Last summer I had a supremely enjoyable day introducing my daughter to golf. As I watched her skip down the fairway with a cut-off five iron in her hand, I wondered if she would learn to love the game the way I did from my father. He helped teach me the hard lesson that loving … Read more
Reading Nietzsche taught me one thing: people can talk about values and really be interested only in getting their way. Case in point: All the recent talk about “civility” is more about power than good manners. Specifically, it’s about marginalizing everyone who finds it necessary and appropriate to speak passionately on the subject of abortion. … Read more
Imaging the following: a guest lecturer visits your parish to address the topic, “values for the third millennium.” He steps to the podium and immediately begins to describe the next one thousand years in such fantastic terms that human values as we have known them will be obsolete. We will need new values, so he … Read more
“You’re not really listening to me!” Thus, after hours of argument my mind remained unchanged. Presumably, if I had been “really listening,” I would have yielded long ago to my frustrated accuser’s incontestable reasoning. I had, however, been listening to him, very closely—I heard his ideas and rejected them. This is not to say that I … Read more
Crisis readers are a unique group. As seen in the 1996 reader survey (p. 29), you are clearly well- educated, politically active, and religious. The results make me curious to know more. What other magazines do you read? What books and movies do you like, what television and music? I suspect the culture you inhabit, … Read more
A few days ago I witnessed an event that made me even more grateful for a magazine named Crisis. “We Are Church” is a coalition of twenty dissident Catholic organizations that want a married clergy, a female clergy, homosexual rights, birth control, abortion, and, get this, the popular election of all bishops. Those who spoke … Read more
Today’s radicals hide behind the skirts of old liberals. This tactic pervades the National Catholic Reporter’s lame defense of Call to Action (CTA), recently disciplined by Bishop Bruskewicz of Lincoln, Nebraska. In that piece, Editor Tom Fox makes CTA’s radical dissent sound like the mild idealism of aging flower children. Far more serious issues are … Read more
Our Holy Father, John Paul II, has called us to participate in the new evangelization of the Catholic Church. These very personal remarks are offered in the spirit of that evangelism. Perhaps hearing from someone who discovered the Church for the first time as an adult will be helpful to those who have lost heart … Read more
“Tenderness is the first disguise of the murderer.” Thus the novelist Walker Percy, echoing Flannery O’Connor, foresaw the Ninth Circuit’s recent decision discovering a “right to die” in the Constitution. Once again we witness a court thinking with the woeful sentimentality of a talk show host. Judge Reinhardt, the author of the court’s opinion, speaks … Read more
Several years ago this month, I nearly disturbed the decorum of my parish church in the northern suburbs of New York City. It was Easter morning. Theresa and I had brought our three year old daughter to Mass. The church was packed with people, but when the organist began playing “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today,” … Read more
You’ve got to be careful about whom you invite to dinner these days. Arguments over abortion are apt to break out quickly and spread dark moods around the table. Some good-hearted soul, to save the occasion, will inevitably suggest, “Abortion should just be taken out of politics.” This would be a terrible mistake, of course. … Read more
Ralph Mclnerny and Michael Novak founded this magazine in 1982. They broke new ground with Curses—in doing so they changed the landscape of Catholicism and the conservative movement in America. For the first time, lay Catholics who were obedient to the Magisterium and confident in the past and future of the American founding could be … Read more
At lunch with some Catholic editors, I heard the following comment, “The trouble with Catholics who support cutting government spending is that they don’t seek direction on their knees before God.” I replied, “How do you know that, and how do you know that those who support the status quo are making prayerful decisions?” The … Read more
During four years of college and seven of graduate school, most of it in philosophy and theology, I heard only one lecture on virtue — the virtue of art. Thus I consider it miraculous that the language of virtue has returned to public discourse. But the virtues don’t tell the whole story about human life. … Read more
She walks so slowly on her crutches she seems fragile, an impression that doesn’t last for very long. Mother Angelica is made of something as tough as the steel she leans on. This Poor Clare nun from Ohio has single-handedly built a multimillion-dollar television and radio complex on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama, and created … Read more
Crisis wanted to talk to Ralph Reed, president of the Christian Coalition, about his plans to create a Catholic Alliance within the Christian Coalition. Crisis editor, Deal W. Hudson, talked to him at the Capital Building in Washington, D.C. about the history of American Catholicism and his vision of Evangelical-Catholic cooperation in public policy. What’s … Read more
Many people are surprised that Catholics and evangelicals are starting to get along so well— the media is surprised and disappointed, liberals are surprised and scared. I’m not surprised, I was a Baptist who became a Catholic at the age of 33. At the Christian Coalition meeting in Washington D. C., I remarked that one … Read more
As one who was born and raised a Protestant and became a Southern Baptist minister before entering the Roman Catholic Church, I am perplexed by the evangelical Protestant charge that Catholics misunderstand salvation. The constant teaching of the Catholic Church throughout the ages has been that salvation is bestowed alone by God’s grace. This was … Read more
A friend of mind, a cradle Catholic who doubts her faith, asked what she should teach her four-year old about religion. “Everything,” I said, “Heaven, Hell, God, Angels, Sin, Grace, Forgiveness, don’t leave anything out.” “How can I do that,” she responded “When I’m not sure myself.” Such attempts at parental honesty can leave a … Read more
Some people think that religious belief makes you narrow-minded, parochial. If you think so, try lecturing on human rights to high school teachers in Estonia, a county trying to recover from its period of Soviet domination. My Estonian audience listened uncomprehendingly as I spoke to them about natural right and human nature. This was no … Read more