Free Republic

It is increasingly difficult to escape the fact that mainline Protestantism is in a state of disintegration. As attendance declines, internal divisions increase. Take, for instance, the situation of the Episcopal Church in the United States. The Episcopal Church’s problem is far more theological than it is moral—a theological poverty that is truly monumental and that stands behind the moral missteps recently taken by its governing bodies. Every denomination has its theological articles and books of theology, its liturgies and confessional statements. Nonetheless, the contents of these documents do not necessarily control what we might call the “working theology” of...

Whatever else it is, the pro-life movement of the last thirty-plus years is one of the most massive and sustained expressions of citizen participation in the history of the United States. Since the 1960s, citizen participation and the remoralizing of politics have been central goals of the left. Is it not odd, then, that the pro-life movement is viewed as a right-wing cause? Reinhold Niebuhr wrote about “the irony of American history” and, were he around to update his book of that title, I expect he might recognize this as one of the major ironies within the irony. These...

Abortion After Obama by Joseph Bottum Copyright (c) 2009 First Things (January 2009). It happens every four years—maybe every two years: Anytime there’s an election in this country, the pundits and political experts take to their soapboxes and proclaim the death of pro-life politics. The unwashed yokels in Utah, Alabama, South Dakota, Oklahoma: They’re an embarrassment, you see, and the sooner we stop paying attention to them, the sooner the nation’s politics will regain its equilibrium. The fact that we heard exactly this after the elections in 1986 and 1990 and 1992 and 1996 and 2006 suggests it’s more a...

(CNS) Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor in chief of First Things, is currently undergoing treatment for cancer in Manhattan’s Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Father Neuhaus disclosed his cancer at the end of this post on the First Things website in early December. The Daily Blog spoke today with pro-life advocate Chris Slattery, who visited Father Neuhaus yesterday afternoon at the hospital. “I got a call yesterday morning from his office, saying that he was put in on the weekend and please go visit him,” said Slattery, who is founder and president of Expectant Mother Care. Said Slattery, “He’s clearly had a...

Three memories have shaped my approach to this year’s general election. Here’s the first. In the late 1970s, during a two-year break from teaching to raise our second son, an adopted child, I found myself at a Los Angeles dinner party filled with DINKs, the “double income, no kids” crowd who were just emerging as a self-aware and upwardly mobile social group. I fell to talking—or more accurately, listening—to a chatty young female attorney who said she was putting in eighty hours a week as a junior associate on a variety of important cases. After twenty minutes or so, she...

There are reasonable criticisms that can be made of Sarah Palin, both as governor and a vice presidential selection. Yet little of what we have seen in the last six days has been either reasonable or critical (in the traditional sense of the word). Instead, much of the left and many in the media simply lashed out at Palin, particularly at her family. And not only the fringiest parts of the political fringe: A writer at the Washington Post attacked Palin for the fact that her seventeen-year-old daughter was going to have a baby. A writer for The Atlantic openly...

Film-maker Michael Moore has apparently praised the gulf weather for its chance of disrupting the Republican convention: “This hurricane is proof that there is a god in heaven.” Another low point in politics, though possibly one that could be passed off with a laugh—a partisan irony, rather than a serious derangement. But over on the leftist Daily Kos website, there is a post that sinks much lower—so low that it caused many of the commentators to denounce it. Which led another commentator to make this remark: I am prepared to do whatever is necessary to destroy the Republican Party as...

More and more, I wonder whether lefties mean it, any of it. Take Rosie O’Donnell. The other day, one of her co-hosts on “The View” was musing on current events and opined, “If you take radical Islam and you want to talk about what is going on there you have to…” And at this point Rosie interrupted. “One second. Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have a separation of church and state.” Does she really believe that? That “radical Christianity” is “just as threatening” as “radical Islam”? These terms are...

If today’s Catholic bishops lived during the Nuremberg trials, they would have condemned the execution of nine of the defendants – including Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Hans Frank. Kaltenbrunner was responsible for mass executions of civilians and prisoners of war as Heinrich Himmler’s chief SS lieutenant; Frank oversaw the Nazis’ numerous atrocities as the governor of occupied Poland. Such a presumptuous proposition seems plausible given two Vatican officials’ opposition to Saddam Hussein’s death sentence – and the Catholic Church’s moral revisionism concerning capital punishment. Iraq’s High Tribunal convicted Saddam of committing crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death on Nov....

Richard John Neuhaus writes: This is but an addendum to Robert Miller?s fine reflection on the meaning of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is not easy. It is a very deliberate and specific practice that takes some working at. To cite a recent instance, the revelation that German novelist G?nter Grass?lauded for years as the conscience of his country?willingly served in the Waffen-SS may qualify as hypocrisy. For decades he relentlessly insisted that anyone tainted by Nazism should be excluded from the moral community of public discourse, knowing all along that he was complicit in what he condemned in others. He was lying....

This essay asks two questions: Are Europeans in the throes of passive cultural and political suicide as they ignore the threat of fanatical Muslims in their communities? And if so, have the leaders of the Democratic Party in America joined the Europeans in sleepwalking towards a precipice? My main source for answering the first question is a book review titled Suicide of the West, by Theodore Dalrymple which appeared in the Clairmont Review of Books, Fall 2006. Dalrymple reviewed three books in pursuit of his theme of the "Suicide of the West" — namely, Why the Continent's Crisis is America's...

(abridged version) Herewith a potpourri of reflections on the Regensburg lecture by Pope Benedict and reactions to it, intermixed with a bit of my own commentary. As many commentators, Muslim and other, do not know because they manifestly have not read the lecture, it was not chiefly about Islam. It was a considered reflection on the inseparable linkage of faith and reason in the Christian understanding, an incisive critique of Christian thinkers who press for separating faith and reason in the name of “de-Hellenizing” Christianity, and a stirring call for Christians to celebrate the achievements of modernity and secure those...

For years, critics of the idea of same-sex “marriage” have made the point that accepting the proposition that two persons of the same sex can marry each other entails abandoning any principled basis for understanding marriage as the union of two and only two persons. So far as I am aware, our opponents have made no serious effort to answer or rebut this point. Their strategy has been to dismiss it as a mere slippery-slope argument (although the truth is that it is a more fundamental type of argument than that) and to accuse us of engaging in “scare tactics.”...

This is a paranoid moment in American politics. A host of conspiracies haunt our national imagination, and apparent incompetence is assumed to be the consequence of a dark design: President Bush knew about the attacks of 9/11 in advance, or else the Israelis did; the Straussians took us to war in Iraq, unless the oil companies did; the federal government let the levees break in New Orleans, unless it dynamited them itself. Perhaps the strangest of these strange stories, though, is the notion that twenty-first-century America is slouching toward theocracy. This is an old paranoia: Back in 1952, the science-fiction...

On the HOBD listerv, one of the usual challenges to those that would hold to the biblical standards of sexual morality involves belief in the theory of evolution, as if to say that the failure to recongize homosexuality as part of the evolutionary understanding of sexuality means that you are stupid. Well, homosexuality ought to not-breed itself out of existance, so surely, such a thing is not genetic and doesn’t fit within Darwinian theory. But, the play and movie, “Inherit the Wind”, has often provided a basis for protest against so-called biblical fundamentalism. Indeed, with trials occuring in our country...

In July 2005 the New York Times published my short essay “Finding Design in Nature.” The reaction has been overwhelming, and not overwhelmingly positive. In the October issue of FIRST THINGS, Stephen Barr honored me with a serious response, one fairly representative of the reaction of many Catholics. I fear, however, that Barr has misunderstood my argument and possibly misconceived the issue of whether the human intellect can discern the reality of design in the world of living things. It appears from Barr’s essay—and a number of other responses—that my argument was substantially misunderstood. In “Finding Design in Nature,” I...

The Liberalism of John Paul II Richard John Neuhaus Copyright (c) 1997 First Things 73 (May 1997): 16-21.It is no secret that when Centesimus Annus appeared in 1991 some of us viewed it not only as an important teaching moment but also as a vindication of our understanding of Catholic social doctrine. There was a great temptation to declare triumphantly, "I told you so." That temptation was not always resisted as it should have been. This contributed to a degree of polarization over the encyclical. Liberals who paid any attention at all to the document were not convinced of the...

The Design of Evolution -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen M. Barr -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright (c) 2005 First Things 156 (October 2005): 9-12. Catholic theology has never really had a quarrel with the idea that the present species of plants and animals are the result of a long process of evolution—or with the idea that this process has unfolded according to natural laws. As the 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia put it, these ideas seem to be “in perfect agreement with the Christian conception of the universe.” Catholic theologians were more hesitant with respect to the origin of the human race, but even here, the old encyclopedia...

(snip) As the title suggests, Thomas Asbridge’s The First Crusade: A New History begins at the beginning. The First Crusade was called in 1095 by Pope Urban II in response to an urgent plea for assistance from the Byzantine Empire, the last Christian state in the East. Things had been going badly for Christians for several centuries, ever since the explosion of Muslim warriors out of Arabia in the seventh century. Egypt, Palestine, Syria, North Africa—the core of the Christian world—had been conquered by Muslim jihad warriors and subjected to Islamic rule and law. When Turkish jihad warriors invaded and...

In the sport of religion jurisprudence, the cats sometimes catch the mice. In October 1997, for example, federal district judge Ira DeMent issued an injunction forbidding religious activities in and around public schools in Alabama. Forbidden activities included “Bible and religious devotional or scriptural readings; distribution of religious materials, texts, or announcements; and discussions of a devotional or inspirational nature, regardless of whether the activity is initiated, led by, or engaged in by students.” The injunction set up a system of monitors to enter classrooms, visit athletic events, and observe activities—in order to collect complaints and verify compliance. Public schools...