Culture
Founder of First Things and one of this country’s preeminent theologians, Father Richard Jon Neuhaus has passed away. From the National Catholic Reporter. From the early 1970s forward, Neuhaus was a key architect of two alliances with profound consequences for American politics, both of which overcame histories of mutual antagonism: one between conservative Catholics and…
After two drop-out years selling fish off a truck, I returned to college much more motivated, and with a better sense of what I wanted to accomplish there. So I was inclined to approve when I came across a news story with a lede explaining that “more educators are advocating a year off between high…
I have to believe that the day will come when society at large will share my disgust with such phrasings as Owen M. Sullivan’s and be astonished that anybody would commit them to print, much less seek to publish them in major newspapers: The Israeli attack on the Gaza Ghetto, much like the Nazi attack…
A response that Newsmakers host Tim White made to me during the latest episode of his show (channel 12 at 5:30 a.m., channel 11 at 10:00 a.m., and online in two parts here and here) struck me as worthy of further discussion. Ian Donnis asked about the “vitriol” in blog comment sections, and I answered,…
Robert Wendover, director of the Center for Generational Studies, offers some thoughts related to my concerns that some number of Baby Boomers won’t accept it as their social duty to pass the torch along to the next generation: … Regardless of their financial position, most Boomers are reluctant to leave the workforce. While income plays…
It’s difficult to comprehend why society would create lucrative positions known as “philosophy professors” if the people who fill them (at Ivy League schools, no less) are incapable of reasoning more sharply than this: The article tells alumni that Ruthellen Williams is a remarkable teacher. Her classes are “packed, every term,” and her “career holds…
Some readers may have found cause for a sparkle of hope in the following turnabout, as explained in the NY Times: The number of black children being raised by two parents appears to be edging higher than at any time in a generation, at nearly 40 percent, according to newly released census data. Demographers said…
Perhaps it’s his lack of children that enables liberal columnist Joel Stein so succinctly to enunciate one of the more damaging failures of philosophy in modern culture: True love is the blind belief that your child is the smartest, cutest, most charming person in the world, one you would gladly die for. The ineluctable consequence…
An interesting juxtaposition of “role-model” attitude appears in Bob Kerr’s column from yesterday. On one hand: The kid eagerly raised his hand at the back of the room at the Lincoln Middle School. He had the answer. “A condom,” he said. Right he was. A condom is the safe way. Abstinence is probably not going…
Such arguments become deep precipitously, but there remains something disconcerting about the method by which society determines the behaviors that are considered within the bounds of normality and those that justify treatment: The book is at least three years away from publication, but it is already stirring bitter debates over a new set of possible…
