The vast revolutions in morality that have reshaped the modern landscape have been spectacularly successful, with very few exceptions. In the last hal...
With Christmas just days away, the Vatican evidently thought it was high time to reverse 2,000 years of Christian tradition and allow priests to bless...
Most of us know we’re living in consequential times, but sometimes it seems we’re living in truly dangerous times. Just over the course of the last fe...
So, what about the new speaker of the House? Is he a kind and gracious man or “a right-wing fever dream come to life,” as one columnist declared? Actu...
There are certain questions now pressed upon us that previous generations would never believe could be asked. One of these is thrust upon us by events in New York City, where a well-known Ivy League professor has been arrested for the crime of incest ...
One of the hallmarks of the postmodern age is, as one of its main theorists has explained, “incredulity toward metanarratives.” This reflects the postmodern suspicion of any master explanation of world reality and human experience. But, from beginnin ...
The suicide of Mark Madoff, the 46-year-old elder son of disgraced financier Bernard Madoff, has all the trappings of a Greek tragedy. Madoff hanged himself in his Manhattan apartment on Saturday, the second anniversary of his father's arrest for wha ...
Though his work is almost universally known within the English-speaking world, Charles Jennens is virtually unknown. He was a brilliant librettist -- a writer of texts to be put to music by others. Born in the year 1700, Jennens inherited his father' ...
The campus of George Washington University must be an interesting place to be -- and it looks like it may quickly become a lot more interesting. Consider these opening words from a report in The Washington Post: "The long-eroding boundaries that once ...
The great code word for art meant to scandalize is "transgressive." The term was well-established by the end of the 1960s, when artists sought to scandalize middle-class morality by "transgressing" moral boundaries. Artists and writers began pushing ...
Sunday's edition of The New York Times gave front-page attention to the problem of adolescent bullying on the Internet. There can be no question that the Internet and the explosion of social media have facilitated the arrival of a new and deeply sini ...
A proposal to build a theme park that would feature a life-size replica of Noah's Ark has set off a controversy in Kentucky that is worth watching. Within days, the controversy had spread to the pages of The New York Times and USA Today. So, who's a ...
If you were determined to consign a population to poverty and any number of social pathologies, how might you do it? If your design is to extend the effects of these pathologies and pains to successive generations, what might be your plan? The answer ...
Tel Aviv University archaeologist Israel Finkelstein argues that the kingdom of David and Solomon is a greatly embellished biblical fiction. Jerusalem, he argues, was a cow town, a "hill country village." David was an insurrectionist and bandit whose ...