I was introduced to the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s after they were already over. As a teenager, I was given a copy of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon by a well-meaning family friend. It ...

Ten years ago, an editor at Penguin approached me to ask if I would like to edit a collection of essays by Wendell Berry for a British audience. Berry’s essays had never been published in book form in ...

On the night he was elected president, in November 2008, Barack Obama addressed a throng in Chicago and declared that America had been made over the course of “221 years—block by block, brick by brick ...

William Lane Craig has recently caused some consternation by saying he does not confess the faith of the Nicene Creed. The reaction is understandable. Nicene orthodoxy, after all, is the faith ...

When Anna, a pianist at her local church, began to show the unmistakable signs of pregnancy, her elders assumed it was unplanned and prepared to offer her counseling and support. They were shocked by ...

Darel Paul’s excellent First Things article on the Jason Arday scandal pinpoints a number of the problems now rife in academia, problems that I can attest are so well-established that, were they not ...

Here’s a simple, biblical truth: We’re never as smart as we think we are, and we’re never as wise as we need to be. The best intentions can have unintended consequences. I remembered this recently ...

Contrary to online chatter, we are not in a “Catholic moment.” But we may already be in an evangelical century. Significantly more people are leaving Catholicism than converting to it. By contrast, ...

Jews familiar with Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) probably know him first as a hero, only then as a German-Jewish philosopher. His life and death are the stuff of legend. Born to an assimilated Jewish ...

I recently lectured in Rome on the topic of the Antichrist. The Antichrist interests me for several reasons, mostly because nobody else is talking about it—which, for most of Christian history, would ...

Frequent confession was once normal—monthly, biweekly, or even weekly. But it became rarer among Catholics formed from the 1970s through the 1990s. Today, many Catholics go to confession only after ...

Reading—for obvious reasons—Henri Daniel-Rops’s The Church in the Dark Ages, I have been repeatedly struck by the truism that moments of institutional crisis demand genuinely great leaders. Movements, ...