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There is hope, even from the so-called “snowflake” generation.
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Zena Hitz and Mark Bauerlein discuss following Christ fully, outside the religious life. |
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The dilemma Benedict tried to resolve will continue to elicit alternative solutions and passionate disagreements, as Christians make their pilgrimage through the passing kingdoms of this world toward their eternal homeland.
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The ongoing debate about the economy can take two important lessons from “Centesimus Annus,” I suggest.
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“You’re mine?” she replied, reaching over and taking my hand. “Mine? You’re mine?”
“Yes, Mama, I’m yours.”
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Progressive activism among both professors and students at Princeton is eating away at the ideal, however imperfectly practiced, of dispassionate scholarship.
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The people of Somerville define themselves by their sexuality and the fluidity of commitment over against the kinds of bonds that keep people rooted and give their lives meaning.
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Our calling in the wasteland isn’t to conserve but to keep in step with the Spirit, hoping, boldly and joyfully, for resurrection.
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What happens when a culture no longer wills its own existence? R. R. Reno and Nathan Pinkoski discuss:
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We’re all weekend beatniks now. The counterculture of transgression that dominates “On the Road” has thoroughly colonized our middle-class world.
From the archives:
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It would be hard to find a more faithful community than the Syriac Christians of Derik, and their faith survives in the face of war, persecution, and the emigration of their brothers, sisters, children, and friends.
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Polyamory is the arrangement most natural to the “throwaway culture,” which reduces everything—including people—to interchangeable, and thus disposable, consumer products.
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We must grasp the gravity of our moment. The West isn’t sick. It’s dead, and we should heed Jesus’s exhortation to “let the dead bury their dead.”
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There is still temporal hope in the young people, however few they may today be, who carry the torch of truth into the future.
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Mark’s latest podcast with Zena Hitz explores the role of contemplation in the life of laypeople. |
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If sex is liberated, what is it liberated from, and what is it liberated to?
From the archives:
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Holden’s loving vision of catching falling children is what finally reconciles him to birth’s biological sentence of doom and allows him to triumph over death.
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Given twenty-first-century economic and political realities, the real issue is the proper legal regulation of the economy.
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The spirit of Mephistopheles is truly seductive, as Goethe well knew. Thankfully, however, there is still hope.
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The real issue is the degree of regulation that should frame the activities of the free economy, on everything from minimum wages to pornography to carbon emissions to the development of artificial intelligence.
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Nathan Pinkoski and R. R. Reno discuss “The Camp of the Saints” and Western self-loathing.
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Within a culture of death, it is an easy transformation from decent, law-abiding citizen into a murderer, into a murderer’s willing accomplice. |
From the archives:
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“African Founders” is a book that gives us neither fatalism nor triumphalism, but reasons for hope, grounded in a meticulous study of the actual historical record.
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At first, my mother’s decline into incoherence was hard to bear. But, over time, I’ve found our disjointed conversations to be more and more comforting.
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No doubt globalization has had adverse consequences for some Americans; it has also helped lift as many as two billion people out of abject poverty.
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Talking with my mother now is a bit like a dream, but I’m starting to believe that life, in many ways, is a dream best shared while drifting on the gentle currents that lead us toward that greater ocean.
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Have you listened to Mark Bauerlein’s latest?
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I wonder who taught Salome to dance,
To wave her arms, to drop her final veil.
For all her grace, she somehow disenchants.
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Our task—as it was the Church’s task during the Donatist controversy—is to distinguish clearly between the “life” and the “works” of those we read.
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It’s sad to watch a once-great institution destroy itself, but a heck of a lot more pleasant to do so from outside.
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I am hers and she is mine and nothing, not dementia nor death itself, can ever erase that. She will always be my mother, and I her son.
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What a joy it is to be back in an office, around colleagues who are no less smart and opinionated than Princeton professors—while being kind besides.
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Mark Bauerlein and John Staddon discuss the rise of ideological thinking in scientific realms.
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People who regret the incivility of modern life tend to regard the sight of a dozen sweaty guys in a ring throwing punches as part of the problem. They should see it, instead, as a solution. |
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De Foucauld wrote that the desert was a place of “unparalleled calm” in which God’s love could be contemplated undisturbed: holy solitude.
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Tim Keller relished the conversation, was unafraid of pushback from skeptics, and courageously launched out into broken spaces that others had abandoned.
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Painful though it is to say, in getting rid of me, Princeton added unwittingly to my family‘s happiness.
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The Rev. Timothy J. Keller, who died recently at age 72, was a towering figure who never wavered in his dedication to Scripture and the Reformed vision of the Christian life. |
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Catholic universities have suffered a series of betrayals by faculty and bishops. R. R. Reno and James Keating discuss:
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