A powerful story in this morning's New York Times Magazine illustrates the value of restorative justice, where the focus of the criminal justice system is put on the victims of crime and the community harmed by it. A young man killed his girlfriend of several years after an extensive dispute, and
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In a brief interview, the philosopher Joshua Cohen reflects on the beauty of Central Park, noting how "the park provides an experience of beauty and is also ... driven by a remarkable intellectual idea: the democratic idea of an experience of beauty for the people". As an example of
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Last week is ages ago in blog time, I know, but I just came across a passage in Wendell Berry's Hannah Coulter that speaks to a ridiculous pseudo-controversy that engulfed the Internets early last week. Chris Hayes, an editor at The Nation and host of a program on MSNBC (full disclosure: I don't
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In their statement on the revised version of the HHS regulations, the U.S. bishops write that under the new terms, the mandate "would allow non-profit, religious employers to declare that they do not offer such coverage [of sterilization and contraception]. But the employee and insurer may
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Consider the following story:
Suppose there is a law requiring every father to purchase a car for each of his daughters or pay a hefty fine, and Smith and Jones set out to meet this obligation. Smith wants to buy his daughter a car with a turbocharged engine, and when he goes to the auto dealer he
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Suppose Grant is right, and the Obama administration's revision to the HHS mandate, whereby religious employers are exempted from having to contribute their own dollars directly to pay for insurance policies that cover contraception, is sufficient to address concerns about religious freedom. It
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This post, in which First Things contributor Greg Forster makes what he calls "The Moral Case Against Child Tax Deductions", is a strange piece of reasoning. Here is Forster's argument in a nutshell:
The rule of law is a much higher moral imperative for government than encouraging
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Via Rod Dreher, here is a terrific column by First Things editor Rusty Reno, taking on a staff editorial from the Wall Street Journal that criticized Rick Santorum's proposal to expand the tax credit for children as "social policy masquerading as economics". As Reno points out, the WSJ's
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Here is an absolutely fascinating, and for me very saddening, article on the economics of the production of altar bread. At stake is the struggle taking place between a Rhode Island company that produces 80% of the communion wafers consumed in the U.S., and a dwindling number of religious
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I have been traveling for the past few days, and am sorry to be slow in noting the death of Michael Dummett, Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford from 1979-1992 and undeniably one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Dummett was also a faithful Catholic, something I
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Matthew Boudway points me to a clip from the documentary film Collision, where Christopher Hitchens debates the Presbyterian pastor Douglas Wilson. In it, Hitchens acknowledges the difficulty of the so-called "fine-tuning argument" from the atheist perspective, and then notes an important
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The public square has a gaping hole this morning, as the brilliant Christopher Hitchens has died. Here is a brief obituary in Vanity Fair that links to some of his most recent columns and essays, several of which reflect on the cancer that took his life. David Gibson excerpted one of them in this
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Via Rod Dreher comes some good news: the Kentucky Baptist Convention is pushing for legislation to regulate predatory lenders:
Kentucky’s largest religious denomination joined Tuesday in a growing call for regulations on payday lenders, saying such loans cost the annual equivalent of nearly
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Today is (was?) the 50th anniversary of Dwight D. Eisenhower's Presidential farewell address, in which he coined the famous phrase "military-industrial complex" in warning of the "economic, political, even spiritual" consequences of the "total influence" of America's
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Writes Joe Klein, on today's news concerning the black-white achievement gap in reading, where 12% of black fourth-grade boys and 38% of white fourth-grade boys are designated as proficient:
[...] let's look at it another way: only 38% of white boys are "proficient" at reading, which
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I called attention the other day to a couple of startlingly - though by no means atypically - offensive posts by the conservative blogger Jim Hoft, whose blog "Gateway Pundit" has been hosted at First Things for quite some time now. Now comes this comment from Joe Carter, FT's Web editor
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The big, bloggy news today concerns a supporter of Rand Paul, the Republican candidate for Kentucky's Senate seat, who reacted badly when a female MoveOn.org volunteer went in for a harmless prank. (For the record, I too am a Paul supporter.) Writes the Louisville Courier-Journal (boldface emphasis
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Via Ross Douthat, I see that Jody Bottum has a truly courageous piece in the new issue of First Things calling for Cardinal Sodano (whose see-no-evil antics were blogged about earlier here and here) to step down from his position as dean of the College of Cardinals over his role in covering up
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Remarking on my earlier post, Robert George writes:
... someone "claiming the banner" of Catholicism who says, (1) "the plight of poor people who do not have access to health care is no concern of mine (except, perhaps, as a matter of private charity) and is not a legitimate
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Ross Douthat has written an honest, charitable post that is the most thoughtful contribution I've so far seen a conservative commentator make to the debate over Bart Stupak's stance on health care reform. Ross takes issue with certain of Stupak's critics from the left and remains skeptical about
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The great English philosopher Michael Dummett recounts his journey to Catholicism in an intellectual autobiography in a recent volume of essays on his philosophy:
“During my time at Winchester, my religious opinions underwent a radical swing. Initially, I had an atheist and scientistic outlook
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Leszek Kołakowski, the philosopher and communist dissident who spent most of his career at Oxford after leaving Poland in 1968, died this Friday afternoon in an Oxford hospital. Reuters has a brief obituary here, and here is a short account of his life I wrote for this magazine back in April 2008
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Some of this blog's readers may be interested in an online reading group for Caritas in Veritate that I'm hosting at my personal blog. The plan is to proceed a chapter at a time, with some introductory remarks and a handful of questions posted by yours truly each weekend, at which point commenters
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At the First Things blog, resident climate change denialist Thomas Sieger Derr (whose dishonest tactics Grant has exposed before), after weighing in on the cap and trade debate, lets loose with a predictable volley of faux-scientific silliness:
All this diplomatic turmoil is proceeding against a
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Via Lee McCracken, my erstwhile Culture11 editor Joe Carter discusses "theistic evolution" at the First Things blog. Taking his cue from a Washington Post op-ed in which Intelligent Design proponent John West criticizes Kenneth Miller, Francis Collins, and others, Joe complains that if
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