Jonathan Chait: "The Facts Are In and Paul Ryan Is Wrong":
Changes in the way we think about the world are not “news” in the classic sense — they occur gradually, without discrete events to signal them. But they matter. Two such developments have come together recently, both
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Now up on the homepage is Michael Higgins's "Larger than Legend: Saving Chesterton from the Chestertonians," which laments the simplification of GKC's thought by some of his most ardent admirers. He was called the Prince of Paradox for a reason. Or rather, for a couple of reasons. For
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Sally Potter on Margaret Thatcher in n+1:
I discovered it was possible to contain at least two attitudes simultaneously: on the one hand, revulsion toward and criticism of her ideas, the policies of greed, selfishness, brutal colonialism and militarism, and, on the other hand, a grudging
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From today's New York Times:
PARIS — As if President François Hollande of France did not have enough trouble with a stagnant economy and a scandal over his former budget minister’s secret overseas bank accounts, now his camel has been eaten.
Grateful Malian authorities gave the baby camel
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The poet Charles Simic on health care, "the new American sadism"
Hendrik Hertzberg on why the Left should avoid calling social-insurance programs "entitlements"
Malcolm Thorndike Nicholson profiles Hilary Putnam, "one of the few living philosophers in the same mold as
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On Easter Sunday, a headline on the New York Times's homepage read: "On Being Catholic." This was followed by a teaser: "Can reflective and honest intellectuals actually believe in the church’s teachings?" A Catholic might find the question mildly irritating, especially that
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From the Commonweal archives: Les Murray’s great Easter poem, published in the issue dated March 26, 1993.
The Say-but-the-Word Centurion Attempts a Summary
That numinous healer who preached Saturnalia and paradox
has died a slave’s death. We were maneuvered into it by priests
and
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Ross Douthat on the GOP's autopsy of the 2012 election, which recommends what Douthat calls "the 'donorist view' of how the Republican Party needs to change": embrace gay marriage and immigration reform while sticking to its economic agenda. Douthat has his doubts:
In a democracy, it isn
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Last week the New York Times posted a short piece by Phillip Lopate about the relationship between doubt and the writing of essays. Lopate argues that the essay is a literary form especially hospitable to uncertainty. The essay is, or can be, exploratory, provisional, even self-contradictory. The
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Tim Parks on Italian politics:
It is the constant impression of people outside Italy that Mr. Berlusconi is some kind of evil buffoon and that the vast majority of Italians repudiate him. They cannot understand how a man so constantly on trial for all kinds of corruption, a man with a huge
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Cass R. Sunstein on the case for "coercive paternalism"
Charles Fried and Godfrey Hodgson on the legal theorist Ronald Dworkin, who died last Thursday at the age of eighty-one
Robert T. Miller on Dworkin—and how hard it is to think and talk as one should about one's intellectual
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From the New York Times (where else?): "Pope’s Successor Is Likely to Share His Doctrine."
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The term "dhimmitude" originally referred to the second-class status of non-Muslims living in any Muslim-majority country whose laws officially favor Islamic norms and practices. Religious minorities, such as Christian and Jews, may be tolerated in such a country, but they are also
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From last night's episode of The Daily Show:
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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The rest of the interview is available here
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Michael Lewis on "The Trouble with Wall Street"
Helen Rittelmeyer on sex and ambition at Yale
John Banville on Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet
William Deresiewicz on why he's not a novelist–or a poet
How not to write about depression, philosophy, and natural disasters (and
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To what extent is religious liberty reducible to the rights of conscience? That is one of the questions Brian Leiter's new book, Why Tolerate Religion?, tries to answer. It's a question that's been on my mind again since the Department of Health and Human Services announced its new proposal for
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In his review of Zero Dark Thirty, which appears in the February 8 issue of Commonweal, Richard Alleva defends the film's controversial treatment of torture:
[Kathryn] Bigelow and scriptwriter Mark Boal have been accused of justifying torture because, in their film, the threat of torture to a
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Featured on the homepage is Charles Michael Andres Clark's response to a recent column by David Brooks. Clark points out that long-term fiscal forecasts, which debt scolds cite with as much confidence as alarm, are notoriously unreliable, because they assume that the future will be an extension of
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New York magazine's Jonathan Chait on Republican rhetoric about debt:
They’re not arguing that low taxes take precedent over lower spending. They just keep falsely insisting over and over that Obama refuses to accept spending cuts. If they think it makes sense to refuse the spending cuts Obama
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Because the mere mention of his name reminds them—and everyone else—that they were wrong about the invasion of Iraq, something most of them still deny and the rest try to forget. The few who admit they were mistaken usually claim that no blame attaches to their error because it was universal:
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NEW PRINCE, NEW POMP
Behold a silly, tender Babe,
In freezing winter night,
In homely manger trembling lies;
Alas! a piteous sight.
The inns are full; no man will yield
This little pilgrim bed;
But forced he is with silly beasts
In crib to shroud his head.
Despise Him not for lying
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Alasdair MacIntyre's presentation at the annual conference of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture.
Alasdair MacIntyre "Catholic Instead of What?" Response by Sean Kelsey from ND Center for Ethics and Culture on Vimeo
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I'm arriving very late to this argument—in online journalism, as in presidential campaigns, two weeks is an eternity—but I'd like to add something to what Matthew J. Frank and Ross Douthat have already written about this very stupid post by a very smart man.
Commenting on Paul Ryan's
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Yesterday Paul Ryan gave a speech about poverty in Cleveland, Ohio. The title of the speech was “Restoring the Promise of Upward Mobility in America's Economy.” As Jonathan Chait points out in his response, the biggest obstacle to upward mobility in this country is not welfare, regulation,
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From "Politicopsycholpathology: Neurotocrats vs. the Grand Old Psychosis," available here at n+1:
In math class they ask you to show your work, so that if you get the wrong answer you can later see where you went astray. In American political life today, you never show your work. So the
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In one of those coincidences that heighten—or at least change—one's experience of a book, I had just started reading Eric Hobsbawm's How To Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism, when I learned that he died earlier today at the age of ninety-five.
Hobsbawm kept working right up
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For those who missed it, here Martin Amis does for the conventions in Tampa and Charlotte what Norman Mailer did for the 1968 conventions in Miami and Chicago, albeit in much smaller scope. Nearly every paragraph is worth quoting. There is this:
Madamic good ole girls in scarlet ensembles, peanut-
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During the Republican primaries, Mitt Romney said he believed income inequality was a topic best discussed in "quiet rooms."
Now we know how he likes to discuss class politics when he's in a quiet room with a few like-minded donors. Referring to the 47 percent of Americans who pay no
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Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, on "What Work Is Really For":
Suppose that in 1932, when [Bertrand Russell] wrote his essay [“In Praise of Idleness”], we had followed his advice and converted all gains in productivity into increased leisure. Antibiotics, jet
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From David Brooks's column in today's New York Times:
[T]here is a flaw in the vision the Republicans offered in Tampa. It is contained in its rampant hyperindividualism. Speaker after speaker celebrated the solitary and heroic individual. There was almost no talk of community and compassionate
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The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier on "Paul Ryan's nasty ideal of self-reliance":
Ryan is animated as much by a theory of government as by a theory of life; but his theory of government is erected in part on his theory of life. For government, limits; for the individual, no limits. A
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Today's New York Times has a front-page article headlined "Romney Seen Pulled 2 Ways Over Economy." Most readers are already familiar with one of those two ways, the one Paul Ryan represents: small government, less regulation, and above all lower taxes, especially for the rich. It's the
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First the good news: We don't have to worry this year about the intellectual qualifications of the GOP vice-presidential candidate -- or about the judgment of a presidential candidate who would choose an unqualified running mate. Of course, it was always highly unlikely that Mitt Romney was going
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Milton gave the devil all the best lines, and the devil gave them to Gore Vidal.
It's now fashionable to talk about a writer's "voice," but Vidal was a reminder that it's style -- as much an invention as an endowment -- that matters most. His voice, the one you heard on television, was
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The Nation's Liliana Segura on the execution of a mentally retarded man in Texas, which took place yesterday after the Supreme Court declined to intervene. (Segura wrote her post before the execution and updated it afterward.) The state of Texas did not deny that fifty-four-year-old Marvin Wilson
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Amusing as it was to see David Cameron give Mitt Romney (and poor Salt Lake City) the back of his hand, Romney's offending remark about the British government's preparations for the Olympic Games was fairly inoffensive -- a problem not so much of what he said as of where he said it and when. (OK,
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Ronald Dworkin on the Affordable Care Act in the New York Review of Books. It's a tax, you say? So what?
For centuries the most powerful and influential argument for social justice has been essentially an insurance-based argument. Justice within a political community requires that the most
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In an essay adapted from their new book, How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life, Robert and Edward Skidelsky argue against the assumption that economic growth is always the best measure of economic health. In the developed world, they claim, the problem is not a lack of wealth, but rather the
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New York magazine's Jonathan Chait on conservative opposition to health-care reform:
Opponents of the law have endlessly invoked “socialism.” Nothing in the Affordable Care Act or any part of President Obama’s challenges the basic dynamics of market capitalism. All sides accept that
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The editors of n+1 on Twitter:
When Beckett wrote, in 1930, that it was every bit as illogical to expect tomorrow’s self to be gratified by today’s experience as it was to expect your hunger to vanish at the sight of your uncle eating a sandwich, he could take it for granted that nobody
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Slavo Žižek on the Greek crisis in the London Review of Books:
There are two main stories about the Greek crisis in the media: the German-European story (the Greeks are irresponsible, lazy, free-spending, tax-dodging etc, and have to be brought under control and taught financial discipline)
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Now up on our homepage is a short web-only article about Padre Alejandro Solalinde, a priest who runs a shelter for Central American migrants in Ixtepec, Oaxacam, in southern Mexico. Padre Alejandro recently had to leave Mexico because of death threats from people who could lose a lot of money
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Last month Jamie Dimon announced that JPMorgan's chief investment office in London had lost at least $2 billion on the kind of complex derivatives that nearly sank the U.S. economy four years ago. Dimon has been a vocal -- and often truculent -- opponent of Washington's efforts to strengthen
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The literary critic William Deresiewicz has a good eye for flimflam. In an article titled "Capitalists and Other Psychopaths," he trains it on the phrase "job creator":
There are ethical corporations, yes, and ethical businesspeople, but ethics in capitalism is purely optional
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Marc A. Thiessen, a Washington Post columnist and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, has complained bitterly at Bishop Stephen Blaire's "attack" on Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Thiessen defends Ryan as a "a faithful Catholic who says his budget work is informed and guided
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William Deresiewicz on the tyranny of freedom:
The only thing we seem to believe in anymore is freedom. Freedom has become the be-all and the end-all of our political expectation, the full meaning of the American experiment.Justice is gone, and even more conspicuously banished is that term of
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Yes, we've got one, too. Right across the street. For those of you not familiar with Morningside Heights, it's called Riverside Church. Its tower looks a little like Yale's Harkness Tower, which is where Frank Lloyd Wright said he'd want to live if he had to live in New Haven -- so he wouldn't
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In the March 23 issue of Commonweal, three writers approach the subject of confession from three very different angles. Thomas L. Kuhman, a clinical psychologist, asks whether the sacrament, as currently practiced, does not often serve as an instrument of evasion or self-deception:
The way the
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Most critics of the HHS contraception mandate have said the controversy is about religious liberty, not contraception. Some of the same critics have said that the question is not whether Catholics could comply with the mandate in good conscience if they had to, but whether the government ought to
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Two of our recent web-only items worth looking at. First, Joseph Becker writes here about some of the more controversial provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012. One of these forbids the transfer of Guantánamo detainees to the U.S. mainland for trial.
Reasonable people may
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Our new editorial on the HHS mandate argues that the federal government is wrong to force Catholic institutions to choose between offering their employees health insurance that covers contraception and not offering their employees any insurance at all. The editorial also argues that, once forced
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From our new editorial on the HHS's contraception-coverage mandate:
The administration’s decision raises deep concerns about its understanding of the fundamental corporate and institutional nature of the Catholic Church and similar religious communities. The HHS decision comes perilously close
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The great Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska died yesterday in Krakow. Here's a poem from her 1976 collection, A Large Number:
IN PRAISE OF FEELING BAD ABOUT YOURSELF
The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame
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Mitt Romney's latest fit of cluelessness:
A few points.
First, what makes this sound so bad is not just the sentence I quote in the title of this post. It's the combination of this sentence and the one before it. "By the way, I'm in this race because I care about Americans. I'm not
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Imagine a large institution that provides free meals to the poor, and imagine that the institution is run by Jains, who are vegetarians. None of the meals offered by this institution include meat, though many of the people to whom the meals are offered are neither Jains nor non-Jainist vegetarians
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Now up on the homepage is Unagidon's reply to Hadley Arkes's recent First Things article about the Affordable Care Act. According to Arkes, any law that forces all citizens to enter into a private contract is not only unconstitutional but also a violation of natural rights. Unagidon explains:
[
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No surprise, it's by Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic:
Last week a record store in Dupont Circle announced that it was closing. The immediate cause of its demise—it had outlasted national and regional chains—was Price Check, Amazon’s new idea for exterminating competition. It is an app
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What to make of the new half-hour film about Mitt Romney's record at the private equity firm Bain Capital? It seems odd that a film portraying financiers as vultures should come from a super PAC that supports Newt Gingrich, a candidate who claims Romney's economic policies aren't conservative
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From Ronald Knox's meditation "Our Lord and the Rich Young Man":
[The rich young man] went away sorrowing; the incident, you would think, was closed; the refused invitation might just as well never have been made. Two hundred and fifty years passed, and those words, read out in church,
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If there's a useful distinction between "childlike" and "childish," it has to be conceptual and not just verbal. "Childlike" can't just refer to the undefined set of things one admires about children, while "childish" refers to an undefined set of things we
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"In the old days -- whenever that was -- there was an internal injunction to be good. Now the injunction is to be happy, or to be enjoying yourself." So says the British psychotherapist and writer Adam Phillips in a video interview available on the website of the The New York Times.
What
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Over at Public Discourse, Ryan T. Anderson (the editor of that online publication) reviews Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism by Peter Wehner and Arthur Brooks. Anderson does a good job of summarizing their argument, giving the book's strongest points the prominence they
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In the current issue of the magazine, John Schwenkler and David Cloutier revisit the pope's encyclical on economics, Caritas in veritate, and argue that, if we're looking for ways to make our economy more humane and sustainable, we should begin with food:
We are used to thinking of love and care
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Having warned its liberal readers not to get too close to the crazy radicals of Occupy Wall Street, the New Republic has posted a series of responses on its Web site. Todd Gitlin -- who, as a former president of Students for a Democratic Society, knows a thing or two about protest movements --
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Commonweal's editorial assistant, Christine Neulieb, recently went downtown to see what all the fuss is about. Is Occupy Wall Street really the beginning of a new political movement, an ephemeral sign of a lasting discontent, or Woodstock without the music? The answer seems to be: hopefully,
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Over at Public Discourse, Christopher Kaczor, a professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University and the author of The Ethics of Abortion (Routlege), offers a thoughtful and persuasive response to Dennis O'Brien's contribution to this discussion about abortion in the current issue of
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The New York Times reports today that the Republican presidential candidates have decided to make their opposition to the Dodd-Frank financial-reform act a centerpiece of their campaigns. They complain about the effect of "regulatory uncertainty" on the economy, though it's clear that the
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The New Yorker is deservedly famous for its fact-checking department, which strains every sentence for errors and inadvertent ambiguities. Mistakes do get by, but not many; unverified assertions that are in theory verifiable usually get cut. John McPhee, a frequent contributor to the New Yorker,
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Leon Wieseltier, a religious man with little sympathy for Christianity, and Christopher Hitchens, an irreligious man with almost no sympathy for Christianity, are both right to question Texas Governor Rick Perry's complacent displays of zeal. Wieseltier suspects that Perry's August 6 stadium event
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Over at Verdicts, Scott Moringiello has a fine post about Geoffrey Hill and Marilynne Robinson. Moringiello mentions in passing Robinson's recent Holy Cross commencement address, which is, as you might expect, worth hearing or reading. (You can do both here.) In her occasional prose as in her
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As Jim Pauwels says, everyone should see it. (Warning: There are a few lewd jokes, and the segment is divided into two clips.)
The Daily Show - World of Class Warfare - Warren Buffett vs. Wealthy Conservatives
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Herewith the first of a two-part series on income inequality, which aired last night on the PBS Newshour. Paul Solman talked to Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke University who designed a study to test public perceptions of wealth inequality. The study found -- and Solman's man-on-the-street
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Thanks to Gerelyn for directing our attention to Paul Simms's "Shouts & Murmurs" piece in the August 8 New Yorker. Titled "God's Blog," it starts with a quick post from the Creator himself, which is followed by a series of reader comments:
UPDATE: Pretty pleased with
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Yesterday my colleague Grant Gallicho found a Depression-era Commonweal editorial defending FDR against his many critics (“Recovery & Reformation,” November 17, 1933). The terms of the discussion then are weirdly familiar: the loose talk of "socialism" to describe any program
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THEORY OF PRAYER
Not in the streets, not in the white streets
Or in the crowded porticoes
Shall we catch You in our words,
Or lock You in the lenses of our cameras,
You Who escaped the subtle Aristotle,
Blinding us by Your evidence,
Your too clear evidence, Your everywhere.
Not in the
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I've never like Howard Dean so much
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In the August 12 issue, former Commonweal intern Andy Whinery (now at the New York Review of Books) reviews David Brooks's The Social Animal. Andy has some good things to say about the problems with Brooks's method, but his deepest criticism has to do with Brooks's generally opportunistic attitude
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A few weeks ago the New York Times Magazine published a piece by Mark Oppenheimer about marriage and fidelity. Oppenheimer explored the argument of sex columnist Dan Savage that the real purpose of marriage should be stability rather than fidelity, fidelity being an unnaturally difficult and libido
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From "The Night Birds," Leon Wieseltier's column (available to subscribers only) in the August 4 issue of the New Republic:
NOT LONG AGO I surprised myself with the embarrassing thought that I no longer know any lonely people. This is an exaggeration, of course: the smart rooms in
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The magazine's June 28 editorial, "Over the Brink," concluded that the debt ceiling was an unnecessary and irrational constraint:
If Congress wants to cut the deficit, it doesn’t need to set itself an artificial limit; it needs to spend less, raise taxes, or both. After all, most of
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"These are difficult times in the life of our nation. Millions are looking for work, have been for some time, and the spending binge going on in Washington is a big part of the reason why.... President Obama came to Congress in January and requested business as usual -- yet another routine
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Now at Verdicts, Anthony Domestico on John Banville's The Infinities.
Banville is such a beautiful stylist that I’m tempted to simply quote some of his most lyrical turns of phrase: a blushing character’s face “is tinged with palest pink, like milk with a drop of wine in it”; an estuary
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How worried should we be about the national debt? Is the United States really headed the way of Greece and Portugal?
In an article just posted to our home page, the economist Charles Michael Andres Clark argues that the debt panic that has seized much of Washington and the media indicates a
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In the current issue of Commonweal, Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill writes about John Berryman's "Eleven Addresses to the Lord," a series of poems he wrote after his treatment for alcoholism at St. Mary's Hospital in upstate New York. As we were preparing Cahill's article for publication, we
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The Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz asks why we seem to have learned so little from the recession and the financial crisis that precipitated it. Free-market ideology was allowed to do its thing for three decades, and the results are in. But Wall Street and too much of Washington
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From our editorial on the debt-ceiling debate:
The compromises required by democracy often involve some brinkmanship. But many are now worried that the Tea Party has taken possession of enough Republicans to drive the whole party—and with it the country—over the brink. The Treasury Department
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The New Yorker's George Packer on the biggest insider-trading case in history.
Michael Lewis on The Autobiography of Mark Twain in the New Republic (subscription required).
Ross Douthat's column about abortion and sex selection in today's Times.
An old piece on same-sex marriage and the
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A MODEST MOUND OF BONES
That short-sleeved man, our
uncle owns
the farm next our farm, south
and west of us, and
he butchers for a living, hand-to-mouth.
Once walking on his land
we found a hill, topped by a flower,
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As part of its austerity plan, the United Kingdom's governing Conservative Party wants to make the British university system a little more like ours: more responsive to market pressures, less expensive for the state. The nonrich will still be given places at Oxford and Cambridge, but many more of
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On the op-ed page of today's New York Times, Peter A. Diamond explains why he's withdrawing as a nominee to the Fed. A professor of economics at M.I.T. who won the Nobel Prize for his work on unemployment and the labor market, Diamond has been told by Republican senators that he isn't qualified.
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THE DEAD IN EUROPE
After the planes unloaded, we fell down
Buried together, unmarried men and women;
Not crown of thorns, not iron, not Lombard crown,
Not grilled and spindle spires pointing to heaven
Could save us. Raise us, Mother, we fell down
Here hugger-mugger in the jellied fire
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Congressional Republicans warn that if the federal government doesn't make deep spending cuts soon, international investors will start to worry that the U.S. can't pay its bills. Therefore...unless the Democrats agree to more spending cuts, the Republicans say they will vote against raising the
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Commonweal has long been a go-to place for intelligent criticism of books, movies, and plays. But what about cultural phenomena that don't fit neatly into any of those categories? What about publicity stunts, celebrity exhibitionism, and sham ceremony? With the addition of our new cultural critic
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Not a bit of it. He was undeniably charismatic. The sort of man you'd have noticed no matter what he was wearing, with or without the patriarchal beard. A devout Muslim (not a good one), he never claimed to be a prophet, but to us he seemed to play the part, and he definitely looked it. No one
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The best article you'll ever read about bribery, fiscal misprision, Greek misanthropy, and the monks of Mount Athos.
At that moment, out of nowhere, Father Ephraim walks in. Round, with rosy cheeks and a white beard, he is more or less the spitting image of Santa Claus. He even has a twinkle in
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Donald R. McClarey of The American Catholic is disgusted but not surprised that Commonweal has published an article defending the ideas of Karl Marx:
That a Catholic magazine would give space to a man who thinks that perhaps Marx was right after all, and who is a bitter anti-Catholic to boot,
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Terry Eagleton thinks so. In his article in the current issue of Commonweal, he makes the case for a reconsideration of Marxist theory in the aftermath of the economic crisis that began three years ago.
In our own time, as Marx predicted, inequalities of wealth have dramatically deepened. The
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Fr. Peter Milward, SJ, who teaches English literature at Sophia University in Tokyo, writes here about last week's earthquake and its aftermath:
I’ve become reasonably accustomed to swaying after fifty-five years in Japan, where small earthquakes are fairly common. But this was different.
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Asked yesterday on "Fox Sunday News" about the implications for American energy policy of what's happening in Japan, Mitch McConnell responded, "My thought about it is, we ought not to make American and domestic policy based upon an event that happened in Japan." Right. Let's
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On the New Republic's Web site, one of the best things I've seen on the uprisings in the Middle East:
[I]f there was a proximate cause...to the Tunisian uprising, it was that least virtual of political acts—the decision of Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in the central Tunisian city of Sidi
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Some dotCommonweal readers may remember the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who late in life entered the Catholic Church and is perhaps best known in America for his book about Mother Teresa, Something Beautiful for God. In the 60s Muggeridge wrote book and film reviews for several American
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Wilfrid Sheed, who died Wednesday morning at the age of eighty, may have been the most naturally gifted writer who ever wrote regularly for Commonweal. At Slate, Timothy Noah claims that Sheed "possessed the most captivating writing style of any journalist writing in the 1960s
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The editors of n+1 on the "Revolt of the Elites":
[E]litism...usually refers to a much narrower phenomenon than just a fancy education. Recall that in 2004 the educational backgrounds of the cultural elitist John Kerry (St. Paul’s, Yale) and the cultural populist George Bush (Andover,
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Christians who oppose the modern welfare state and, more generally, "handouts" sometimes cite St. Paul's instruction to the Thessalonians, "If anyone will not work, let him not eat" (2 Thessalonians 3:10). In a recent thread, a commenter misquoted this verse, revealingly,
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The novelist, only nine years older than Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, writes in the New York Review of Books about "2.0 people" from the perspective of a 1.0 person who has dipped into the world's most famous social network and jumped back out, afraid of what this big pool of
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He can be a blowhard and a bully, and without his cue cards he's often a muddle, as on election night; but Keith Olbermann is usually right. And if you think he's usually right, you're likely to find him amusing, usually. (If you think he's wrong, his confidence will irritate you, as Bill O'
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The Republicans, we are told, have capitalized on the country's anger and frustration in the face of a crippled economy. No doubt this is true. But it's also true that Republicans have always been better at appealing to voters' pride, both collective pride (patriotism or nationalism or national
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Now up on our homepage is Robert Vischer's report on last weekend's "Open Hearts, Open Minds, and Fair Minded Words" conference at Princeton University. (The conference title came from President Obama's speech last year at Notre Dame.) Vischer observes that there now seems to be more fear
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The New Republic has an excellent piece by Michael Lewis about the sort of self-serious analysis of foreign affairs one finds in such journals as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy and, yes, the New Republic. (To TNR's credit, Lewis is allowed to mention this: "How many articles in The New
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Note to the New York Times: If your headline is "Body of Missing Boy is Found in Desert About a Mile From Home," the lead should not be:
PHOENIX — It was not a needle in a haystack but a toddler in the desert, both of which are extremely challenging to find
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As Commonweal's editor, Paul Baumann, prepares to move into a glamorous new office (one with a door and a window), he has slowly been excavating his old office. This morning he unearthed an ancient photocopy of an editorial comment from an ancient issue of New Blackfriars. The piece is dated
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"Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself."--Ludwig Wittgenstein• • •
Paul tells the Corinthians, "I show you a more excellent way" -- not "I show you a more excellent way to talk about the things you were going to do anyway." But isn't this exactly
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Kenneth L. Woodward, the former religion editor of Newsweek, has written a piece for us about the New York Times's religion problem. It is, Woodward explains, a question of rival magisteria:
No question, the Times’s worldview is secularist and secularizing, and as such it rivals the Catholic
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In a blog post titled "Streetwalkers," the New Yorker's George Packer laments that, after a brief hiatus, the brain drain to Wall Street seems to be back underway:
Why shouldn’t the graduates of America’s élite universities flock to Wall Street again, now that the market
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The historian Anthony Grafton has posted a short appraisal of Pope Benedict XVI's strength's and weaknesses on the blog of the New York Review of Books. The judgments are equitable; the tone, remarkably equable. He describes Benedict as a man of qualities -- as, among other things, "probably
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If you're like me, when you read a newspaper artcle about bans on air travel in Europe or the sex-abuse scandal in the church, you may find yourself wondering, "What would the actor Matthew Modine think about this?"
Thanks to New York's Metro, we now know. Metro, a free daily, asked
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In the current issue of Commonweal, Fr. Robert E. Lauder writes about his interview with Woody Allen, which is available here on our Web site. "As a long-time admirer of [Allen's] work I was already familiar with his general outlook, but I was still surprised at the extreme language he used to
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He did not believe. ("I cannot utter the word 'Lord' with meaning. Because I do not believe that he will come to judge me; because that says nothing to me. And it could say something to me, only if I lived completely differently.") But he tried to imagine what it would be like to believe
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Our friends at Dissent have started their own group blog. They call it "Arguing the World"; David Marcus, their online editor, explains why:
“Arguing the World” takes its name from Joseph Dorman’s documentary about four young radicals who gathered in a City College cafeteria to
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John Schwenkler is right about this post by Ross Douthat. It is, as Schwenkler says, honest and charitable. (Douthat's writing almost always is.) But on his way to making a good point about the relationship of the prolife movement to America's two major political parties, Douthat rather too
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From David Brooks's column in today's New York Times:
Economics achieved coherence as a science by amputating most of human nature. Now economists are starting with those parts of emotional life that they can count and model (the activities that make them economists). But once they’re in this
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The March 25 issue of the London Review of Books includes an interview with the historian Tony Judt, whose Ill Fares the Land has just been published by Penguin. We'll have something to say about that important book both here and in the magazine. It's the sort of book one wishes every college
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Bart Stupak calls their bluff. One of last night's most gratifying moments
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In his response to something I wrote here yesterday, the National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru points out that I mispelled his last name. ("Matthew Boudway is so indignant over a post of mine that he can't even type straight.") I apologize to him for that. A Boudway can never be too careful
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Dr. Charmaine Yoest, President and CEO of Americans United for Life Action, has responded to the Stupak deal with the following statement:
This deal to pass the largest expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade is a tragedy for America. We believe that Mr. Stupak’s choice to succumb to the
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John McCormack of the Weekly Standard takes issue with our editorial, "Crying Wolf":
The editors of Commonweal try to claim that the Hyde amendment would apply to the community health centers:
"since such money will in any case be channeled through the Department of Health and
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If this isn't the best answer to the New Atheists I've seen, it's certainly the best three-minute-and-fifty-nine-second answer I've seen
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Nick Baumann, who covers national politics for Mother Jones (and is the son of Commonweal's editor, Paul Baumann), explains here why the Senate bill fails to explicitly apply the Hyde Amendment to the new funding for community health centers.
The pro-lifers are wrong. The Senate bill won't lead
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Until today, this memo by Timothy Stoltzfus Jost of Washington and Lee law school, was the best analysis of the Senate bill's abortion language I had seen. Now the best analysis I've seen is his response to the USCCB's critique of that memo. (Strangely, the USCCB's critique was posted not on
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Last week I wrote here about a chart put together by Americans United for Life. The organization has responded to my comments here. The controversy about whether the Senate health-care bill funds abortion is complicated, tedious, and important. For those who still have a stomach for it, I
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At Politics Daily, our own David Gibson has a helpful article on abortion and health-care reform. Gibson goes into details that most stories on the subject skip or just summarize, and he talks to a few people who actually seem to know what they're talking about. His conclusion: the Senate bill
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About suffering they were never wrong,The Old Masters: how well they understoodIts human position; how it takes placeWhile someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
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In his New Republic column, Jonathan Chait explains that, when it comes to health-care reform, the difference between Democrats and Republicans is not about "how far to go, but in which direction":
The divide is simple. Democrats propose to shift resources from the rich and the
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This afternoon I received an email from Americans United for Life. "TAXPAYERS FORCED TO PAY FOR ABORTION UNDER PRESIDENT'S PLAN" it warned in a headline, which was followed by a "Statement of Dr. Charmaine Yoest":
This announcement marks the President’s latest attempt to
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Barbara Mujica's article about St. Teresa of Ávila is now available to nonsubscribers here. The article, titled "Teresa of Ávila: A Woman of Her Time, a Saint for Ours," is both a personal account of how Mujica was changed by her discovery of Teresa's writings and a survey of the
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The National Review has published some excellent obituaries in its day. The magazine's founder, William F. Buckley Jr., was a master of the form. But in this day many of NR's obituary notes, which appear in its front-of-the-book roundup called "The Week," are little bundles of casual
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The Republicans say they have a health-care plan, one the American people can accept. It preserves the system we have, they insist, and brings down the cost of insurance. According to Representave Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the President's plan is a "repackaged" version of the Senate
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"Wal-Mart Cuts Over 13,000 of What It Calls Jobs":
Sources inside the company confirmed that roughly 1,200 people will be forced to leave what one might very charitably characterize as their careers in the neon-lit dungeon known as the membership recruitment office. In addition, another
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A brief footnote to Greg Wolfe's earlier post about the death of Ralph McInerny.
I was once an assistant editor at Crisis, the magazine McInerny founded with Michael Novak in 1982. While I was there, one of my jobs was to edit and proofread McInerny's column. It was usually the smartest thing
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Rebecca Solnit argues persuasively in the Nation that it is journalistic malfeasance to report on "looters" in Haiti as if they were opportunistic criminals:
Imagine, reader, that your city is shattered by a disaster. Your home no longer exists, and you spent what cash was in your
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And now for some good news from Washington. The White House is finally listening to Paul Volcker:
Declaring that huge banks had nearly brought down the economy by taking “huge, reckless risks in pursuit of quick profits and massive bonuses,” President Obama on Thursday proposed legislation
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Jonathan Chait, whose TRB column in the New Republic has been one of the best things in that magazine in recent years, has begun blogging at TNR's Web site. I wish he hadn't waited so long. His posts, like his column, are sharp, smart, and often very funny. He knows (and cares) enough about
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In his online column at the New York Times, Stanley Fish distinguishes between what's right and what's true. Procedures yield the former by bracketing the latter. This often leaves us unsatisfied. Sometimes it also leads to absurdity:
[L]ast year I found myself talking to an insurance
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The winter 2010 issue of Dissent features a forum titled "Intellectuals and Their America." Among the contributors are Michael Tomasky, Martha Nussbaum, Jackson Lears, and the ever-linkable and often-likable Leon Wieseltier, who writes:
[T]o the inventory of alienating human
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For those who missed it, Clifford Longley's column in the November 28 issue of the Tablet does a good job of teasing out the absurdity in Richard Dawkins's insistence that it is wrong to "indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them"
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Those are the words of John Varley, chief executive of Barclays; they were addressed to an audience at the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Varley is one several bankers who are now taking the case for free-market capitalism to churchgoers. Brian Griffiths, an adviser to Goldman Sachs
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In the October 22 issue of the London Review of Books, David Bromwich argues that President Obama's irenic postpartisanship betrays a hobbling misconception about politics: the president seems to imagine that no divisions are so deep that they cannot be overcome with gestures of goodwill and a
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At a recent panel discussion on Iraq and Afghanistan, Todd Gitlin expressed serious misgivings about the effort to banish the Taliban from Afghanistan. His remarks have now been posted on Dissent's Web site. Gitlin does not deny that the Taliban is very bad for Afghanistan, nor does he claim it
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Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic quotes Gerald Marzorati, the editor of the New York Times Magazine, who was recently asked if his magazine has an ideology. Marzorati answered yes, and then explained:
Call it Urban Modern. That is, I think it reflects not a left-or-right POLITICAL ideology
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In his online New York Times column, "Think Again," Stanley Fish writes here, here, and here about the way writing is taught at American colleges. His conclusion: It usually isn't taught well when it is taught at all. Along the way Fish spars with several composition teachers who, in
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By claiming that Democrats are pushing health-care reform too quickly, Republicans are asking us to forget anything that happened before the last election. Americans have been talking about this problem for decades now; meanwhile little has been done about it. And as we have continued to talk,
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In his TRB column in the New Republic, Jonathan Chait discusses Will Wilkinson's Cato Institute paper on income inequality. Wilkinson thinks it shouldn't bother us so much. Chait disagrees.
Wilkinson's most interesting argument holds that material inequality between the rich and the non-
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A few weeks ago, Stanley Fish made a distinction that could cut through a lot of the confusion and posturing in the debate over Sonia Sotomayor's statement about what a wise Latina could bring to the bench. Perhaps it was wise, or at least prudent, for Sotomayor to distance herself from that
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Matt Cavedon of the Acton Institute writes that I and other "leftists" are trying to "own" the pope's new encyclical, Caritas in veritate. Since private ownership is the summum bonum for the folks at Acton, maybe I should take this as a compliment. But there's plenty of
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A summer special at dotCommonweal: three new between-issues web-only articles.
First, E.J. Dionne's column about the new encyclical and the president's upcoming meeting with the pope. Dionne writes:
Benedict is more a left-of-center Christian Democrat than a socialist. His radical critique of
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Encyclicals, especially social encyclicals, often function as Rorschach tests. The generalities and translationese produce whatever image an observer wants to see, or wants others to see. Whatever can be misconstrued will be misconstrued.
But there are several passages about political economy
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In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Thomas Frank writes about the mythology behind the Republicans' obstruction of health-care reform:
Where the conservative mythologists show their hand is when they use their own monumental screw-ups, committed during conservatism's long years in charge of the
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Last week the political philosopher Michael Walzer wrote a short piece about the response to recent events in Iran for the Web sites of the New Republic and Dissent. There he carefully distinguished between the way private citizens and members of the media should respond to the Iranian government's
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In today's Times, Tony Judt argues that President Obama should not be taken in by Benjamin Netanyahu's claim that his government is willing to entertain the possibility of a Palestinian state, since what Netaynyahu has in mind for the Palestinians is a kind of statehood lite: a state without
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A free copy of Commonweal Confronts the Century to the first person who can -- without using a search engine -- name the authors of both of the following passages. The first will be easy enough for many readers of dotCommonweal, but the second?
The first:
This, therefore, is...my reason for
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In N1BR, the new online book review of the literary journal n+1, Benjamin Kunkel reviews three books about the impact of new digital media on our culture. I posted excerpts of another essay Kunkel wrote on this subject a few months ago. The review is less ambitious but more personal than the
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In today's New York Times, Ross Douthat makes two important points about the abortion debate. Both have been made many times before, by Douthat and others, but they cannot be made too often. The first is that most abortions, including those performed after the first trimester, have nothing to do
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From the New York Times, May 12:
LONDON — This month dozens of academics at Oxford University received anonymous packages. Each contained photocopied pages from a book describing decades-old allegations of sexual harassment against Derek Walcott, the Nobel Prize-winning poet.
It is still
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What are the jobs of the twenty-first century doing to twenty-first-century minds? Why, when we talk about American jobs, do we talk only about how few there are and how little they pay? For the purposes of all political and economic discussion, high-quality job has come to mean any full-time job
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In the thread under Fr. Imbelli's last post, my colleague Mollie Wilson O'Reilly refers to William Saletan's most recent Slate column, which relates President Obama's Notre Dame commencement address to new polling data about public attitudes toward abortion. Saletan's reading of Obama's speech
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Ross Douthat has a column in today's New York Times about the appeal of Dan Brown's novels and the two blockbuster movies they've inspired. Suspense is one ingredient; so is a well-varnished conspiracy theory. But that, Douthat says, is only part of it:
The polls that show more Americans
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To improvise when there are no obvious solutions available is called resourcefulness. To improvise instead of adopting an obvious but unpleasant solution to an unpleasant problem is called stalling.
Some people believe that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's plan to help private investors buy
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In March Commonweal ran an essay by Terry Eagleton titled "Culture & Barbarism." The essay began its life as one of four lectures given at Yale University in April 2008 -- they were that year's Terry Lectures. (As you might expect, Eagleton did not waste the coincidence of names
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The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has long been a favorite of many conservatives, especially religious conservatives. And the things they admire about him are indeed admirable: his contribution to the revival of virtue ethics, his concern for the relationship between tradition and rationality, and
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From the Commonweal archives: Les Murray's great Easter poem, published in the issue dated March 26, 1993.
The Say-but-the-Word Centurion Attempts a Summary
That numinous healer who preached Saturnalia and paradox
has died a slave's death. We were maneuvered into it by priests
and by the
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President Obama's economic pragmatism is said to be a commitment to "whatever works." This is in one way a refreshing change from the approach of his predecessor, who always seemed sure that he already knew what worked (for problems at home, lower taxes for the rich; for problems abroad,
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In the April 10 issue of Commonweal, and now up on the homepage, is another article on the economic crisis by Charles R. Morris. Few write as clearly as Morris about the series of events and decisions that have brought us to this pass. Fewer still write as trenchantly. Morris spares no one in his
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In a New York Times op-ed piece titled "Obama's Ersatz Capitalism," the economist Joseph E. Stiglitz writes:
In theory, the administration’s plan is based on letting the market determine the prices of the banks’ “toxic assets” — including outstanding house loans and securities
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Flannery O'Connor would have been eighty-four today -- the Solemnity of the Annunciation. Many of her stories involved some kind of annunciation, some short encounter that changes everything (think of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"). She rarely wrote directly about the events of the Gospel
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For those who haven't already seen it, Terry Eagleton's cover article, "Culture & Barbarism," is now up on Commonweal's homepage. A taste:
Advanced capitalism is inherently agnostic. It looks particularly flaccid when its paucity of belief runs up against an excess of the stuff
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From a discourse titled "Neglect of Divine Calls and Warnings":
[E]very sin has a history: it is not an accident; it is the fruit of former sins in thought or deed; it is the token of a habit deeply seated and widely spread; it is the aggravation of a virulent disease; and, as the last
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"If it’s obvious that we’re not talking embryos that can -- that under any conceivable scenario would be used for a process that would allow them to be fertilized and become little babies, and I think if it’s obvious that we’re not talking about some science fiction cloning of human
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Is this a Fast, to keep
The larder lean?
And clean
From fat of veals and sheep?
Is it to quit the dish
Of flesh, yet still
To fill
The platter high with fish?
Is it to fast an hour,
Or ragg'd to go,
Or show
A down-cast look and sour?
No: 'tis a Fast to dole
Thy sheaf of wheat
And meat
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Welcome dear feast of Lent: who loves not thee
He loves not Temperance, or Authority,
But is compos'd of passion.
The Scriptures bid us fast; the Church says, now:
Give to thy Mother, what thou wouldst allow
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The New York Times reports this morning:
PARIS — Judges at the International Criminal Court ordered the arrest Wednesday of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, charging him with war crimes and crimes against humanity for a concerted government campaign against civilians
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On his New Yorker blog, "Interesting Times," George Packer writes:
Obama isn’t trying to remake America’s economy and society out of ideological hubris. He’s initiating sweeping changes because he inherited a set of interrelated emergencies that require swift, decisive action.
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From Leon Wieseltier's "Washington Diarist" column in this week's New Republic:
The response of the right to the crisis in America was to flee to its catechism. The Republicans propose to bail out the economy with doctrine. Unemployment is 7.6 percent and rising, and they say: let them
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On the question of Obama and abortion (yes, that again), three kinds of arguments were made by Catholics who did not believe that voting for Obama was an obvious error or proof of diabolical possession. (Not all of these were Obama supporters.) Some, taking their cue from the bishops, argued that
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Thomas Frank, in yesterday's edition of the Wall Street Journal:
The announcement last week that Trader Monthly magazine was ceasing publication was one of those moments when a chance arrow of history scores a perfect bull's eye on a deserving target. The current recession, brought on at least
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"Shameful" bonuses? A million-dollar dustbin? A new coporate jet for the executives of a bank in crisis? How is this possible? How is it possible that we're surprised? This is an old story in American capitalism: businesses that are theoretically insolvent -- or people who are
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In an earlier thread on the death of John Updike, Joseph S. O'Leary directs our attention to "Seven Stanzas at Easter," a poem written very early in Updike's career. The poem is unambivalently Christian, and one wonders whether Updike could -- or would -- have written it later in his
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Leon Wieseltier says Happy Chanukah to Mayor Bloomberg -- and Merry Christmas to Caroline Kennedy.
I can almost not imagine a more obvious mutilation of the meritocratic ideal than the appointment of Caroline Kennedy to the United State Senate. A Senate seat is a fucking valuable thing, you
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This piece by Ross Douthat in the Week in Review section of last Sunday's New York Times is the best thing I have seen about the politics of abortion in the aftermath of the election. Douthat puts paid to the idea that prolifers cost the Republicans the election and should now be hushed or
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John Milton, that great scourge of the Catholic Church, and one of the greatest religious poets in the language, was born four hundred years ago today in Cheapside, London -- the son of a scrivener (and former Catholic). Milton knew five languages besides English (Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French,
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New York Review Books recently published a new edition of Lionel Trilling's great 1950 collection, The Liberal Imagination. In an essay about the novel, titled "Art and Fortune," Trilling writes, "Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself
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In the Fall 2008 issue of the journal n+1 (number seven), Benjamin Kunkel has an essay about how the internet has affected public life (“Drawn and Quartered on the Internet”). This is a topic that inspires a lot of vague and inconclusive apprehension but not much real analysis. Techno-
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In its Fall 2008 issue, The Paris Review interviews Marilynne Robinson. The whole thing is worth reading, but one exchange is especially interesting.
It may be true that real religious experience is incompatible with a merely instrumental understanding of religion. But, as Robinson makes clear,
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As I was walking home tonight, I thought to myself, “I should have a look at the Poetry Foundation website now and then. Otherwise, how will I know when someone like Hayden Carruth dies?” So when I got home I turned on the computer, went to the site, and there was the news: Hayden Carruth died
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Whatever one thinks of the proposed bailout, there was something very ugly about the Treasury Secretary's impatience with congressmen who dared to question the wisdom of his original three-page proposal. In "From a German War Primer," Bertolt Brecht has some good lines about the
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In the thread under Eduardo's last post, Joe Pettit mentions that the conservative columnist Kathleen Parker now thinks Palin ought to bow out. A good line from the Parker piece: "If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself."
But Parker seems to think that Palin's
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Why is self-deception so easy and common, self-correction so difficult and rare? Pride is the safe answer. OK, but why does pride affect us, almost all of us, in this way? Most of us believe what we want to believe and surround ourselves with people who agree with us -- or else with people who
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At the bottom of our last thread on the financial crisis, Barbara recommends this helpful article by Robert Kuttner in the American Prospect: "Seven Deadly Sins of Deregulation -- and Three Necessary Reforms." Kuttner reminds us that the de- and non-regulation that led to the mess
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I don't think the Wall Street Journal would allow me to copy every Thomas Frank column on this blog (I sometimes wonder how they can bear to run the column themselves). But it's been a few weeks since I last mentioned him, and in that time a lot has happened. The champions of deregulation,
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Time Magazine remains, even today, an important American institution. In recent years it has done a lot to squander its legacy of smart middlebrow journalism (think James Agee, Whittaker Chambers, and Dwight MacDonald), but it still has a circulation of over three million, which is higher than
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David Gibson raises a number of important questions in his last post. But one of them -- the one mentioned in his title -- seems to me to be preeminently important, and I'd like to focus on it here.
If it's true that both Obama and Biden managed to avoid sounding as clueless as Nancy Pelosi (a
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The problem with John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate is not -- or not mainly -- about her qualities, or even her qualifications; the problem is what it reveals about McCain himself: that he and his advisors are not bothered by self-contradiction, that the only logic that
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Hard to say what was more fun -- watching the Olympics or reading Anthony Lane's two-part report from Beijing, published by the New Yorker and available here and here. Lane's account is full of close observation, amusing trivia, and the kind of stories that the television coverage mostly overlooked
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Here the novelist and art critic John Berger reads a passage addressed to death by the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who died on August 8 at the age of 67. Not Donne's "Death, be not proud" but "Death, wait..."
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fromy11082A[/
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Archbishop Charles Chaput has been reviled by some liberal Catholics, here and elsewhere, for suggesting that Catholics who vote for prochoice politicians will have to answer to the unborn victims of abortion.
But [Catholics who support pro-choice candidates] also need a compelling proportionate
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For those who missed it, here's Thomas Frank's pointed analysis of Phil Gramm's Marie Antoinette moment. "This, historians will someday say, was the snarling end of an era in which our leaders believed that markets represented the very will of the people; that to serve one was to serve the
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In May, the New Republic published a piece titled "The Stupidity of Dignity"by Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Commonweal commented on it here. Now Paul J. Griffiths responds to Pinker in the August/September issue of First Things. (The
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About twenty years ago an African leader wrote the following words:
As a nation with long-term interests in southern Africa and a fundamental commitment to the promotion of justice and democratic values, the United States cannot stand aside as a human tragedy of potentially immense
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What Peter Steinfels did for Hilaire Belloc in the October 26 issue of Commonweal, Adam Gopnik now does for (or is it to?) G.K. Chesterton in this week's New Yorker. (The article, not available online, is titled "The Back of the World.") Gopnik is a fierce champion of Chesterton's
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In this week’s issue of the New Yorker the critic James Wood reviews Bart D. Ehrman’s God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer. Like Ehrman, Wood was once a believer. For Wood, as for Ehrman, it was what theologians call “the problem of evil
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Once again Leon Wieseltier has found something useful to say about a fairly useless controversy:
"You'd think he'd do other believers the courtesy of assuming they've also thought about their beliefs," Kristol remarks about Obama. Auf keinen Fall, Genosse! American religion may be the
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For those who haven't seen it yet, here, from the New Republic, is Michael Tomasky's masterful demolition of Jonah Goldberg's bestselling book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. I particularly like this parenthetical speculation:
(
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[This is a revised and somewhat shortened version of a letter I wrote to Deal Hudson last week; he has posted his own summary of the letter on the InsideCatholic website and promises to respond.]
Dear Deal,
I just read your latest response to Douglas Kmiec's article in Slate about the
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