The following essay first appeared in the September 1995 issue of Crisis Magazine. Augustus John, her extrovert younger brother, a prodigious talent in the world of painting and portraiture, remarked that his sister brought nothing for herself and yet had managed to see to it that her cats would be fed and cared for … Read more
The following essay first appeared in Disorientation: How to Go to College Without Losing Your Mind, ed., John Zmirak. It is reprinted with permission of the publisher. You might be surprised to hear feminism described as a “heresy.” Like most Americans, you may assume that the feminist movement simply asserts that women are full … Read more
The following review was first published in the August 1998 edition of Crisis Magazine. Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism F. Caroline Graglia, Spence Publishing, 1998, 451 pages, $20. Caveat lector: Domestic Tranquility is anything but a tranquil book. F. Carolyn Graglia may celebrate the virtues, satisfactions, and substantial rewards of women’s domestic … Read more
The following review first appeared in the October 2007 edition of Crisis Magazine. Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism, by Christopher Lasch and Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, W.W. Norton and Co., 1997, 196 pages, $19 Christopher Lasch’s Women and the Common Life, a collection of essays compiled with the help of his … Read more
With all the talk about “disparities” in innumerable contexts, there is one very important disparity that gets remarkably little attention — disparities in the ability to create wealth. People who are preoccupied, or even obsessed, with disparities in income are seldom interested much, or at all, in the disparities in the ability to create wealth, … Read more
Finding Joe Directed by Patrick Takaya Solomon (documentary). Featuring Deepak Chopra, Mick Fleetwood, Catherine Hardwicke, Sir Ken Robinson, Akiva Goldsman, Chungliang Al Huang, 80 minutes I wasn’t sure what to expect from a documentary on the life of Joseph Campbell, the 20th century American philosopher and mythology expert who was captivated by Krishnamurti and … Read more
What are students and what are professors or teachers? On coming to a university, the student will hear of the names and characters of the teachers who are there. Most student bodies will have a kind of underground evaluation of the characters and effectiveness of teachers. These can be unfair but often they serve as … Read more
Lee Wishing of the Center for Vision and Values interviewed Helen Krieble, author of the plan proposed by Rep. Newt Gingrich for resolving the status of millions of illegal aliens in the U.S. Krieble was responding to a recent column by Ann Coulter which criticized the plan. Ms. Krieble will be a speaker at the … Read more
I must confess to an intellectual sin. I delight in the paintings of Norman Rockwell. I know I’m not supposed to do this. As a college professor, I have a duty to pretend to others that I derive real satisfaction from poems whose sentences cannot be parsed, from sculptures that look like green blobs from … Read more
In 1999, Pope John Paul II wrote a Letter to Artists. In this he called for a “new epiphany of beauty” and for a “renewed relationship between Church and culture” in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council. A “new epiphany” will not just happen by itself. This article aims to set out a basis … Read more
This essay originally appeared in the October 1998 edition of Crisis Magazine. In the Fifth Sermon, entitled “Equanimity,” in the fifth book of his Parochial Sermons, delivered mostly in the 1830s, Newman speaks of the preparation for Christmas. Sometimes in Scripture, Newman points out, Christ’s coming seems a fearful thing. A “holy” fear or … Read more
The following essay is reprinted with the permission of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute from The Intercollegiate Review. T. S. Eliot was indisputably the greatest poet writing in English in the twentieth century. He was also the most revolutionary Anglophone literary critic since Samuel Johnson, and the most influential religious thinker in the Anglican tradition … Read more
Ten Popes Who Shook the World by Eamon Duffy, Yale University Press, 136 pages, $25 Eamon Duffy is an eminent scholar of the English Reformation and Professor of the History of Christianity at Cambridge University. In a succinct volume, Ten Popes Who Shook the World, he explains how each of these popes met the … Read more
The following review originally appeared in the March 2000 edition of Crisis Magazine. The Reform of the Papacy: The Costly Call to Christian Unity John R. Quinn, The Crossroad Publishing Company, 189 pages, $18.00. The new year brought ugly news from Beijing. Chilling what had begun to look like a thaw in Vatican-China relations, the … Read more
This past Christmas, the people of North Korea were without their messiah. That is, their self-anointed messiah. For a sense of just how bad was Kim Jong-Il, I thought I’d share a few anecdotes reflecting the singularly pernicious nature of this man and what he created in his own image. Kim was truly a modern … Read more
It is not often that I go to moving picture palaces, and when I do I am saddened that the new kind of “multiplex” cinemas are not palaces at all. I may be indulging nostalgia (defined as “history after a few drinks”), but theatres do seem to have shrunk to fit the quality of most … Read more
Last February, Bernard Lewis, the famous historian of the Middle East, warned that if elections were held early after the Arab spring, “It can only lead to one direction, as it did in [Weimar] Germany, for example,” an allusion to Hitler’s 1933 takeover after gaining a plurality in elections. In this case, Lewis meant not … Read more
The following interview with Rev. John A. Hardon, S.J., by Anita Crane, appeared in the Dec. 1997 edition of Crisis Magazine. Father Hardon died on Dec. 30, 2000, and the cause for his canonization has already been introduced. John Hardon, S.J., has fought the good fight for some time. He has published more than … Read more
Have you heard any good news lately? Bad news abounds. It’s been another tough year. Economic woes continue. Greece and Italy are on the verge of bankruptcy. Unemployment is still high in the United States (around 8.6 percent), and the stock market has taken a beating. With approximately $108 billion in insured catastrophic losses, 2011 … Read more
I will not presume to present you with the best classical recordings of 2011, but will inflict upon you my favorites – those CDs that have found themselves most often on my player for repeat auditions simply because of the generally enjoyable nature of the music and performance. I have so many discs to recommend … Read more
