Barack Obama: Bully and Cad?

Remember back when right-wing bloggers were terrifying each other, predicting that President Obama would build America’s first gulag archipelago? (What’s that? Ah. Sorry, Japanese-Americans. Make that America’s second gulag archipelago.) Well, critics are making a case that his administration does, in fact, threaten Americans’ traditional civil liberties. The twist: both the critics and the alleged [...]

How to REALLY Write for First Things

For the past two years, I’ve had a passionate love-hate relationship with First Things. When the Best Spiritual Writing: 2010 anthology came out, I counted no fewer than three First Things imports — one by Amanda Shaw, another by Joseph Bottum, and a third by the man himself, FT founder Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. Possibly [...]

…Then Someone’s Not Being: A Reply to Elizabeth

Today, in First Things, my mentor, gaffer and friend Elizabeth Scalia does a very gutsy thing. She talks about homosexuality in a way that affirms nobody’s orthodoxy: Wondering whether being born gay might constitute a “call to otherness,” she continues: I have a theory that our gay brothers and sisters are, in fact, planned, loved-into-being [...]