More on: editorial statement

AT the height of the recent sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, a writer friend of mine told me that the whole sorry situation had her in a “white rage.” I knew exactly what she meant: like most people who have lived through these interminable revelations, I have found myself speechless with fury against…

AT the heart of every well-made work of art—no matter how dark or disturbing it may be—is an act of praise. In Mark Jarman’s review of Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just in this issue he recounts Scarry’s contention that beauty tends to call forth, or beget, more beauty. The beauty of a face,…

JAMES Wood is a literary critic to die for. Earnest, passionate, and erudite, Wood’s lucid, distinctive voice has cut a wide swathe through what often seem like the mutterings and tergiversations of contemporary literary discourse. Still in his thirties, this British expatriate is now the in-house critic at The New Republic and his first collection…

MY earliest recollection of my grandfather, James Nicol, comes from a trip to Britain when I was very small. Seeing him and my grandmother was a special treat, because we lived in New York and they lived far away in a place called South Africa. On this trip, however, we were all visiting their native…

LAST night, after the kids’ final day of school and a hard slog at work, our family sat down to watch Jurassic Park III, the kind of movie we call E.T. (“entertaining trash”). Like most Hollywood sequels the film is full of recycled scenes—mainly dinosaurs energetically masticating just about any piece of flesh that comes…

BACK when this journal was nothing more than a mere proposal, I sought out a meeting with the distinguished church historian Martin Marty to enlist his support. Despite his frenetic schedule, he responded immediately, offering to meet me for a drink when next I came to Chicago. When we got together the conversation eventually turned…

HAVING been a participant in any number of roundtables and panels on the state of religion in America, and in particular the relationship between faith and culture, I’ve grown accustomed to hearing my conservative colleagues argue that contemporary writers of faith are flabby compared to the more muscular writers of the early and mid-twentieth century.…

SAMUEL Johnson, the great eighteenth-century critic, moralist, and wit, once said of the American revolutionaries: “How is it that the loudest yelps for liberty come from the holders of slaves?” I don’t know what Johnson’s friend, Edmund Burke—a proponent of American independence—said in response to this, but I rather hope it was: “Touché.” While I…

TOWARD the end of his life, Karl Marx found himself in conversation with an earnest, would-be acolyte who was burbling about his plan to found a Marxist club. The older man suddenly rounded on him, declaring: “Je ne suis pas une Marxiste!” (I am not a Marxist). In a few simple words Marx managed not…

NOW THAT Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ has reached thousands of screens around the world and the frenzy of editorializing, pre- and post-release, has died down, two of the early questions about the film have been answered. Once the film entered the public domain, most of the fears about whether the film was…