Historians have much reason to be grateful to the memorialists of the 17th and 18th centuries. Given that Antonia Fraser has made “love and Louis XIV” the subject of her latest work, she is certainly indebted to the Princess Elizabeth Charlotte (Liselotte) of Bavaria, sister-in-law of the Sun King, whom Fraser calls her favorite among … Read more
Notorious atheists like Christopher Hitchens try to convince us that the world would be a more humane place if we could give up on the idea of God, but Tod Lindberg provides a cogent argument in The Political Teachings of Jesus that the modern world’s most cherished liberal values — religious tolerance, equality, freedom, and … Read more
Anthony Esolen’s Ironies of Faith is a very dated kind of book. There is nothing of the first-person narrative that adorns modern books, where the author tells us why something matters to him. Â Ironies of Faith: The Laughter at the Heart of Christian Literature Anthony Esolen, ISI Books, 412 pages, $18 Â Anthony Esolen’s … Read more
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything Christopher Hitchens, Twelve Books, 307 pages, $24.99 One is tempted to quip that Christopher Hitchens is certainly one of the best minds of the 18th century, but that would be to give Hitchens too much credit as an equal to Voltaire in wit. He is not, and … Read more
Mu siida, arka tiles ja kiida Loojat lauldes, Kes koik head meile annab ja muret ikka kannab. Kui magama ma heitsin, end Isa stale peitsin, mind saatan puudis neelda, kuid Jumal vottis keelda. Wake up, my heart, and sing praise to the Creator Who gives us all good things and bears all our worries. When … Read more
Mu süda, ärka üles ja kiida Loojat lauldes, Kes kõik head meile annab ja muret ikka kannab. Kui magama ma heitsin, end Isa sülle peitsin, mind saatan püüdis neelda, kuid Jumal võttis keelda. Wake up, my heart, and sing praise to the Creator Who gives us all good things and bears all our worries. When … Read more
What does a word mean, if it can mean anything? Is there a difference between a word meaning anything, and one that means nothing at all? This isn’t merely a semantic problem if that word is “marriage.” When I maintain that the definition of marriage has been all but lost, I intend both senses of … Read more
When Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical came out, the media were a bit confused. They, along with eager conservatives, were expecting the new pope to line up the ecclesiastical howitzers and mow down dissenters in crisp, staccato prose. Instead, they got Deus Caritas Est, “God Is Love.” Had the pope gone soft? Even daft? Too … Read more
When Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical came out, the media were a bit confused. They, along with eager conservatives, were expecting the new pope to line up the ecclesiastical howitzers and mow down dissenters in crisp, staccato prose. Instead, they got Deus Caritas Est, “God Is Love.” Had the pope gone soft? Even daft? Too … Read more
I don’t believe I have some kind of extraordinary spiritual sense, but something alerted me the very first time I saw George Felos, the lawyer responsible for killing Terri Schiavo: Something is deeply wrong with this man. Very deep, and very wrong. I had no such spiritual warning on the radar in viewing Michael Schiavo. … Read more
Granting all the wonderful, important things modern scriptural scholarship has given us, it bears within it something dreadfully wrong. If you have had the misfortune of coming into earshot of all too many of our contemporary scriptural scholars, they will assure you that scholarship, properly speaking, must strip both the Old and New Testaments of … Read more
This is not an article for those who are unabashedly in love with democracy, who look forward to election year with patriotic zeal directed first of all to the nation and second of all to one of the political parties. I write instead for the genuinely dispossessed: for those who feel deep in their bones … Read more
It is difficult to gain attention in an era that uses superlatives to describe dishwashing liquid and mayonnaise. Perhaps speaking simply and directly might prove such an oddity that words may again have their proper power. And so, here it is: The greatest moral crisis is now upon us. I don’t mean the continual, factory … Read more
In a now-famous passage from his justly acclaimed The First Three Minutes, physicist Steven Weinberg provides a rather dismal assessment of the human drama: It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of … Read more
A man has dreams, and all too often, this one found himself drifting off on his pleasant and wishful clouds as he corrected yet another stack of undergraduate papers. Yes, being a professor had seemed so inviting—a life of tweed jackets, of dragging on the meerschaum, of good books and penetrating discussions, and of time … Read more
As an advocate of the Intelligent Design movement, I’m very often confronted with the following rather pointed criticism: “Well, if the world is designed, then we’ve got to blame the designer for all of the evil in it, don’t we? Backaches and headaches, cancer, cats playing with mice, parasites, floods, Nazis, slavery, starving children—the whole … Read more
Not long after we moved onto our country property, I thought I’d amble over and see Fred Number Two. We had just bought the property from Fred Number one, and I thought it best to get to know both Freds, since they were our new neighbors and being neighborly was, of course, one of the … Read more
Not long after we moved onto our country property, I thought I’d amble over and see Fred Number Two. We had just bought the property from Fred Number One, and I thought it best to get to know both Freds, since they were our new neighbors and being neighborly was, of course, one of the … Read more
Author’s note: In the first part of this article, “Does Science Point to God? The Intelligent Design Revolution” (April 2003), I focused on Intelligent Design (ID) as a scientific revolution. In this article, I will get at the importance of the ID movement from a different angle. What happens if we just ignore the ID … Read more
It may well be the most important intellectual movement to occur in the last 200 years, if not the last half-millennium. Its roots are in the sciences, but when it reaches full flower, it may branch into nearly every discipline, from theology, philosophy, and the social sciences to history and literature, and redefine almost every … Read more