Where Christianity intersects with politics, culture, and entertainment.
Near the bottom of the pit of hell, Dante encounters a man walking with his torso split from chin to groin, his guts and other organs spilling out. “See how I tear myself!” the man shrieks. “See how Mahomet is deformed and torn!” For us, the scene is not only gruesome but surprising, for Dante…
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Back in 1980 out in rural Nebraska I conducted my first Thanksgiving Day worship service. It was not a good week. Lucille had died the previous afternoon. I was at the hospital with her husband, her sisters, and her children when, at age forty-eight, she lost a three-year battle with cancer. For some little while…
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Tomorrow, Americans will be flocking to the polls to decide their President for the next four years. When the election concludes, there will be a great deal of discussion about the blessings of democracy, our grand political tradition, and the precious freedoms Americans have—all of which we should be thankful for. Hand in hand with…
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For the vast majority of American citizens, exercising prudential judgment in politics is not a matter of framing and executing public policy, but of voting. Voting, in other words, is an exercise in moral judgment. Which is to say that serious Christians, for whom love of the Lord Jesus and fidelity to his Kingdom measure…
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One of the last of the generation of critics that included Edmund Wilson, Irving Howe, and Lionel Trilling, Jacque Barzun, who died yesterday at the age of 104, developed a historically informed critical approach that, without descending into polemic, didn’t shy from defining or diagnosing Western culture. For Barzun, “the historian can only show, not…
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President Barack Obama, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, and countless supporters have claimed again and again that Planned Parenthood provides mammograms. President Obama did so in the second presidential debate, describing the “millions of women all across the country who rely on Planned Parenthood for . . . mammograms.” The problem is the mammogram claim…
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Some centuries ago, someone (a politician, I suppose) disconnected theology from the rest of the academy, hustled it down a dark hallway, and locked it in a basement office with stern warnings to “Stay put” and “Behave.” Theologians, by and large a meek race, complied. They have spent their time holding long seminars and filling…
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In a bid to save Catholic education, major Catholic archdioceses are closing many schools and turning others over to the control of regional boards. This sad necessity has become an occasion for soul-searching within the Catholic educational bureaucracy. As Catholic leaders combat the causes of plummeting enrollment, they might look beyond the obvious financial barriers…
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Last week, Kimberly Hyatt of Patheos asked why Christians are mean in “Look at the Christians: See How Mean They Are”. “Perhaps it is past time for us to stop focusing on what others are doing or trying to do and start taking responsibility for our own actions and their consequences.” This is always true…
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