Magazine > Business
The Global Crisis: Lessons from the Middle Ages
Reviews > Books
A mad, wonderful adventure
In her first book, Parched, Heather King documents twenty years of worshipping alcohol to the point, as she says, she was “willing to sacrifice everything: career, family, money, health, reputation, my life, and what is far worse than any of those, my soul, for alcohol.” Her second book Redeemed – A Spiritual Misfit Stumbles toward God,… READ MORE >
Magazine > Life
Redeemed
The Christian religion is only for one who needs infinite help. That is, only for one who feels infinite anguish. The whole earth can suffer no greater torment that a single soul. The Christian faith—as I see it—is one’s refuge in this ultimate torment. Anyone to whom it is given in this anguish to open his heart, instead of contracting… READ MORE >
Reviews > Movies
Mission Impossible
Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest was a novel about Hitler narrated by a demon, who writes: “Most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil…There need be no surprise, then, that the world has an impoverished understanding of Adolf Hitler’s personality.” I was… READ MORE >
Reviews > Movies
The Ugly Truth
When Caden Cotard wakes up, the first thing he does is look in a mirror. He sees a pudgy, middle-aged, balding, sad-sack of a human being. The rest of the movie will be like that: a merciless self-examination. Neil Gaiman, sci-fi and fantasy author, described most current literary fiction as “miserable people having small epiphanies of misery.”… READ MORE >
Reviews > Books
Burgeoning Beats
A legendary manuscript co-written by Beat Masters, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, has finally come to light as And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Written when both were unknown and unpublished, leading hardscrabble lives in wartime New York, the real-life story centers on the doomed relationship between Lucien Carr and… READ MORE >
Reviews > Movies
Blood Lust
Twilight begs the question, why do girls always go for vampires? Is it the Byronic good looks? Or perhaps because they’re given to lines like, “You don’t know how long I’ve waited for you,” and “You’re my own personal brand of heroin.” Bella, a junior in high school recently relocated from Arizona… READ MORE >
Opinion > Issues
After the Disaster: Back to the Family and Localism
The rules of capitalism are being re-written. Banks are being nationalized. Governments are pouring money and incentives into the economic system. Interest rates are being lowered towards zero. Consumers are being asked to buy more in order to re-start the cycle of consumption-driven production, while Barak Obama gets on with saving the planet.… READ MORE >
Reviews > Music
Mercy Knows My Name
There’s a pseudo-myth in rock music that drug-abusing artists lose their edge when they clean up their act. Their music, once forged in the crucible of angst and addiction, is softened and sanitized by sobriety. It’s a popular theory, especially among would-be rock stars without a label contract but with a dealer contact. To paraphrase… READ MORE >
Reviews > Movies
Guy Movie
Who or what is a RocknRolla? Someone born to be in a Guy Ritchie flick, that’s who. An amoral member of the criminal class doing bad things in stylish threads and an expensive pair of shades, spouting tough-lout talk like a Cockney at a Tarantino casting call. Ritchie’s first and best movies were Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels… READ MORE >
Opinion > Politics
After Obama: Why Catholics should open a ‘second front’ in the Democratic Party
I have a commentary in this week’s National Catholic Register entitled “What Now? Will New Voters Refashion the Democratic Party?” I argue that the election had a silver lining for Catholics: the same voters who turned out in large numbers for Obama—blacks and other minorities—voted strongly for California’s Proposition… READ MORE >
Reviews > Books
A Hipster’s Homily
Chuck Klosterman acquits himself well with his first novel, Downtown Owl. He’s better known as a wiseass essayist on movies, video games, heavy-metal music and pop culture miscellany for publications like Esquire, Spin, and The Guardian. An ominous news clipping prefaces Downtown Owl, reporting on a vicious blizzard that claimed the… READ MORE >
Reviews > Music
Man of Sorrow and Strife
If, in his early days, middle-class Minnesotan Bob Zimmerman playacted the persona of hobo troubador Bob Dylan, he has since evolved into the genuine article, an authentic Elder Statesman of American music. Dylan’s late-career flowering, which began with 1997’s death-haunted, Time Out of Mind (though 1989’s Oh Mercy had its… READ MORE >
News > Faith
On The Road Through Nothingness
It’s rare to see a positive story about the Catholic Church in the mainstream media, especially in newer online-only publications like Slate, but Harold Fickett, a Godspy contributing editor, managed to publish an essay there recently about the Clear Creek Monastery, a new and growing contemplative Benedictine monastery in Kansas, and the wider story of how Catholic religious communities are attracting young people. It could be that the critical success of the three-hour documentary, Into Great Silence, which had a long run at Manhattan’s Film Forum in 2007, left an impression on the editors. The appeal of that movie is captured in Harold’s ending: “From its rich liturgical rites to the pastoral details of its life as a working farm, as the monks raise sheep, make furniture, tend their orchard, and care for a huge vegetable garden, Clear Creek is what a monastery is meant to be—a sign of paradise. Father Anderson says, ‘We were only a bunch of bums, but by becoming nothing, you can be a part of something great.’" READ MORE >
Magazine > Faith
Struggling with the Rosary
The Rosary is excruciating. There I said it. Archbishop Fulton Sheen said it was the most perfect prayer because it takes 19 minutes, which is the maximum time the average person can maintain a state of concentration. The truth is the Rosary can be a real chore. St. Thérèse, the Little Flower, was being more honest when she said,… READ MORE >
Reviews > Movies
Don’t Call Me Junior
No one could accuse Oliver Stone of ducking controversy. But I don’t think anyone expected his new movie about the George Bush presidency, W., to be predictable and toothless, if intermittently amusing. In the era of the internet and insider confessionals, most of what appears on screen has already been widely circulated. What, Bush… READ MORE >
Opinion > Politics
Sarah Palin Meets Woody Allen, Across the Great Divide
If you’re feeling down about the ever-widening gap between blue-state and red-state America (and the even wider gap between blue and red Catholics), you can find hope in Sarah Palin. Ironically, the woman who’s been blamed for single-handedly re-igniting the culture wars is showing signs that she can appeal across the cultural divide.… READ MORE >
Reviews > Movies
Conservulous
A movie mocking Hollywood liberals is overdue, but a movie mocking Michael Moore is outdated. David Zucker, director of zany comedies like Airplane and Naked Gun, sets his satirical sights on a ripe target: the self-satisfaction of bleeding-heart Hollywood liberals (the kind who decry world poverty while collecting multi-million dollar paychecks).… READ MORE >
Reviews > Music
Cosmic Slop
Yes, it’s The Verve’s fourth album, Forth. A bad pun is a suspicious beginning for an album with philosophical pretensions, especially since the word “forth” suggests a progression, when Forth is more like a reminder: “Remember us? We’re The Verve. We used to make epic Britpop. We still do.” The clouds… READ MORE >
Magazine > Culture
Damien Hirst: The Death of Art Explained
As Wall Street tanks, the Art Market soars. The Damian Hirst auction at Sotheby’s London (Sept. 15-16, 2008) raked in $198 million (£111 million), creating a new jaw-dropping record for a one-artist sale. Hirst’s own record for the highest price he has yet fetched for one of his pieces was also surpassed at this sale with a whopping $18.8… READ MORE >
Reviews > Movies
Funny as Hell
There’s a segment of the Tonight Show called “Jaywalking,” where Jay Leno asks regular Joes (“Joe Sixpacks”?) simple questions about history, politics, geography, etc. Considering the answers he gets, you’d think Burbank a social experiment gone wrong. Bill Maher, host of Politically Incorrect, adopts the… READ MORE >
Opinion > Business
Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand and the Libertarian God that Failed
In today’s NY Times, Peter Goodman’s excellent profile of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan confirms what I’ve been writing, that it was a specific “structure of sin”—financial speculation—rather than mere human greed (or bad home loans) that created the credit crisis. I’d always wondered how a rigid anti-government… READ MORE >
Opinion > Business
Thinking Catholic: European leaders blame crisis on “speculative capitalism”
Europe’s financiers were seduced by the lure of easy subprime mortgage profits, just like everyone else, and they’re suffering now, just like everyone else. But give Europe credit for one thing: Thanks to its Catholic roots, Europe’s leaders understand that the financial crisis wasn’t caused by some vague form of “greed”; it was… READ MORE >
Opinion > Politics
Politics and Words
Image Journal’s website features a blog by Brian Volck on the slippery nature of words; more specifically, the language of this election season, and key words like “change.” Both parties claim to be the agents of change. What does it mean? How does a word or expression change in a given context? In politics, are words used… READ MORE >
Reviews > Books
Rushdie, The Enchanter
In 1988, Sir Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses earned the Indian-British author a rare honor: a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s assassination, issued by a faction of Muslim extremists. The fatwa granted Rushdie the social distinction of martyrdom without its one significant disadvantage, as the author continued to collect awards and… READ MORE >
Reviews > Books
Disasters of War
So here we are, facing a global economic collapse and an election where both candidates represent the lesser of another evil. It’s time to turn to Kurt Vonnegut, whose unique blend of bleak humor, genuine outrage, and dark surreality seems more relevant than ever, and more cogent than a cadre of political and economic analysts. Armageddon… READ MORE >
Opinion > Books
The Archbishop of Canterbury Reads Dostoevsky
Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, has recently written a book about Fyodor Dostoevsky, author of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. The book—Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction—has drawn some controversy, not so much for its content, but for the question of whether it should have been written in the first place.… READ MORE >
News > Issues
Anglican bishops decry the ‘new creed’ of extreme capitalism
A trillion for the Iraq War, almost as much to rescue Wall Street, but basic health care for all is too expensive? Why aren't Christian leaders in the U.S. saying as much? In England it's a different story: "[T]he Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, warned in a magazine article that modern devotion to the free market is a form of idolatry and that Karl Marx was morally right in his analysis of the power of 'unbridled capitalism.' He believes that Marx's economic theories, as implemented by authoritarian state regimes, have proved equally wrong and harmful to unfettered market ideology, but that the protest against a greed-driven system is one that should be taken seriously." READ MORE >
Reviews > Movies
God is Godard
Reprise is a movie about young Norwegian writers that feels made by young French filmmakers: stylish, self-conscious, angsty, funny, a little sloppy, and unapologetically pretentious. Erik and Philip are two aspiring writers and lifelong friends who simultaneously slide their manuscripts (as precious to them as bundled babies) into a mail… READ MORE >
Opinion > Movies
Waugh’s Unlikely Champions
In the New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn demonstrates a supple understanding of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited—its themes and ambitions. Many have criticized the latest film version of the classic Catholic novel for playing fast-and-loose with the source material, but Mendelsohn is one of the few critics to analyze with… READ MORE >
News > World
Holy See Denounces Misuse of Protection Principle
The Vatican continues to take every opportunity to discourage preemptive war: "The use of violence to resolve disagreements is always a failure of vision and a failure of humanity. The responsibility to protect should not be viewed merely in terms of military intervention but primarily as the need for the international community to come together in the face of crises to find means for fair and open negotiations, support the moral force of law and search for the common good," Also see this statement. READ MORE >
Reviews > Books
The Same Man?
I suspect that the title of this little dual biography was intended to produce in the potential reader (i.e., anyone even a little familiar with Waugh and Orwell) precisely the reaction it produced in me upon hearing it: I exclaimed something to the effect of, “Say what?” and promptly plunked down twenty-six bucks (minus my local indie… READ MORE >
Opinion > Issues
The Right’s Hypocritical Crusade against Wall Street
I almost never agree with First Things on economic policy, but Robert T. Miller was right last week when he warned that “those on the political right need to make sure that the Republicans in Congress do not through ignorance or stupidity misunderstand conservative economic principles and so lead us into economic disaster.” Unfortunately,… READ MORE >
News > Business
Behind AIG’s Fall, Blind Eye to a Web of Risk
Opinion > Issues
They’ll Believe in Anything: Study says atheists are more irrational
A new Gallup study, “What Americans Really Believe,” suggests that if anti-religious crusaders Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins want a more rational, less superstitious world, they should encourage people to go to church. A recent Wall Street Journal article reported that, according to the study… “…traditional Christian… READ MORE >
Reviews > Books
Roth’s Wrath
It’s not quite a twist on the level of The Sixth Sense (I read dead people?), but you may raise an eyebrow fifty-or-so pages into Indignation: our narrator is not only unreliable, he may not be corporeal. Philip Roth’s idea of the Afterlife is apparently similar to his idea of Old Age: mourn lost youth, nurse grudges, and rage… READ MORE >
Reviews > Music
Lord, Can You Hear Me?
Sometime last year, Spiritualized frontman, Jason Pierce, found himself in the UK equivalent of the E.R, the Accident & Emergency ward, undergoing treatment for double-pneumonia. It would be tempting to conclude that this brush with mortality inspired Pierce’s latest album’s worth of death-haunted sonic swells, Songs in A &… READ MORE >
Opinion > Culture
Tom Stoppard, Freedom Fighter
Tom Stoppard, the witty British playwright most famous for his mind-bending twist on Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, is the feature of an Observer article on human rights. Stoppard’s plays are like Samuel Beckett by way of Oscar Wilde, with detours to Bardland—postmodern riffs on Big Themes like love and death and liberty,… READ MORE >
Reviews > Books
How to avoid the next war
If you’re concerned about where Republican fear-mongering on the war on terror might lead us, don’t turn to the Democrats, who when it counted caved in to Bush on the Iraq War (and now mostly echo McCain/Palin’s position on the Middle East). Instead, go to clear-eyed foreign policy realists like Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski… READ MORE >
News > Faith
Libertarian Heresy
You don't often find Commonweal hunting heretics. In the latest issue, Daniel Finn takes aim at Fr. Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute and other Catholics who force fit Catholic social teaching into free market ideology. Sirico, he says, "uses his tendentious view of law and morality to conclude that raising taxes to help others is unchristian, since citizens have no choice but to pay the tax... One wonders if this conviction hasn’t been engendered by a libertarian view of government actions, where such redistribution is always immoral." Commonweal isn't alone in recognizing this distortion of Church teaching, which has always recognized the authority of government to balance private property rights with the "universal destination of goods." There is a silent majority of orthodox Catholics who resent Acton and other Catholic think tanks that are so well-funded by wealthy pro-big business donors that they're able to drown out genuine Catholic social teaching. Finn thinks its time that "neoconservative Catholics inquire into the influence of libertarianism on their work and, most importantly, that they make Catholic moral theology the standard for judging right-wing claims about morality in economic life-and not the other way around." READ MORE >
Opinion > Culture
Adam and Eve make a stand in California
You connect the dots: A California couple refuses to submit to the state’s new “gender-neutral” marriage license that replaces bride and groom with “Party A” and “Party B.” Buried within a Scientific American article on storytelling and the brain (cited by John Murphy below) is a fascinating discovery made by “literary Darwinists”… READ MORE >
News > Business
The Fleecing of America
Yes, greed fueled the crisis, but Cohen pinpoints what's unique about our penchant for financial manias: "...the U.S. economy is being socialized to the tune of $700 billion ($2,000 for every man, woman and child in the country) as a result of a giant mortgage-related Ponzi scheme... Let’s be clear: this is an American mess forged by the American genius for new-fangled financial instruments in an era where the mantra has been that government is dumb and the markets are smart and risk is non-existent." READ MORE >
Opinion > Science/Tech
Secrets of storytelling
Having just read a collection of masterful short-stories by Tobias Wolff, the issue of what makes storytelling such an intrinsic, necessary part of the human condition has been at the forefront of my mind. An article in the most recent issue of Scientific American approaches this age-old question from a left-brained perspective: “Popular… READ MORE >
Reviews > Books
Twice-told Tales
Our Story Begins collects new and older short-stories by Tobias Wolff, one of America’s acknowledged masters of the genre. Wolff-hounds will recognize canonical works like “Hunters in the Snow,” “Bullet in the Brain,” and “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” short-form masterpieces that have… READ MORE >
Opinion > Culture
Vatican Searching for Next Raphael. Or Roy Lichtenstein?
The Catholic Church used to be Western Civ's pre-eminent patron of art and architecture. But the past few hundred years have seen the Vatican slowly transition from commissioner to collector, safeguarding the long and luminous tradition of Church art. Tantalizing signs of change are looming, however. Newsweek is reporting on the Vatican's… READ MORE >
Reviews > Movies
League of Morons
After doing the damn near impossible—making last year's damn near perfect No Country For Old Men—who could blame the Coen brothers for blowing off a little steam? Burn After Reading returns to the anarchic comedy of Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski, but with diminished returns. Like the suitcase full of cash in No Country,… READ MORE >
Reviews > Books
Paul Auster, In the Dark
In Paul Auster’s new novel, the ‘Man in the Dark’ is August Brill, a retired book critic with a broken leg, a broken heart, and a serious bout of insomnia. Lacking the season of all natures, sleep, Brill endures an endless cycle of dark nights of the soul by making up escapist stories in his head, an activity that dampens his… READ MORE >
News > Issues
Pope Benedict: Pius XII ‘spared no effort’ to help Jews during WWII
A symposium held in Rome confirmed the Church's position on Pope Pius XII: "'Thanks to the vast quantity of documented material which you have gathered, supported by many authoritative testimonies, your symposium offers to the public forum the possibility of knowing more fully what Pius XII achieved for the Jews persecuted by the Nazi and fascist regimes,'" Benedict said."'One understands, then, that wherever possible he spared no effort in intervening in their favor either directly or through instructions given to other individuals or to institutions of the Catholic Church." READ MORE >
News > Business
Greed and ruthless pursuit of profits to blame for banking fiasco
This article gets Catholic social teaching right, and exposes the fallacy that 9/11 restored us to moral clarity: "'Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Lehman Brothers' fall is that it comes almost seven years to the day after 9/11... For all the talk of pulling together in the wake of the terrorist attacks that shook America to the core and supposedly set our priorities straight, Wall Street rushed headlong back to its mindless pursuit of profits and speculation without consideration for the consequences of its actions... At some point, society has to figure out that the way an investor earns his money is even more important than the amount of money he makes. This is why human beings were vested with moral sentiments, so they could distinguish the quality of human conduct from the quality of its results... It is incumbent upon the gatekeepers of capital ... to bring discipline to the system. This will require a rethinking of their priorities and a willingness to add to their investment calculus, considerations that exceed their own narrow interests about short-term investment returns.'" READ MORE >
Opinion > Culture
#110 Stuff White People Like
The Atlantic has an interesting commentary on the popular blog site, Stuff White People Like (also now a New York Times bestselling book). The website features mini-essays by Christian Lander, a PhD dropout now famous for skewering the tastes and mores of ‘White People’—alternately called ‘bourgeois bohemians’ and… READ MORE >
News > Business
Ironic Speculation: Investment banks seek protection against short-selling
In an effort to slow panic selling, the SEC will try to force hedge funds to disclose their short selling positions. What's ironic is who's cheering the agency on: "Morgan Stanley and Goldman are the only two of the formerly five major Wall Street brokerages standing alone, and that is believed to have made them targets of speculators... Last week Lehman was the subject of a massive sell-off that eroded confidence in its business and sparked a funding crisis that ultimately led to its demise. 'It's very clear to me we're in the midst of a market controlled by fear and rumors, and short sellers are driving our stock down,' Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack said in a memorandum to employees Wednesday. 'You should know that the management committee and I are taking every step possible to stop this irresponsible action in the market.'" READ MORE >
News > Business
Credit Crunch: What Happens Next?
Opinion > Politics
The Democrats are Blowing the Election—and the Catholic Vote
The best thing about how the Democratic Party is kicking away what should be an easy victory in the November presidential election is that it might force them to finally reassess their support for abortion and gay marriage, positions that are unpopular with working class voters, their natural constituency. A subplot here is how the Dems were… READ MORE >
Reviews > Movies
Brideshead Revised
Nearly every review of the new film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited has referenced the landmark 1981 miniseries produced for British television starring Jeremy Irons, John Gielgud, Claire Bloom, and Laurence Olivier. With good reason: the 11-hour adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel is an obvious entry into the canon of Modern Classics,… READ MORE >
Opinion > Business
The Church on the financial meltdown: Usury and speculation are to blame
If there’s anyone in the mainstream media willing to listen to the Church these days (I doubt it), they’ll discover that centuries of Catholic teaching about the sinful practices of usury and financial speculation can explain why Wall Street is tumbling down. (For the best technical explanation, read The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy… READ MORE >
Opinion > Culture
David Foster Wallace, postmodern moralist, dead at 46
The apparent suicide of David Foster Wallace, the prodigiously talented author of the novel Infinite Jest, is a sad, stunning end for a writer whose best work burst with unflagging energy and propulsive imagination. Though often lumped with postmodernists like Thomas Pynchon, Wallace's fiction had a deeply-felt humanity and breadth-of-scope… READ MORE >
Reviews > TV
J.J. Abrams’ Mystery Boxes
With the debut of his latest TV series Fringe last week, J. J. Abrams—the writer/director/producer behind Lost, Felicity, and Alias—is back in the spotlight to talk about why he did the things he did with his new, much anticipated sci-fi show. Opening to mixed reviews, the X-Files-esque-medical-puzzle series promises to deliver… READ MORE >
News > Politics
Obama’s Problem: Where’s the Change?
John McCain has criticized his own party's failures and gone against Republican orthodoxy. Has Barack Obama ever gone against his party's line? He "talks a lot about finding ways to move beyond the bloody battlegrounds of the 'culture wars' in America; the urgent need to establish consensus on the emotive issue of abortion," without ever making a concession to pro-lifers. "Politician Obama's support for abortion rights is the most extreme of any Democratic senator... The fact is that a vote for Mr Obama demands uncritical subservience to the irrational, anti-empirical proposition that the past holds no clues about the future, that promise is wholly detached from experience." READ MORE >
News > Life
The Mysterious Other: As Barriers Disappear, Some Gender Gaps Widen
Reviews > Movies
For This Documentary Tells Me So
The idea that documentaries are unbiased truth is well-established nonsense, of course, but some filmmakers are better at covering their ideological tracks than others (the good ones are, anyway). For the Bible Tells Me So tackles a tough, timely topic: the antagonism between Christian fundamentalists and practicing homosexuals. This complex… READ MORE >
Opinion > Politics
David Brooks explains the Republican Party’s Catholic problem
In a NY Times column today called “The Social Animal,” David Brooks pinpoints exactly why so many Catholics hold their noses every four years as they vote Republican for president merely because of the party’s stance against abortion and gay marriage. As any Catholic who’s watched a Republican convention knows, the GOP… READ MORE >
News > Science/Tech
Tom Wolfe and a cognitive neuroscientist discuss status, free will, and the human condition
Reviews > Music
Not-So-Merry Prankster
He’s been a four-track folk singer, found-sound experimenter, hip-hop beatmaster, Dada-ist lyricist, postmodern collage artist, and mock funk-soul crooner. He mixes electronica and harmonica. He mixes dance beats and downbeat blues. Then he remixes. If consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds then shapeshifting singer-songwriter… READ MORE >
Opinion > Movies
Alfred Hitchcock: Mistaken Identities
The Times Literary Supplement just ran two reviews of recent books about Alfred Hitchcock, the iconic filmmaker whose morbid Catholicism bled into the edges of such classics as Vertigo, I Confess, and Shadow of a Doubt. His movies—popular entertainments in their own time, snubbed by critics and award-givers—have since become the subject… READ MORE >
Opinion > Politics
Pro-Life vs. Family Values? Is Newsweek’s Jacob Weisberg promoting eugenics?
The culture war is back, stronger than ever, with the liberal media completely flummoxed over how to handle Sarah Palin. But what’s really thrown them is Bristol Palin’s unwed teen pregnancy, and the Republican Party’s surprisingly warm-hearted, non-judgemental response to it. How else to explain Jacob Weisberg’s bizarre… READ MORE >
Reviews > Movies
Gonzo Suicide
Gonzo should have been subtitled “The Life and Work and Death of Hunter S. Thompson,” because the writer’s suicide three years ago was the flare-out of a fading star, a premeditated decision that shrouded his last moments in existential uncertainty. Did the Lion in Winter flip a final bird to established conventions, rebel… READ MORE >
Magazine > Culture
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Prophet & Exile
Opinion > World
Gained in Translation: Lessons from a visit to a Mexican orphanage
A few months ago, I traveled with eighteen other Catholic singles to Casa de Elizabeth—an orphanage in Imuris, Mexico, a region in the state of Sonora, about two hours south of Tucson. It is an area marked by small rivers that flow west from the Sierra Madre, where many of the residents sell their wares, like handmade tortillas, in the middle… READ MORE >
Magazine > Music
Larry Norman’s Street Fighting Gospel
Larry Norman passed away last February. He's been called the Father of Christian Rock, a burden he refused to carry. “I think the blacks invented it about 200 years ago." READ MORE >
News > Faith
Benedict’s Discomforting Message
"Benedict directly challenged an assumption so many Americans make about religion: that it is a matter of private devotion with few public implications. Not true, said the pope. 'Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted,' he told the country’s Catholic bishops Wednesday. 'Only when their faith permeates every aspect of their lives do Christians become truly open to the transforming power of the Gospel.' That is a demanding and unsettling standard for the right and the left alike... This is the thinking of a communitarian counseling against radical individualism... Perhaps it is the task of the leader of the Roman Catholic Church to bring discomfort to a people so thoroughly shaped by modernity, as we Americans are. If so, Benedict is succeeding." READ MORE >
Magazine > Faith
What’s Behind the New Interest in Confession?
Is the present increase in the popularity of the confession of sins a step toward a realistic religiosity, or is it the popularity of the penitential rite of the American Church of Christ without Christ? READ MORE >
Magazine > Music
The Weakerthans’ Liturgy of the Other Hours
Magazine > Culture
Beauty Goes Underground
Would St. Augustine ever have experienced his conversion sitting in a pew being subjected to an off-key rendering of “On Eagle’s Wings”? READ MORE >
Reviews > Music
REM’s Comeback
"…for a supposed comeback attempt, R.E.M. doesn't seem desperate to be loved here. Much of Accelerate actually sounds fired-up and angry: ‘Living Well Is the Best Revenge’ is an aggressive opening salvo, the oblique narrative of ‘Mr. Richards’ finds Stipe at his most effectively political, and the gritty, double-speed ‘Horse to Water’ is the album's most self-critical song… If it isn't able to recapture the post-punk energy of Reckoning, the political fury of Life's Rich Pageant, or the epic scope of Automatic for the People, the album, at the very least, finds the band playing to its strengths rather than attempting to explore an increasingly thin artistic mythology. That alone justifies Accelerate's positive buzz, even if the album doesn't quite support the magnitude of it.”
READ MORE >
Magazine >
Seeing Others
Why are we so hesitant to respect the soul of the person in front of us? READ MORE >
Magazine > Faith
Doubting Doubting Thomas
St. Thomas’s evangelizing journeys after the Pentecost, culminating in his brutal death, tell a quite different story from the role he has been cast in the Christian script. READ MORE >
Magazine > Life
Visiting with Jesus in Prison
The InnerChange Freedom Initiative descends into unhappy and often hellish places in obedience to the Christ who was himself obedient to the point of death. READ MORE >
News > Faith
The Puzzling Pope: Six Surprising Things About Benedict XVI
"The head of the CDF has to draw lines, level punishments and basically talk tough, a role that Ratzinger seemed to relish, but one that won him epithets like God's Rottweiller and the old standby, the Panzerkardinal. But now that Cardinal Ratzinger is Pope Benedict, he knows better than anyone that he is also the chief pastor of the church. There can be no 'Panzerpope.' His job is to be the good cop, a symbol of unity who tries to encourage people to live their faith more deeply. As he told a dinner companion about his new role: 'It was easy to know the doctrine. It’s much harder to help a billion people live it.'" READ MORE >
News > Issues
Hiroshima: Has the ground zero of the nuclear age become too ‘normal’?
...Hiroshima is still here to remind us of what happened when we first unleashed our "device" and how it can never happen again—supposedly. That's what everyone says after visiting Hiroshima, the statesmen and citizens who sign the guest book at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. We will never forget. But maybe we will. The very fact that Hiroshima is thriving with its KFC and Starbucks, with the carefully manicured lawns of its 'Peace Memorial Park'—the only evidence that hell was unleashed here—may have the opposite, anodyne effect. This is not John Hersey's Hiroshima, the Hiroshima of the horrific immediate aftermath, but is to a certain extent a Hiroshima that says a nuclear detonation is a transient thing, something that's eminently recoverable from with a little time and some good landscaping." READ MORE >
Reviews > Books
Holy Man: What does the Dalai Lama actually stand for?
“’The more he gave himself to the world,’ Iyer writes, the more Tibetans have come to feel ‘like natural children bewildered by the fact that their father has adopted three others.’ …Avidly embracing the liberating ideas of the secular metropolis, the Dalai Lama resembles the two emblematic types who have shaped the modern age, for better and for worse—the provincial fleeing ossified custom and the refugee fleeing totalitarianism. Even so, his critics may have a point: the Dalai Lama’s citizenship in the global cosmopolis seems to come at a cost to his dispossessed people… It is hard to see the Dalai Lama bringing about mutual understanding in the world at large when he has failed to bring it about between China and Tibet.” READ MORE >
News > World
Coptic priest Zakaria Botros fights fire with fire
“The very public conversion of high-profile Italian journalist Magdi Allam — who was baptized by Pope Benedict in Rome on Saturday — is only the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, Islamic cleric Ahmad al-Qatani stated on al-Jazeera TV a while back that some six million Muslims convert to Christianity annually, many of them persuaded by Botros’s public ministry… Many Western critics fail to appreciate that, to disempower radical Islam, something theocentric and spiritually satisfying — not secularism, democracy, capitalism, materialism, feminism, etc. — must be offered in its place. The truths of one religion can only be challenged and supplanted by the truths of another. And so Father Zakaria Botros has been fighting fire with fire.” READ MORE >
Reviews > Books
Sleepy-Eyed Writer, Wandering Byzantium
“About the Lower East Side today,’ Mr. Price said, ‘This place is like Byzantium. It’s tomorrow, yesterday — anyplace but today.’ ... ‘Lush Life’ took so long to finish, he said, in part because he spent so much time researching it — talking to people, riding around with the neighborhood police and sometimes just walking around. ‘I always like to hang out,’ he said, ‘because, one, it’s a way of avoiding really writing; and, two, sometimes God is a crackerjack novelist and you can plagiarize the hell out of him.’ He particularly liked hanging out with cops, he said, ‘because I’m so not a cop myself. Being with them gets me out of my own self-consciousness.’” READ MORE >
News > Issues
Latin Patriarch’s Easter Homily: Security Cannot Be Achieved by Inflicting Insecurity on Others
“For the people and for all our political leaders, the situation has become deadlocked, or still worse, a routine of death that the latter think they must only govern without ever giving it life. The recent events of these past few weeks, Gaza, the murder at the yeshiva in Jerusalem, the young people killed in Bethlehem, and many others, are no more than sterile repetitions of the events of all the past years. And we will not stop repeating that security cannot be achieved by inflicting insecurity on others. New means must be found…” READ MORE >
News > Faith
Pope Benedict XVI’s Address at the End of the Way of the Cross
"Dear friends: After having lived together the passion of Jesus, let us this night allow his sacrifice on the cross to question us. Let us permit him to challenge our human certainties. Let us open our hearts. Jesus is the truth that makes us free to love. Let us not be afraid: upon dying, the Lord destroyed sin and saved sinners, that is, all of us. The Apostle Peter writes: 'He himself bore our sins in his body upon the cross, so that, free from sin, we might live for righteousness' (1 Peter 2:24). This is the truth of Good Friday: On the cross, the Redeemer has made us adoptive sons of God who he created in his image and likeness. Let us remain, then, in adoration before the cross." READ MORE >
News > Faith
Good Friday is the Feast Day for Those Who Suffer
"'Jesus died in utter agony but also with total acceptance of the will of his Father: 'Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,' he said. Such trust and belief is hard to understand, but it lies at the heart of what faith is about.' ... Suffering and doubt is part of what it is to be human, but Jesus rising from the dead shows us that [it] is not the end of the story." ... But today it is enough to be humble and to share that sense of pain and desolation, wherever we know it to be and which many of us experience from time to time and pray that the darkness and despair will turn to hope and to light." READ MORE >
News > Faith
Through His Eyes: Stations of the Cross
For centuries... many stations were crowded with Roman soldiers and jeering or appalled onlookers, perhaps set against someone’s impression of first-century Jerusalem. Eric Gill’s 1918 stations, carved in shallow relief for Westminster Cathedral in London, pointed in a new direction. The figures were few and without background; the compositions were simple and formal, not theatrical. Rather than dictating an emotional response, the stone panels left space for the devotee’s own thoughts... Don Meserve, a fervent admirer of Gill, works within this contemporary current...'What strikes one from the outset is the absence of the figure of Christ — the perplexing absence of the protagonist himself.'” READ MORE >
Magazine > Faith
Bart’s Problem
In his new book, God’s Problem, Bart Ehrman tries to prove that the God of the Bible doesn't answer the question of why we suffer, but his argument falls flat. In the end, what Ehrman and other “new atheists” forget is that a world without God is not a world without evil or innocent suffering. It’s simply a world of suffering without hope. READ MORE >
News > Faith
Bearing the Silence of God: The image of Christ in the persecuted church
“…The greatest glory Jesus brought to God was not when he walked on the water or prayed for long hours, but when he cried in agony in the garden of Gethsemane and still continued to follow God's will, even though it meant isolation, darkness, and the silence of God. Thus, we know that when everything around us fails, when we are destroyed and abandoned, our tears, blood, and dead corpses are the greatest worship songs we have ever sung. The dead body is not the end of the story. The one who sacrificed his life is also the one who has been glorified: 'because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you in his presence' (2 Cor. 4:14).” READ MORE >
News > Culture
The last rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke
“…Clarke, who is credited in real life with being the first to come up with the idea of an ‘artificial satellite’ that could ‘broadcast to half the globe,’ was nothing if not prescient. Two years before I was born, he had already grasped the inevitable, unstoppable business model of on-demand-sex-flicks in the privacy of your own living room [and] I mean, come on -- in 1960, Clarke had already sketched out ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.’ Were there no limits to his imagination!?” READ MORE >
Reviews > Movies
Rated G for Glorious
“…In the Jungle of Nool something foreign lands on a piece of clover. It's not a spaceship but an entire alien world: the nearly infinitesimal planet of Who-ville. Horton the elephant, his large ears giving him the most acute hearing, detects cries from the clover speck. He can't see the little Whos, but he deduces, believes, knows that sentient creatures are in there; and his caring instinct tells him that they must be protected. He builds a rapport with the tiny planet's resident scientist, Dr. Hoovey, who is having just as much trouble convincing his villagers that there's a giant outside force, unseen but benevolent, that will determine their future." READ MORE >
Reviews > Books
Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana
“Far from pushing boundaries, or the church's buttons, Rice's portrayal of Jesus as the son of God and the savior of humankind is theologically sound. At the same time, he's also very human, with needs and cares readers can relate to. ‘It's an attempt to get close to him and what he experienced, to make it historically exciting and historically correct,’ she said. Writing the books ‘has made me conscious of what (Jesus) suffered in the way of derision and dismissal … Just like today -- people go around making jokes about him. But he goes right on winning souls no matter what anybody does. We've come 2,000 years, and you can still sit at his feet and hear him speak and feel his hand, maybe, touch your shoulder. He survives it all.’" READ MORE >
News > Movies
Apocalypse Now?
"On a recent Saturday night, I went to the movies. Walking past the theater showing 'I Am Legend' (plague kills most of humanity), I opted to watch 'Cloverfield' (inexplicably angry alien destroys Manhattan) instead. After sitting through back-to-back previews for 'Hellboy II: The Golden Army' (ancient truce between Hell and Earth is revoked, resulting in mass destruction) and 'Doomsday' (lethal virus ravages England, a disease-ridden cinematic cousin to '28 Days Later' and 'Children of Men'), I found myself disturbed. The End of Days suddenly seemed imminent. Should I cancel my post-movie dinner reservation? What's with all this apocalyptic entertainment, I wondered, and what does it say about those of us who are filling the theater seats?"
READ MORE >
News > World
Bearing Witness
Bearing Witness: 5 Years of the Iraq War. A Photo Essay. READ MORE >
News > Faith
The Audacity to Hope (1990)
“It's easy to hope when there are evidences all around of how good God is. But to have the audacity to hope when that love is not evident—you don't know where that somewhere is that my grandmother sang about, or if there will ever be that brighter day—that is a true test of a Hannah-type faith. To take the one string you have left and to have the audacity to hope—make music and praise God on and with whatever it is you've got left, even though you can't see what God is going to do—that's the real word God will have us hear…” READ MORE >
News > Politics
Gloomy Conservatives:The right wing is properly blaming itself for the fix it’s in
“Why, I heard people ask again and again, had the [Christian] leaders not led? Why, if they had as much influence as everyone supposed they did, had they brought us still one more time to the point where everyone had to rehash the rights and the wrongs of voting for ‘the lesser of two evils’? …I have no doubt the leaders of the religious right will be unified in their opposition to this fall's Democratic candidate. I have grave doubts whether those same leaders will any time soon be able to offer credible credentials for positive endorsements of almost any kind.” READ MORE >
News > World
The Mideast’s epitaphs of death and the duty to remember
"I think it is our duty as Christians, whether lay people or clergymen, to have the courage to remember history under any latitude in order to promote reconciliation and build it on more solid foundations... I wish to remember what happened in the streets of Beirut in 1982 when Italy's Bersaglieri force arrived following the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Colonel Franco Angioni, who was in command of our soldiers at the time, asked Shia Muslim and Phalangist Christian leaders to order their men not to go around armed in the area under Italian control. The leaders of the various factions refused. A few days later Angioni had a group of Phalangist militiamen arrested and disarmed. News about what happened spread immediately, especially in Shia and Sunni areas. 'Italian soldiers have arrested Phalangists, Christians,' Muslims said. 'They did it even though they too are Christian; these soldiers tell the truth; they don't want to disarm us to favour our adversaries.' After this episode, filled with tension and disbelief, Shia militiamen and Phalangists stopped showing their weapons in those parts of Beirut under Italian control. That early action kept the peace for some time..." READ MORE >
News > Issues
Catholic College Leaders Expect Pope to Deliver Stern Message
"School presidents insist that truth-seeking is part of their institutional purpose. 'Every university is committed to the pursuit of truth,' said Georgetown President John J. DeGioia, 'and we want to ensure that there is the opportunity for both academic freedom and for the free exchange of ideas and opinions across all issues.' But David Gibson, the author of a Benedict biography, said the pope will ask, 'If you're not going to be an authentically Catholic, orthodox institution, why should you exist?'" READ MORE >
News > Faith
An interview with Chris Hedges: “I don’t believe in atheists”
"…Not believing in sin is very dangerous. I think both the Christian right and the New Atheists in essence don't believe in their own sin, because they externalize evil. Evil is always something out there that can be eradicated. For the New Atheists, it's the irrational religious hordes. I mean, Sam Harris, at the end of his first book, asks us to consider a nuclear first strike on the Arab world. Both Hitchens and Harris defend the use of torture. Of course, they're great supporters of preemptive war, and I don't think this is accidental…" READ MORE >
News > Issues
The Wire’s War on the Drug War
"Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional." READ MORE >
