Argument has fallen on hard times. That might seem an odd thing to say in an election year roiled by agitation over social questions and the continuing presence of candidates whom political strategists had thought would go away by now….
Duke Divinity School professor Norman Wirzba wrote recently about why he thinks we ought to declare the end of “Christian America.” A link to that essay was emailed to me by a friend who thought it was an excellent read,…
Very few books can be summarized as “social science by a prayerful engineer wearing a hauberk,” but John Gravino’s The Immoral Landscape (of the New Atheism) stands tall as a paperback fitting that description. Gravino used the CreateSpace platform to…
At least one reader on a news aggregator website for conservatives recently sniffed that anyone who hates as much as Ann Coulter does should not wear a cross in public. What made that reader’s simmering disapproval boil over was Coulter’s…
Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic recently took a poet to task because that poet had written to an advice columnist wondering whether he had any right to write. The anonymous supplicant was more conflicted than Hamlet, but less eloquent. “I…
Dear journalists: May I have a public word with you, especially if you edit the Raleigh News and Observer? You probably take a dim view of unsolicited advice from a junior member of the guild, but I think I can…
Canadian essayist David Warren is a man with whom I seldom disagree. Imagine my surprise on reading his depressing assessment of the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. Warren’s “Marching to Nowhere” starts strongly, with a withering reminder of…
Writing in Al Jazeera America, a Ph.D. student in “religion and critical thought” at Brown University recently declared 2014 “the year of Pope Francis.” Her sentiment is shared by other writers. What made her article interesting was the “pull quote”…
In the unlikely event that administrative assistants behind the “For Dummies” book series are preparing galley proofs for a title called “Religion Reporting for Dummies,” complimentary copies of such a book ought to be shipped to the Washington, D.C. offices…
Late in the morning of Sunday, April 27, a movie theater in Morrisville, NC rebroadcast the Canonization Mass for pope saints John XXIII and John Paul II. Anyone who missed the live telecast from the Vatican had a chance to…