
The situation in the Middle East has been changing so rapidly, it seems impossible to have timely commentary on it. The best outcome one can imagine is a restoration of Lebanon. Hezbollah has been for years an organization existing in the cracks of modern nation-states. It is in certain ways a . . . . Continue Reading »
"Who would presume to know the intentions of another human being?" someone asks in Lady in the Water . Who indeed, but the most prosaic and literal-minded of critics? And it is to his critics that M. Night Shyamalan has really addressed both this question and his latest film¯critics . . . . Continue Reading »
Over on the University of Chicago law school’s faculty website, Prof. Geoffrey Stone posted an argument about embryonic stem cells that’s quite revealing, in its way. The post garnered some attention from other law professors, here and here , for instance. The always interesting Eugene . . . . Continue Reading »
Yesterday’s New York Times ran an interesting story about Henri Tessier, the elderly archbishop of Algeria, "where he has been witness to what he says is the slow ‘death of a church.’" The immediate purpose of a Christian presence in Algeria, he claims, "is not to . . . . Continue Reading »
"Government Will Defend Polish ‘Morals.’" The story in the Herald Tribune underscores the sneer quotes around morals . As it happens, the prime minister had told the parliament in Warsaw that "the government will defend Polish culture and morals." One imagines an . . . . Continue Reading »
It’s hardly a breaking news story that the old mainline Protestant denominations are in trouble, both doctrinally and in membership numbers. It’s even less of a breaking story that a wide range of nondenominational churches¯or churches only loosely affiliated with a . . . . Continue Reading »
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