Sometimes a book’s importance depends more on who is reading it and talking about it than what it actually says. That explains the widespread celebration of Yale University law professor Stephen Carter’s new book, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (Basic Books, 1993). Carter’s book got its best plug from President Clinton, who hosted…
President Clinton was quoting the author of the Declaration of Independence in Beijing: “We are convinced that certain rights are universal, that, as one of the heroes of our independence, Thomas Jefferson, wrote in his last letter 172 years ago: ‘All eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man.’” The president went on to spell out those rights—“to…
There is controversy stirring in the basement of the U.S. Capitol. Literally. It has to do with an eight-ton marble statue commemorating three pioneers of the women’s movement—Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. After women were finally granted the right to vote in August 1920, the National Women’s Party, in a celebratory mood, donated the statue to…
The most insightful book of this election year has been the best-selling Bobos in Paradise (Simon & Schuster, 2000). David Brooks, a self-confessed “Bobo” who writes for the conservative journal, The Weekly Standard, argues that today’s ruling elites—the dot-com millionaires, the celebrity pundits and media empire-builders—along with the millions of educated beneficiaries of our booming “information economy,” constitute a new…
Why is it that when artists today want to be edgy and transgressive, they always pick Christian symbols to desecrate? In recent years, we’ve seen crucifixes plunged in urine and the portrayals of Jesus having sex with his apostles. Now the Brooklyn Museum of Art is displaying the “shocking” image of a Madonna festooned with real elephant dung and bare…
The abortion lie in America is so big that it hardly comes as a surprise when one of the builders of that lie now admits that he and his colleagues deceived the country about partial-birth abortion. What Ron Fitzsimmons, director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, admitted in an interview with the American Medical News (March 3), is nothing…
Certainly it is welcome news that the lawsuit charging Cardinal Joseph Bernardin with sexual abuse has been dropped because the accuser is no longer sure whether the alleged abuse ever occurred. But the taste of vindication is still bitter and the exoneration can never fully restore the reputation ruined. For Catholics, the case is another reminder to look with suspicion…
By all accounts, Zachary Hood is a pretty normal 9–year–old Catholic boy. A couple of years ago, while a first–grader in a Northern New Jersey public school, Zach was asked by his teacher to read his favorite story in front of the class. He chose one from “The Beginners Bible”—about Jacob’s reunion with his estranged brother Esau, one of the…
At the end of what has been called the “American Century,” there is an understandable pride that comes with living in what is rightly described as the strongest, richest, freest and most generous country on earth. We are a hardworking, upright people, given to charity, with a government that is open and accountable, and an economy that rewards initiative and…
It was three Octobers ago, and Capuchin Father Ronald Lawler and I were in the basement of St. Augustine Friary in Lawrenceville. We were sorting the books in his copious library into boxes since he had decided to donate them to a theological think-tank.